Secular Education Forum
The Secular Education Forum (SEF) provides expert and professional advice and opinion to the National Secular Society (NSS) on issues related to education and provides a forum for anyone with expertise in the intersection of education and secularism.
The SEF's main objective is to advocate the value of secularism/religious neutrality as a professional standard in education. The SEF welcomes supporters of all faiths and none. It provides expert support for the NSS working towards a secular education system free from religious privilege, proselytization, partisanship or discrimination.
Want to get involved?
Sign upJoin our mailing list to apply to join the forum. You'll be kept up to date with news, meetups and opportunities to contribute or volunteer.
Membership of the Secular Education Forum is intended for education professionals (including current, former and trainee professionals) and those with a particular expertise in the intersection of secularism and education. All requests to join will be considered after signing up to the mailing list.
Education blogs and commentary
A selection of blogs and comment pieces on education and secularism. For education news from the NSS, please click here.
Charles Bradlaugh’s legacy is well worth celebrating
Posted: Wed, 1st Sep 2021
Bob Forder reflects on the key achievements of the NSS's founder, ahead of the restoration of his grave.
The funeral of Charles Bradlaugh – parliamentarian, activist and founder of the National Secular Society – took place at Brookwood Cemetery on Tuesday 3 February, 1891, four days after his death. Brookwood is 25 miles from London and the funeral was to be low key. According to the terms of the dead man's will he was to be buried as cheaply as possible and the affair was to be silent, with no speeches, no ceremony.
It didn't turn out like that as in a huge wave of spontaneous grief, gratitude and adoration thousands made their way to Brookwood by railway and down country lanes. Estimates of the attendance vary widely – nobody kept count – but thousands were there and this may well have been the largest event ever witnessed at the nation's largest cemetery.
Attendees came from far and wide and from all Britain's great cities. There were miners from the north, soldiers in bright uniforms from Bradlaugh's old regiment and Indians in large numbers. Northampton, Bradlaugh's parliamentary constituency, was represented by many wearing rosettes in Bradlaugh's colours of mauve, white and green. A young David Lloyd George was there, among 17 other MPs. Walter Sickert who had painted a number of Bradlaugh portraits was present, as was a young Indian law student, Mohandas Ghandhi. George Jacob Holyoake attended alongside other leading secularists such as the redoubtable Annie Besant and the marquess of Queensbury.
So, what was it about Bradlaugh that provoked such a response?
Throughout his life Bradlaugh was the friend of the underdog, the under-privileged and the downtrodden. It was his fervent belief that the answer to their woes lay in a more open, secular, democratic and liberal society. To this end he achieved two great victories.
First, there was his and Annie Besant's success in establishing the right to publish cheap birth control literature. In 1877 they had republished Charles Knowlton's "Fruits of Philosophy", a pamphlet advocating contraception and advising on contraceptive techniques. Shortly before, a Bristol bookseller had been convicted and imprisoned for selling the pamphlet and the previous publisher had withdrawn it from circulation. Bradlaugh and Besant were prosecuted. They defended themselves and were acquitted, striking a substantial blow for freedom of the press and speech. Further couples' endeavours to control the size of their families were aided at a price they could afford. It had always been Bradlaugh's conviction that large families were a principal cause of poverty and the subjugation of women.
Second, there was Bradlaugh's long and ultimately successful battle to take his seat in parliament. As a constitutionalist Bradlaugh had long harboured the ambition to secure election to parliament and in 1880 he was returned as one of Northampton's MPs.
The problem was that to take his seat he was required to take an oath, on the Bible, of loyalty to God and the queen. He believed in neither. Bradlaugh asked to affirm (a non-religious oath) but was told he could not. He therefore prepared to take the oath because he considered the words less important than his duty to serve his constituents. However, some MPs objected because of his atheism. The speaker ruled in their favour and he was effectively barred from taking his seat, prompting a by-election.
Four times Bradlaugh returned to Northampton to contest elections and each time he won. Once he tried to take his place in the chamber of the House of Commons demanding that the oath be administered, but was arrested and imprisoned in the Palace of Westminster overnight. It was not until 1886 that a new speaker allowed him to be sworn in. Bradlaugh had triumphed. An important democratic right had been established, and the episode served as a reminder that MPs sit in the House of Commons by virtue of their election, rather than others' opinion of their views.
