Abstract
The Totalitarian Imagination Revisited examines the origins and ends of religion in education at the ‘worldviews’ watershed. It does so against a personal academic life journey which has assessed state religious education in the light of modern autocracy, dictatorship and totalitarianism. Drawing on the specific context of developments in the United Kingdom, the chapter shows this watershed epistemological and linguistic shift—from a subject defined by the study of religious traditions to the designation of that of teaching and learning about ‘worldviews’, a putatively inclusive approach framed in its thinking to incorporate religious and secular outlooks—through an etiology which has its pathogenic roots in a range religiously sceptical, secular epistemologies. This epistemological-philosophical trajectory, with its modern beginnings in the Eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the revolutions of that period, is, it is shown, rooted in an outplaying of a centuries-long, specific historical-political context which has now made itself manifest in contemporary state religious education.
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Gearon, L. (2023). The Totalitarian Imagination Revisited: State Religious Education at the ‘Worldviews’ Watershed. In: Gross, Z. (eds) Reimagining the Landscape of Religious Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20133-2_14
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