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Whenever young people party cheerfully in city centres and destroy glass bottles, when people do not pay their cleaner adequately, underground trains are polluted, or managers defraud millions, we hear proclaimed a decay of morals and a loss of values such as solidarity, public spirit, and responsibility. It seems that values are always invoked when a deficit of cultural, individual, or societal resources for shaping the common good and individual life is identified. Obviously, the discourse on values is a discourse on crisis. People attempt to counter the diagnosed phenomena of social disintegration, cultural distortion, or even individual deficits in orientation and meaning with an increased commitment to questions of values. This certainly includes this volume, which researches values concepts in Europe and meticulously differentiates between the processes of secularisation and religious and values-related individualisation in the respective regions. Demands are made for an increased effort to impart values, with the perception that previous attempts to impart values (‘Wertevermittlung’) have failed (Ziebertz 2010). This call for the teaching of values is made to institutions such as the family and school. Not coincidentally, it is also made to those involved in religious pedagogy, because religion is believed to have a value-generating, meaning-creating, and orientating power, with religious education in schools in particular supposed to impart values. But is that really the task of religious education? What enables it to carry out this task? The connection between values, politics, religion, and education that can be discerned here generates an urgent need to think more closely from the perspective of religious pedagogy – which academically reflects the instances of religious education such as religious teaching – with a precise question: What contribution can religious pedagogy make to the current discourse on values in a late-modern society and the question of the imparting of values? What are the possibilities, what are the limits, and what are the normative and hermeneutic implications?

The following considerations attempt to justify the thesis: Religious education is by no means identical to values education (‘Wertebildung’). But it can make a critical and productive contribution to the current discourse on values precisely because of its specificity regarding the idea of God and its integrative, politically dimensioned concept of education.

This requires a comprehensive introduction with several stages. First, the problem needs to be further honed in order to specify the initial question (1) and to clarify basic concepts (2). In this context, it is vital to work out the specifics of religious values (3). Only then can the profile of religious values education (4) and its politically dimensioned and communication-theoretical structure (5) be uncovered. A real-life example will then illustrate this (6). The understanding of religious education taken as a basis here stands within the framework of a self-reflexive and politically dimensioned public religious pedagogy (7). Its meaning must be justified in the field of empiricism. This will be done here on the basis of two selected European Values Study (EVS) fields (8), before an evaluation of the critical-constructive contribution of religious pedagogy and a view to the future conclude the considerations (9). However, one must bear in mind that there is no such thing as the religious pedagogy; religious pedagogy is contextually, religiously, and politically differentiated. For example, religious pedagogy in Germany (which is itself heterogeneous) differs in its relative autonomy in relation to church and state from religious pedagogy in Poland, where religious pedagogy is significantly ecclesiocentric and catechetically oriented and where even the term itself is disputed (Milerski 2013; Rothgangel et al. 2020). The contextuality of my remarks must be taken into account, therefore, if only when it comes to specifying the question.

1 Specification of the Question

The relationship between the identification of a crisis and the intensity of the discourse on values, as the above has indicated, has a peculiar albeit paradoxical similarity to the relationship between diagnosis and treatment. The deeper the identified deficit, the more energetic the insistence on values. This paradox lies in the fact that the relationship invokes something as a precondition that is itself in need of legitimation. The assumption that values should be effective in the background of subjective existence and social coexistence is already based on a presupposition that is itself based on certain values. The empirical research question about the connection between political systems and values or religion and politics, as it is also presented in the EVS, is based on preconditions that must first be legitimised discursively. Weymans, (Chap. 3, this volume) shows impressively the political instrumentalisation of values. And the investigation that is particularly important at present – to identify what values are supposed to be and to argue if they need to be taught – is itself dependent on value-related preconditions. The basic assumption that society and politics in late-modern transformation processes should be value-guided and value-bearing at all is quite controversial. The dispute over value judgements, which is still simmering in the philosophy of science today, problematises the value guidance of research (Lindner 2017a). While for some science consists precisely in abstaining from basic value-guided assumptions, for others science is situated in the value-guided circle of knowledge and interest, based on the insights of a hermeneutic circle in the philosophy of science. This dispute is currently reflected in the assessment of the climate crisis. Some, for example the Fridays for Future movement, focus on sustainability, climate justice, and a radical departure from previous patterns of capitalist economic structures, cultural processes of self-understanding, and consumer behaviour. Others bring into play the complexity of social differentiation processes in the transformations of late modernity, suggesting that decisions in modern heterogeneous societies cannot be organised and justified on the basis of certain values and that translations between different social systems and their diverse value systems alone are capable of structuring society and justifying political decisions. The condemnation of ‘moralisation’ arises easily in this context. This was the case especially during the refugee crisis of 2015, when the term was used pejoratively and with politically charged force in debates. It is still a burning topic in disputes within the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD, Protestant Church of Germany) about a refugee ship.