So Bradlaugh was responsible for two very significant victories for secular, liberal democracy. And there's also the issue of his character and personal qualities. His most recent biographer is Bryan Niblett. In the preface of his aptly titled book Dare to Stand Alone, Niblett explores the development of his understanding of heroism:
"The battles that Bradlaugh fought were battles of the mind, played out on public platforms, in courts of law, and in political debating chambers. This supplied a new dimension to my understanding of heroes, the recognition that the virtue of thinking for oneself of engaging in action founded on reason as the guiding principle, was the essence of real heroism… One man, relying on reason, and daring to stand alone, can make a difference in the world."
Those assembled at Brookwood on that day in 1891 came together because collectively they recognised a great man's achievements and his qualities.
Today the NSS is a modern campaigning organisation. However, it is intensely proud of its past and its foundation in 1866 by Charles Bradlaugh, a great Victorian, radical and secularist.
You can help to restore Charles Bradlaugh's grave by donating to our appeal. There will also be an event to mark the restoration at Brookwood Cemetery on 17 October – if you'd like to attend, please let us know by emailing events@secularism.org.uk.
The child abuse inquiry has been too deferential to the Jehovah’s Witnesses
Posted: Wed, 25th Aug 2021
Next week the IICSA inquiry will publish a report into the Jehovah's Witnesses. This can only be damning. But the inquiry hasn't gathered the evidence needed to root out abuse within the organisation, writes Lloyd Evans.
As I write, we are only days away from learning the findings of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in its investigation of a number of religious organisations, including Jehovah's Witnesses. When the findings are published I expect them to be damning, at least concerning the failings of the Jehovah's Witness organisation of which I was once a member and devoted follower.
I don't see how an organisation that has in recent years cemented a global reputation for the industrial scale cover-up of child sexual abuse could receive anything other than strong condemnation from any self-respecting inquiry or investigative body that wishes to be taken seriously. But am I pining for these findings as needed validation? Will I look on them as the final word on the mishandling of abuse by my former religion? No, and nor should anyone else.
IICSA has barely scratched the surface of a problem that always warranted a much more probing investigation and intervention. The inquiry's investigation of Jehovah's Witnesses in particular is so inadequate that I have come to think of it as a travesty and insult to victims.
I've done my very best to assist IICSA as a core participant in its investigation. And I was grateful that last year, when the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses (CCJW) tried to have me thrown off the investigation on the preposterous grounds of hate speech, IICSA gave this short shrift. But the inquiry's failings have been evident almost from the very beginning.
IICSA is a woefully underfunded enterprise; a pound shop version of its equivalent Royal Commission in Australia, which did an incredible job of investigating abuse between 2013 and 2017. According to research by Mandate Now, a pressure group advocating mandatory reporting of all child sexual abuse, the gulf in funding between IICSA and its Australian equivalent is stark.
Whereas the Australian Royal Commission was given an annual budget of around £45m, IICSA has received a meagre £23m (approximately) annually between 2015 and 2019 – despite its investigation encompassing a combined England and Wales population that is more than double that of Australia. In other words, IICSA has received nearly half the funding for more than double the workload. I'm afraid the old adage applies: "you get what you pay for".
From the outset in my evidence to IICSA I have implored the inquiry to use its statutory powers to pursue a full and independent audit of all data held by Jehovah's Witnesses on accusations of child sexual abuse. When Australia's Royal Commission did this, it found that 1,006 perpetrators from among Jehovah's Witnesses stretching back to 1950 had amassed around 1,800 victims, with not a single accusation of abuse reported to Australian authorities. Based on these figures, I scoured the Jehovah's Witness yearbook data and extrapolated a likely figure of 2,300+ perpetrators and 4,100+ victims for the entire UK.
IICSA is aware of these jaw-dropping numbers and has been handed clear evidence in the organisation's own documents that Jehovah's Witnesses have a written policy of gathering sex abuse records into a secret database that is not shared with the authorities. IICSA even allowed CCJW to cherry-pick a tiny sampling of the figures from this database and present them as the only figures that mattered.
The figures presented were damning enough. On page 23 of his first written evidence, JW spokesperson Paul Gillies admitted that out of 67 accusations, 30 had not been reported to the police – and the 37 that were reported were reported "in most instances" by the victim or their family (in other words, not necessarily at the behest or initiative of the organisation).
