Archbishop warns against RE downgrade

The Archbishop of Canterbury has used his Easter sermon to criticise moves to “downgrade” religious education in schools.

Religious Education was left out of the new English Baccalaureate despite protests from the church and a nationwide petition calling for its inclusion that was signed by more than 120,000 people.

In his last Easter sermon as Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams said that younger people did not have hostility towards religion.

“There is plenty to suggest that younger people, while still statistically deeply unlikely to be churchgoers, don’t have the hostility to the faith one might expect,” he said.

The Archbishop said that young people took faith seriously “when they have a chance to learn about it”.

He said: “It is the worst possible moment to downgrade the status and professional excellence of religious education – but that’s another sermon.”

Reflecting on the meaning of Easter, he said the ultimate test of the Christian religion was not whether it was useful or helpful to the human race but whether its central claim about the resurrection of Jesus Christ is true.

No other understanding of Easter morning made any sense, he said.

“Easter makes a claim not just about a potentially illuminating set of human activities but about an event in history and its relation to the action of God. Very simply, in the words of this morning’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles, we are told that ‘God raised Jesus to life’.

“We are not told that Jesus ‘survived death’; we are not told that the story of the empty tomb is a beautiful imaginative creation that offers inspiration to all sorts of people; we are not told that the message of Jesus lives on. We are told that God did something.”

He went on to say that Jesus’s death had made possible the “reconciled love” between God and man.

It also reveals a God who acts. Turning his attention to the conflict in the Holy Land, the Archbishop suggested that faith in the God who acts would help both sides to reconcile.

“We have to prod and nag and encourage the religious leadership in the Holy Land on all sides to speak as if they believed in a God who acts, not only a God who endorses their version of reality.

“We have to pray, to pray for wisdom and strength and endurance for all who are hungry for peace and justice, pray that people will go on looking for a truly shared future.”

The Archbishop observed that there appears to be an emerging acknowledgement of the “social value” of religion in recent times, but added that people should remember that there is more to the faith than that.

“What matters isn’t our usefulness or niceness or whatever: it’s God, purposive and active, even – especially – when we are at the end of our resources.”