However, it should come as no surprise that the intensification of phenomena and semantics resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic is also reflected in the field of values. Where problems of social segregation become magnified/more intense during a crisis, the debate on values also becomes more dynamic. Against the background of the functional differentiation of politics, law, morality, and religion, this is not without piquancy. While debates on values have always been appealing, in Germany the approach pursued by government in dealing with the pandemic is based on the two-pronged strategy of regulatory and criminal law on the one hand and an appeal to a sense of responsibility for the common good on the other. Admittedly, this means that the government is also taking a firm stand on controversial values issues. In the debates conducted in empirical social research (especially by Ronald Inglehart and Helmut Klages) about a change in values in the twentieth century from materialistic to post-materialistic values, from ‘collective obligation values to individual self-fulfilment values’ (Wagensommer 2020: 118; Schambeck and Pemsel-Maier 2017), the executive takes a one-sided stand against personal self-fulfilment values, which are often even morally discredited in the media. In view of the assessment of the threat posed by the pandemic, it is not the dominance of the executive that is problematic, insofar as it is legally secured. What needs to be clarified in the context of a plural society is rather its value-based positioning. When certain values are insisted upon, the old debate on basic values and the almost forgotten question of a guiding culture are reactivated under pandemic conditions (Schambeck 2017).

This intensifies the challenge for religious pedagogy to give a precise account of how it wants to be involved in these socially and politically charged discourses on values. Religious pedagogy must be able to demonstrate its critical-constructive connectivity to the diverse discourses, and this requires an embedding in these discourses, which itself requires conceptual clarification.

2 Conceptual Clarifications

The discourse on values is an ethical discourse. There is a ‘growing need for ethics’ (Englert 2008: 816; Wagensommer 2020) in order for people to be able to cope with the complex and dynamic field of ethically relevant decisions and changing values that is becoming increasingly visible and intense. What is meant by ‘ethics’? Ethics is the form of reflection on good and evil, right and wrong, which is ordered towards morality lived in the real world in the form of chosen actions, action preferences and rules of action. Philosophical and theological ethics both reflect on the ‘morality of morality’ from their own particular horizon ‘and examine, seek and develop reasons for its confirmation or criticism, practical recognition or change’ (Lutz-Bachmann 2013: 19). Ethics and morality are therefore related to each other like grammar and living language (Ernst 2009; Habermas 1991). Values, norms, and virtues must be distinguished terminologically. Virtues are understood to be certain moral attitudes of the subject that are habitualised to a certain degree. Norms are prescriptive, ‘ought’ regulations that guide the moral action, thinking, and willing of the subject from the outside, but which are dynamic. Norms are thus ‘to be understood as positively marked possibilities’ (Möllers 2018: 14) that are to be realised. Values, on the other hand, are subject-directed goals of morality that are not actually developed by the subject themselves, but which nevertheless guide the subject’s own desires. In this respect, evaluations are to be understood ‘as an elementary form of the normative’ (Möllers 2018: 403). Norms are oriented towards values and are obligatory and prescriptive. Values, however, in their teleological orientation towards the good, arise from the fact that subjects allow themselves to be taken in by them and freely bind themselves to them (Lindner 2017a, b). Admittedly, the central philosophical and legal-theoretical discussions revolve around the precise identification of the relationship between values and norms; the objectivity or subjectivity of values and their cognitive, knowledge-accessible or non-cognitive character, attainable via intuitions and affect; and the universalisability of values.

Their respective shapes are, of course, themselves the result of positional judgements, as can be seen in the fundamental tension in discourse on values. For some, values provide orientation and create meaning because they can be derived from an already existing arsenal of values arising from natural law and, ontologically, from a supreme good or an intuitive view of values. Such a materialism of values, in which values can only be retrieved and applied situationally, is disputed in post-metaphysical thought patterns. There, values owe their existence to highly complex processes of value generalisation, which must then be discursively identified and justified in order to gain validity (Wagensommer 2020; Lindner 2017b). Values thus emerge in a processual way through discourse and experience.