But these were only records related to accusations against elders (priests) and ministerial servants (deacons), or where the abuse occurred within a JW kingdom hall or place of worship. Furthermore, the figures only represented accusations brought to the attention of CCJW between September 2009 and August 2019 related to abuse within that period.
Apparently abuse perpetrated any earlier (August 2009?), or abuse perpetrated by rank and file members, or abuse occurring outside of a kingdom hall (i.e. in a family home), didn't matter or wasn't worthy of any serious analysis. This was a perfect example of a group under investigation being allowed to mark its own homework.
The outcry regarding IICSA's refusal to apply proper scrutiny to Jehovah's Witnesses, despite having full knowledge of their conspicuously egregious child safeguarding policies, was loud and unequivocal. More than 6,000 signed a petition calling for IICSA to do their job properly and "get the data". IICSA's response?
It didn't just refuse. In a written letter to the person behind the petition, solicitor to the inquiry Martin Smith bizarrely claimed that it would be "unlawful" for IICSA to pursue full disclosure of the relevant abuse records. He wrote:
"While it is true that the CPIROS investigation will not formally conclude until the panel has published its investigation report, the only task remaining for it is the writing of that report. This work is well under way and it would not be appropriate, lawful or fair for the inquiry to seek substantial additional evidence from any particular organisation in the manner sought by the petition at this stage of its process."
Yes, a statutory inquiry tasked with investigating sexual abuse was claiming it was against the law to do its work.
We can speculate any number of reasons as to why IICSA has been so half-hearted in undertaking work regarding which it once promised it would leave "no stone unturned". Thousands of abuse records being knowingly withheld from police is a pretty big stone if you ask me.
And let's remember: this is not some game. Any foot dragging or lack of appetite concerning the thorough investigation of one of the most damaging crimes a human can perpetrate against another human translates into more children molested, more abuse covered up, and more lives ruined. Every second of inaction begets more abuse.
My own feeling is that lying at the heart of IICSA's glaring apathy (to the point of making misleading statements about what is or isn't "lawful") is a societal indifference to fully scrutinising child sexual abuse, as evidenced by how grossly underfunded the whole thing is.
This underlying lack of urgency, which some justifiably reason is informed by a desire to not overburden a prison population that is already bursting at the seams, is compounded in my view by societal deference to religion.
It should not be possible in the 21st century for any organisation to keep thousands of secret records on child sexual abuse hidden in plain sight. If it were a football club, playgroup or gym franchise concealing criminal evidence to this extent it would be all over our newspaper front pages, and the police would be breaking down the doors and seizing documents. But if it's a religion doing this, we have learned as a society to look the other way - even in cases where a statutory inquiry ought to be doing the exact opposite.
Image: Hassocks5489, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Locked in and locked out: how faith schools restrict families’ choices
Posted: Wed, 25th Aug 2021
State funding of faith schools means many families are left without suitable schools. The narrative that faith schools are justified on the grounds of choice should be confronted, says Alastair Lichten.
The latest figures from the National Secular Society's choice delusion project, along with other research on discriminatory admissions, show how seriously faith schools are restricting choice across England. Hundreds of thousands of families a year face either being effectively locked in to faith schools, because there are few or no alternatives, or locked out of their local schools by religious discrimination.
At first glance, these may appear to be opposite problems. But both are caused by the proliferation and exclusionary nature of faith schools. This is a serious problem that left unconfronted will only grow as the country becomes more diverse and less religious.
Thirty per cent of people have little or no choice but a faith school at primary level, and 10% at secondary level. These figures represent around 475,000 pupils a year. Over 20,000 a year are assigned faith schools against their families' preferences. Estimating the number of pupils subject to direct religious discrimination in admissions is extremely difficult, but researchers have found that around half of C of E and all Catholic secondary school places are potentially subject to religious selection. It can be easy to forget the human stories behind these huge numbers and shocking statistics.
We regularly provide advice and support to parents experiencing the sharp end of the choice delusion. We hear from parents like Abhi from west London, whose four year old daughter was turned away from all their local schools on religious grounds. Rachael and David from Liverpool faced similar problems at secondary school for their son. Parents like Roxana from Bristol could pretend to be religious to access their local schools, but don't want to teach their children that dishonesty pays.