Both contrasting positions, however, assume that values must be learned. It is only the design and orientation of the learning process that are questioned. The concept of values education therefore acquires a semantic ambiguity that leads us to the specifics of religious pedagogy. According to Roland Verwiebe (2019), the term ‘values education’ means, on the one hand, value formation processes in which values are determined in terms of content, in which catalogues of values are shaped. In addition to this shaping of values, it is also about the genesis of values, about knowledge, learning, communication, and an educational confrontation with them (Polak and Klaiber 2019). For such a processual, experiential, and pragmatic philosophy of values, as elaborated by Hans Joas, values are formed in experiential, intersubjective processes of self-transcendence and self-formation, where subjects feel touched by something and understand themselves as being brought beyond themselves and from there oriented towards the good. Values thus take on a dynamic, creative, subject-oriented, and contextual character, since they must prove themselves anew and be changed in the face of changing challenges precisely because of their binding power, allowing people to explore and discover what the orienting and meaningful good in each case is (Joas 1999; Lindner 2017a; Lindner 2017b). Overall, a movement from ‘essentialist’ to ‘relationist’ values can be observed in the discourse on values (Ebertz 2017). This is reinforced by migration and globalisation. As a result of their cultural foundation, values are often understood by migrants as a ‘portable home’ (Freise 2017), which leads to self-constructions that are identity relevant but at the same time can promote processes of exclusion because they are often not the same as those of the majority society. Against this complex background, the current discourse on values does not speak of a ‘loss of values’, but rather, with a view to the contextuality of thinking with good reasons, of a ‘change in values’, because it is actually not the values that change, but the ‘subjective value rankings’ (Wagensommer 2020). Subjects are fundamentally involved in the intersubjective process of values education, which has significant consequences for religious pedagogy. Values are not, then, an object that can simply be transferred like a package. Values education has to be communicative.

3 The Specificity of Christian Discourses on Values

Theological ethics meanwhile emphasises the autonomous nature of ethics and values. Accordingly, there are no specifically Christian values, but rather dynamisations of values in the light of basic theological statements such as the image of God, gifted freedom, and the unconditional dignity of the human being coming from God. Christian faith motivates, initiates, and can also inspire specific attitudes and actions (Hilpert 2009). Christian faith focuses on the idea of God. It is not ethics; rather it has ethics. Christian faith in the ever greater God protects, dynamises, orients, but also frames ethics (Grümme 2018a). Faith in God is more than ethics. This is why the remarkable admonition by a leading politician that the imparting of values is the task of all school subjects, but that religious teaching finds its indispensable specificity in bringing up the idea of God in an experiential and critically productive way, should give us pause for thought (Thierse 2001).

It is relevant for the discourse on values that from a secular and democratic perspective this feature of the discourse is considered highly significant for the common good. Jürgen Habermas has marked the difference between a Kant-inspired communicative freedom and a Christian ethic of love. This has essentially to do with the supererogatory character of this freedom, which knows itself to be endowed and taken into service as liberated freedom:

A supererogatory action that goes beyond what can be expected of anyone on the basis of reciprocity means the active sacrifice of one’s own legitimate interests for the good or the reduction of the suffering of the other in need of help. The discipleship of Christ requires of the believer the sacrificium, on the premise, of course, that we freely accept this active sacrifice, sanctified in the light of a just and good God, of an absolute judge. (Mendieta 1999: 206)

For Habermas, the increasingly ‘derailing modernization’ that can ‘wear down’ the democratic bond and ‘wear out’ solidarity points to such traditions outside formal, procedural rationality (Habermas 2005: 109, 111). Practical rationality already misses its ‘own destiny when it no longer has the power to awaken and keep awake in profane minds an awareness of solidarity that has been violated worldwide, an awareness of what is missing, of what cries out to heaven’ (Habermas 2008: 30; Habermas 2001). In the face of increasing crises, the democratic state in particular needs an internally guided, conviction-based legitimation of its citizens that goes beyond mere pragmatic acceptance. In this respect, it is based on pre-political sources so that it does not cut itself off from ‘dwindling resources of meaning, solidarity and justice’ (Habermas 2008: 99) that are also capable of motivating supererogatory actions.