Michael from Bath told our No More Faith Schools campaign that he was effectively forced into putting all three of his children into a Catholic school. He had three schools to choose from: a terribly performing C of E school, and two Catholic schools.
Victoria from Medway told us: "My son has been placed into a faith school at the secondary school allocations. This was not one of my six choices, but no other school is available. The school say that they must attend all Catholic services even if they don't pray!"
Our research has revealed that 53% of rural primary schools are faith-based, and parents in some rural areas raised particular concerns about a lack of access to secular education. One told us she was looking at moving to a village – but the only school there, and the only schools in the next two villages, were all Church of England schools. Another said it was "impossible" to find a non-faith based school in the local area. Others said their children weren't being given the chance to make up their own minds about their own beliefs – for example because they were being forced into prayers, or were subject to evangelism.
Despite repeated parliamentary questions, research and lobbying by the NSS, the government recently admitted that it still has no estimate of its own on the extent of these problems. This means the choice delusion figures remain the best available and, combined with the new local authority scorecard, a powerful research tool for policymakers.
Breaking down these figures by local authority not only confirms the extent of this problem but provides important new insights. Serious questions must be asked about whether the worst performing local authorities are failing in their legal duties to ensure adequate suitable school provision, particularly where they are considering new school proposals. Public scrutiny and transparency around new faith schools is extremely limited, and claims that proposals will improve choice are often unevidenced and unchallenged, making reliable local data even more valuable.
And although the data only applies to England, the same problems affect families across the UK (where different methodology would be needed to work out how many are affected). Rohan from Newport told us: "My children have no choice but to attend a Church in Wales faith school, as with all our local council schools. It indoctrinates and teaches biased religious education. This is religious discrimination. Other faiths and atheism are dismissed." In Northern Ireland, over 90% of schools are segregated despite demand for integrated options.
Far from being the knockdown argument some supporters believe, 'choice' is actually one of the worst inequities caused by faith schools. Community ethos schools are suitable and accessible for pupils of all religious and non-religious backgrounds. The same cannot be said of schools organised around an exclusive faith ethos, let alone those with religious selection.
If we are to justify faith schools though this narrow concept of choice, this invites the question of why the 'choice' of schools organised around atheist, political or other ideological belief systems or identities is not also catered for.
The idea of choice is often wielded against families. Often when supporting someone dealing with inappropriate evangelism in schools, biased RE, religious sex ed, or coercive worship, they will tell me that their faith school was the only practical option. They didn't select it for faith but are told "you chose a faith school, what do you expect". Many faith schools openly state that they demand parents accept all aspects of a school's ethos if they have 'chosen' it.
Critics of faith schools are also accused of 'hypocrisy' when they have no choice but a faith school, or told to mind their own business if they are lucky enough to have the choice.
And choice focused narratives around faith schools are extremely limiting. They mischaracterise both the real-world options families have, and the social role of public education. Schools are community assets, not consumer products where individuals can choose freely between 100 brands to suite their personal taste. The harm caused by religious discrimination in school admissions and the exclusionary ethos of faith schools extends far beyond the inconvenient restriction of choice, and legitimises wider prejudices.
Moving towards a fully inclusive community-ethos education system, where all schools are suitable for pupils of all backgrounds, would be the best way to solve these problems. But in the meantime, the government must at least ensure that all families have a real option of a non-faith school.
Image: patat/Shutterstock.com.
The Taliban takeover is part of a wider threat to secular liberal democracy
Posted: Thu, 19th Aug 2021
Stephen Evans argues that secular liberal democracy is the antidote to the totalitarian Islamism offered up by the Taliban – so we need to do a better job of defending it.
With the Taliban back in control, the return of repressive theocratic rule in Afghanistan looms large.
The Taliban's pledge to create an "open and inclusive" government has largely been greeted with the scepticism it deserves. Taliban mullahs say the rights of women in Afghanistan will be respected "within the framework of Islamic law". That is one hell of a caveat.
The last time they ruled, they barred women and girls from taking most jobs or even going to school. Women caught outside the home with their faces uncovered, or even wearing nail polish, risked public whippings or other degrading forms of punishment. Discrimination and violence, including killings, rape, abduction and forced marriage, were commonplace.
Reassurances that things will be different this time are unlikely to provide much in the way of hope or comfort. It's hard to regard such statements as anything other than propaganda – a ruse designed to win global approval.
Not least because even since the end of the Taliban's rule, over 20 years ago, its fighters and like-minded insurgents have continued their brutal assault on women. As recently as May this year, Taliban insurgents bombed the Sayed Ul-Shuhada High School in Kabul, killing at least 85, mainly schoolgirls. The previous year the Taliban murdered 24 women, children and babies in an attack on a maternity ward at a hospital in the Afghan capital.
Over the last 20 years hopes for the equal rights of Afghan women before the law may have been raised, but whatever progress there has been in the cause of women's equality looks likely to be swept away. Women are already being erased from the public square. Afghan women and girls are again living in fear for their liberty.
The Taliban's war is not just against women or a regime; it's a war against civilised values of freedom, justice, equality and tolerance. The Taliban's focus may be on ruling Afghanistan according to its interpretation of sharia law, but its takeover of Afghanistan will provide a massive morale boost to violent jihadists and religious fundamentalists the world over.
The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is therefore a reminder of the need to resist religious power seeking, wherever it rears its head. It's no coincidence that the world's theocracies and Islamic republics – Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Mauritania and Saudi Arabia – are amongst the world's worst human rights abusers. State religion is correlated with significantly higher levels of religious favouritism and lower levels of freedom of religion or belief, in terms of political rights, civil liberties and religious persecution.
The distressing destruction of hope in Afghanistan is a reminder of the fragility of freedom – and needs to serve as a wakeup call to better defend fundamental freedoms everywhere. Those of us able to enjoy relative liberty should never take it for granted. Instead, we should seek to ensure the same liberties are extended to people everywhere. The freedoms we have aren't ours to give away. They have been won by others before us - clawed away from theocrats, fascists, communists and other ideologues of all stripes by people brave enough to stand up to them. We owe it to them to do a better job of defending and enhancing them – wherever they come under threat.
In this week's parliamentary debates on Afghanistan Conservative peer Lord Farmer took the opportunity to have a swipe at secularism, claiming that its "root" is "simply a belief in the infallible 'me'". He added: "The disintegration of our spiritual backbone blinds us to the chaos all around us, and to its inevitable end-point: the decay and decline of the West."
But secularist principles of free speech; freedom of conscience, religion or belief for all; individual rights and autonomy are everything the Islamists rage against. Islamists reject the protection and freedoms offered by liberal secular democracies to women, children, religious, ethnic and sexual minorities, which remove their ability to oppress them.
Secularism's greatest gift is its ability to protect citizens from the imposition of other people's beliefs. The Taliban's objective of re-establishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is the very antithesis of secularism. It's also part of a wider global threat to secular liberal democracy, which is largely driven by religious extremism.
The Taliban's theocratic takeover has triggered a humanitarian crisis that will cause unimaginable hardship and distress. The international community must do all it can to protect those at risk. And collectively, we all need to do a better job of defending the principles that underpin secular liberal democracy. Because in an increasingly pluralistic world, they offer us the only realistic path to freedom and peaceful coexistence.
Image: Suhail Shaheen, spokesman for the Afghan Taliban, at a press conference in Russia earlier this year. © John Smith 2021/Shutterstock.com.
It's time to move on from religious education
Posted: Tue, 17th Aug 2021
RE has become a subject in search of a purpose. There are better approaches to learning about the diversity of beliefs, and better uses of time than using outdated legislation to perpetuate it, says Keith Sharpe.
Rather than a distinct area of learning as with other curriculum subjects like maths, history or physics, religious education has always been a form of socialisation, a process through which children are inducted into a national identity based on societal norms, values and beliefs. Over the past 80 years these have changed drastically, critically undermining the justification for 'religious education' as a distinct subject.
The 1944 Education Act put religious education on the school curriculum as a legal requirement. RE was the only subject of the curriculum which that act prescribed; everything else was left to the discretion of schools and individual teachers. In the 1940s Britain was an overwhelmingly Christian country. Along with most of the population the politicians of the 1940s believed that all children should be brought up in a broadly Christian faith and that the ethics and morals engendered in schools should be entirely Christian. The Church of England was perceived as the bastion of national ethical values to which it was the duty of loyal subjects to give assent. Being Christian, or at least professing to be, was part of British national identity.