Admittedly, this raises the controversial question of universalisable standards. Such standards of judgement – purely immanent, without horizons beyond the concrete contexts and visions of the good – would be impossible. ‘Who wants to tell the critic of the Indian caste system, who completely rejects it, to please proceed “immanently”? Or remind the critic of patriarchy in a society where it has hardly ever been challenged not to speak a “foreign language”?’ (Forst 2015: 15). For Hans Joas, systems that create meaning, such as Christianity, provide an overarching standard because they ‘motivate a break with egocentric perspectives’ and do not have the ‘happiness of the members of one’s own culture or faith community in mind alone’ (Joas 1999: 287). Religions in particular can ‘provide strong universalistic values that are capable of overcoming cultural boundaries, indeed that reckon with and presuppose such differences’ (Ebertz 2017: 33). Nevertheless, this standard remains too weak in view of the limited possibility of the universalisation of religions. With communication-theoretical approaches, I emphasise the interest in universal identifiability, but frame this with a certain action-theoretical rationality. Accordingly, in the current heterogeneity of life environments, only those values are capable of universalisation that can be justified freely and equally by all at least potentially involved in a mutual, thus reciprocal, and general manner (Forst 2007). In the light of this normative criterion, those values and value structures that ‘do not fulfil the standard of reciprocal and general justification and are characterised by forms of exclusion, privileges and domination’ (Forst 2011: 20) appear to be illegitimate. Thus, value thinking must be substantiated post-metaphysically in modernity and identified critically and contextually.

However, the contextuality of discourse on values draws attention to another important point to which religious pedagogy must orient itself – that the discourse on values has to do with power. This discourse, which initially emerged from a metric-economic field that considered values predominantly in categories concerning the accumulation of goods and finances, is ultimately the counterdesign to far-reaching social and individual experiences of crisis. After the disruption of the systems of idealism, with the impossibility of an overall systematic interpretation of reality and the resulting loss of orientation in thought and action, the philosophy of values attempted in the nineteenth century ‘to remedy the situation by proving the objective validity of values’ and to take this as the occasion for ‘a fundamental reflection on the value and the value-determinacy of human performance (thinking, willing, acting, etc.)’ (Krijnen 2011: 548). Even in the social experiences of insecurity in the 1980s, the conservative call for a virtue-oriented ‘courage to educate’ was passionately discussed in educational sciences in order to counter the loss of values identified at the time (Benner 1978). Here, however, the indeterminacy of the concept of values increases its ‘attractiveness when it comes to bringing up the widespread concern about custom and morality [… which] is usually a conservative rhetoric of “everything used to be better”’ (Schnädelbach 2012: 166). Quite obviously, the concept of value is used to ‘designate what is socially desirable’ (Lindner 2017a: 101). Against this background, critical attention should certainly be aroused if value discourses are now increasingly gaining momentum in various researches. This applies to religious pedagogy as well as to values research, including the EVS, and should be seen as an indication of the experience of social crisis, but also of theoretical power interests that may be at play. Such affirmative tendencies make it necessary to question the connection between ‘normativity and power’ and to critically examine the discourse on values and thus the discourse on values education within the framework of a critical theory with regard to its hegemonic structures (Forst 2015; Brown 2015). Only in this way can values and normative orientations be appropriately justified in relation to religious pedagogy. But what does this mean more precisely for the education processes around religious values? We must now consider these in more detail.

4 Values in Education and Upbringing. Setting the Course

Highly relevant for the discourse on values is first the difference and mutual relationship between education and upbringing (Domsgen 2019; Englert 2007). The process of upbringing starts from the object, from society, and from culture. Upbringing aims to place people in given contexts, in society, in groups, in culture and political systems, in world views, in religions and the church, and thus in certain value systems. The subject is predominantly thought of as passive – the object of educational processes. Teachers and parents are instigators of this process of upbringing. Accordingly, values education means the diachronic and synchronic transmission of values for the continuity of institutions, identities, and structures. Value formation instructs in existing structures.

Education, on the other hand, starts from the subject and ultimately aims at the subject. Education arises from the self-activity of the subjects, who set their own goals. The subject is the agent of an educational process. In that process, a subject actively, critically, and constructively engages with its object world with the goal of maturity and autonomy. In the traditions of Rousseau, Kant, Herder, Schiller, and Humboldt, the goal of education is not to be knowledgeable, mobile, functioning, adapted, and fitted into political contexts, culture, society, and economy. It is to be self-responsible, free, mature, and capable of judgement. Education aims at emancipation and enlightenment – at the realisation of human destiny. The theology of the image of God embedded into the concept of education in Judeo-Christian traditions signifies the internal historical incompleteness and utopian overspill of education. Such educational processes find their measure in the potential self-determination of human beings. The ‘pedagogical paradox’ (Peukert 1987a), the aporia of how freedom and maturity can be initiated in a relationship of coercion and inequality, in which the pupil should always be able to turn critically against the content, norms, and methods chosen, remains unresolvable. Religious education can therefore be characterised as a ‘language school for freedom’ (Lange 1980; Peukert 1987b; Platzbecker 2013), as a process in which people become capable of perception, action, speech, and judgement in their socio-cultural and political context under the liberating yet challenging claim of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Out of the spirit of eschatological hope, it brings a comparative, permanent opening to otherness – to something greater – to educational processes. In this way it is transformational (Grümme 2019).

For the discourse on values as it is also dealt with in the EVS, a considerable connectivity becomes apparent here. The orientation towards free subjectivity in the linguistically mediated contextual processes of history and society marks the value-generating, freely binding power of the subjects in an axiomatic way, as well as the categorical contradiction of a values education that narrows itself as a purely inner formation of the heart and attitude of the individual subject. Of course, upbringing and education are intrinsically interrelated in many dimensions. In terms of values pedagogy, this points to the great importance of given value structures and traditions, though these are always to be understood within the framework of autonomy. In this sense, values education functions as a normative as well as a critical standard for upbringing in values.

5 Practical Communication. Contours of Religious Values Education

Values discourses in philosophy and in theology are in agreement with the fundamental statement that values have to be learned. Whether values education is shaped as value grading or value generalisation, it is not self-evident; it does not always make sense intuitively (Lindner 2017b). In contrast to values upbringing, religious values education emphasises the importance of internally guided understanding, experience-based reflection, and critical self-reflection. If one overlooks the discourse of ethical education in general and values education in particular, a dynamic emerges in two fields that is highly significant for the discussion of the EVS. On the one hand, there is a differentiation arising from the specificity of school form/class/grade and place of learning. Values formation takes place in parishes, in institutions of religious adult education, and in education for the elderly. It has established itself in different types of schools and at different age levels with different didactic focuses (Domsgen 2019; Wagensommer 2020; Lindner 2017b). On the other hand, values education is becoming increasingly sensitive to interreligious and intercultural dialogue. Religions are being addressed in the context of integration, but with a highly significant dialectic. On the one hand, they are supposed to be a ferment of integration in civil society, while on the other hand, they are seen as obstacles to integration. Distorted images of Islam – especially its alleged incompatibility with democracy and affinity with violence, which are constructed through its identification with Islamism, along with anti-Semitic stereotypes – are gaining momentum in societies that are disintegrating economically and politically. As a result, comparative research and the internationalisation of the discourse on values are becoming more important, as can be seen not least in EVS. Intercultural theology and interreligious education are thus becoming relevant in the field of values education (Meyer 2019).

According to Hans-Georg Ziebertz, this kind of values education, within the horizon of the Christian biblical tradition, aims at the ability to ‘conduct practical discourses on values and to develop a capacity for judgement that enables one to make responsible decisions with regard to the questions: What do I have to do? What should we do? What should be valid? What is desirable and sustainable – for me and for others?’ (Ziebertz 2010: 434). But how is this religious values education to take place in a subject-oriented and autonomy-oriented form in such a way that values can be brought to bear at the same time (Sajak 2015)? Research in the sociology of religion as well as the EVS point out that because of secularisation, individualisation, pluralisation, and deconfessionalisation in large parts of Western Europe, an uninterrupted and unbowed transmission of religious values can no longer be assumed (Polak and Schuster, Chap. 6, this volume). This requires an enormous dynamisation of values education (Grümme 2017). This heterogeneous complexity and the interdependence of political, societal, and religious aspects needs to be identified and proven in the values education of religious pedagogy. On the one hand, it is necessary to instil values for the sake of the formation of the subject’s judgement and autonomy and the common good. On the other hand, these values must be instilled in such a way that they do not undermine the goals of autonomy in form and content.

Hans-Georg Ziebertz (2010) has worked out four procedures of values education, which he discovers diachronically as well as synchronically in religious pedagogy (Grümme 2018a). These have always been prevalent in the history of Christian moral education:

  1. 1.

    The transmission of values, which aims to convey given values in an orienting way. Whether in patristic pedagogy with Augustine or in medieval monastic and urban middle schools, or even in the modern schools of the Reformation, this form of moral learning is focused on the transmission of the Church’s moral teachings to the next generation. The focus is not on the subjects but on the message (Ziebertz and Roebben 2017). It is a material ethics in the context of a largely closed, particular universe of values into which the children and young people are introduced by moral pedagogical impulses. Its yield lies in the rootedness of this morality in the lifeworld (‘Lebenswelt’), which receives consolidation and motivation from there. It offers the consistency of a catalogue of values that provides orientation and meaning, as it corresponds to the logic of material ethics of values elaborated above. Its limitation, however, lies in its inability to adequately cope with the pluralism of values. It remains heteronomous (Meyer-Ahlen 2010).