In these circumstances RE had a clear raison d'être. It was to ensure that each successive cohort of pupils understood the Christian religion and held it as part of their overall understanding of who they and their nation were. It was to induct them into a national identity based on a very specific theological ideology.
Over subsequent decades, however, this certainty of purpose was lost. Perceptions of the Church of England changed, and questions of national identity became much more complex. Without these two underpinning supports the rationale for religious education crumbled and collapsed. For years now there has been no agreement on what RE is for.
Concerned about the parlous state of their subject, the Religious Education Council of England and Wales established the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) to make recommendations for the future. The final CoRE report published in 2018 proposed changing the name of the subject to 'Religion and Worldviews'. The basic idea is that now children need to learn about the diversity of worldviews and to have respect for social and cultural differences.
In a nutshell you could say that RE in the 1940s essentially said to children "you must accept the Christian worldview because it is the only truth", but in the 2020s RE says almost the exact opposite, telling children "you must respect each person's different worldview because it is true for them". It is difficult to imagine any other subject on the school curriculum performing such a total volte face. Without a consistent internal logic, RE's changes are never its own, but are always entirely determined by changes in the nature of the environing society.
Far from rescuing RE, the CoRE report appears likely to hasten its end. The report itself admits that "at school level the study of worldviews is inherently multidisciplinary". Well, if it is multidisciplinary and already covered by other subjects, the obvious question arises – 'what is the point of RE?'.
Furthermore, the proposed skills which the CoRE report thinks the study of worldviews will develop have nothing specifically to do with religion. For example it refers to the importance of analysing a range of source materials, understanding symbolic language, developing respect for others and their viewpoints, and interpreting meaning and significance. These are all generic skills of great importance but are not inherently religion related.
And many other established curriculum requirements cover the same ground as the CoRE report identifies for RE. Spiritual, moral, social and cultural education, fundamental British values, personal, social, health and economic education, relationships and sex education, and citizenship education all seek to develop respect for human difference and worldview diversity. There simply is no need for RE to replicate all of this.
It is also interesting to note that in overtly secular education systems such as in France, schools are already teaching what the CoRE report suggests, and doing so under the specifically non-religious title of éducation civique et morale. The CoRE proposals mirror the French syllabus for this subject remarkably closely. To say the least, it is somewhat ironic that the Religious Education Council of England and Wales is now trying to save the subject by copying what is taught in an education system where there are no references to the religious or theological.
The only major difference is that the CoRE report continues to argue that it is worth spending curriculum time describing to pupils the particularities of a variety of differing religious (and non-religious) beliefs and practices. This has been called 'religious literacy' but it is really just a superficial 'Cook's tour' of diverse credos and rituals. The obvious question is though: do pupils really need to know the intricate details of various religious groups' conceptions of the world in order to understand the principle that other people should be respected whatever they believe? One can have every respect for Hindu believers without knowing all about the texts of the Vedas. We respect other people because they share our humanity and, in the school context, also our citizenship and increasingly pluralistic national identity.
And the Cook's tour approach can be positively unhelpful and counter-productive for efforts to foster respect for difference. Many religions and ideologies have a terrible record on treating particular groups and individuals with appalling prejudice and cruelty. And in some parts of the world they still do. Teachers may sugar coat this, which is unhelpful and short-sighted. Otherwise any child being taught about the doctrines behind the treatment of women, gay people or freethinkers, for example, is at risk of developing negative feelings towards the followers of the religions that espouse them.
Time is hugely pressured in the modern curriculum. There are better ways to use it than trying to find a purpose for the perpetuation of RE using outdated legislation. It is time to move on from RE and ensure that the established curriculum requirements, especially citizenship education, are enhanced to provide children with a secular schooling which prepares them to consider and understand their future rights and obligations as citizens.
This is a shorter version of a paper which Keith Sharpe recently delivered to the annual conference of the Association of University Lecturers in Religion and Education. The full paper was entitled 'Why Religious Education is gradually and inexorably being replaced by Citizenship Education'.
Note - September 2021: A longer version of this article has been published in the Journal of Religious Education.
Image: Juice Verve/Shutterstock.com.