  2. 2.

    The elucidation of values, which is intended to reflectively illuminate the internalised values of the students. While the first model is deductively oriented and promotes fitting into what already exists, the inductively structured second model leads to a reduction to individually significant values. Here, only those values that are present in the subject are revealed, but they are hardly learned ethically.

  3. 3.

    In contrast, the third model of values development aims to initiate a gradual increase of competence in moral judgement. In Lawrence Kohlberg’s approach, the discussion of moral conflicts through dilemma stories is intended to enable principled ethical judgement. This structural-genetic model pervades the inner teleology from an egoistic to a universalistic and increasingly internalised justification of moral judgements (Schmid 2015). As convincing as this model is with regard to the genesis of ethical judgement, there remain reservations with regard to a cognitive narrowing or even an ‘apolitical’ moralising (Sutor 1980; Grümme 2009).

  4. 4.

    It is therefore not surprising that this is joined by a more interactional model: the model of values communication. Based on the concept of communicative rationality of Jürgen Habermas and Helmut Peukert, the focus here is on participation in argumentative discussion processes. It aims to make the ability to communicate and argue possible through a change of perspective from the situation of all others. Maturity is thereby increasingly presupposed in the process, in accordance with the pedagogical paradox. It is about the argumentative examination of validity claims and the clarification of which values and values orientations can claim validity (Ziebertz 2010). If there are no more values, no more sets of norms and virtues that can be validly unquestioned as material and formal horizons of justification and goals, then the formation of ethical value orientations and their critical reflection have to be placed in the foreground. The focus is on critical judgement with regard to contextually pressing moral problems. Helmut Peukert (1987a) exemplarily shows how this approach is rooted in concepts of communication theory on the one hand and a correlatively connected anthropologically directed theology on the other hand. An ‘ethics of intersubjective creativity’ should, with recourse to the well-rehearsed impulses of the Judeo-Christian tradition, enable subjects to master the challenges of the present in the service of their autonomy and, to this end, to be able to critically and transformatively deal with traditional and currently propagated value structures in the search for ‘jointly supported orientations’ (Knauth 2017: 155).

In contrast to privatisation and immunity from politics, the integration of religious values education into social processes should be considered (Grümme 2009; Gärtner and Herbst 2020). Drawing on research from critical political education, which seeks to counteract the ‘individualisation of social problems’ (Lösch 2020: 400), I vote for the concept of a political dimension to religious pedagogy, which configures religious education ‘against any individualization and privatization’ (Könemann 2020: 197) in its social, political, and structural aspects, without disregarding the importance of aesthetics, critical judgement, and emotionality. It is precisely the idea of the subject that ensures that the political dimension of religious teaching does not absorb the subjects into structural contexts. Rather, it is a matter of mediating reference to self and to the world with each other and of transferring them into critical contexts of evaluation, which not only questions prevailing ideologies and hegemonic tendencies in an ideology-critical way, but at the same time self-critically reflects on its own place in them (Grümme 2009; Grümme 2017; Grümme 2019).

This political dimension of religious values education results in an important distinction between two forms of learning in religious values education. Social learning attempts to guide the subject towards solidarity and reasonable self-determination and co-determination. It aims for the willingness and ability to communicate, to cooperate, to show solidarity and responsible conflict-solving behaviour, to develop a stable ego identity, social sensitivity, perspective-taking, tolerance, critical faculties, and the appropriate handling of rules. Social learning is ethically and inter-communicatively oriented. The focus is on personal social competences in relation to the self, the peer group, the family, and the community. Political learning, on the other hand, aims at political maturity. It is about power, legal order, ideology and manipulation, domination and interest, the meaning and function of political institutions, and the normative orientation of the political. It is about loyalty and criticism, and about support and transformation. In contrast to face-to-face interaction, political learning is thus systemic and structurally oriented and relates to the context of society as a whole (Wohnig 2017; Herdegen 1999; Massing 2007).

This points to concrete forms of learning in religious values education. Since values education aims to shape judgement and motivation as well as action, it goes without saying that such learning in religious education integrates cognitive, affective, and volitive moments in order to transcend a cognitivist narrowing and instead shape a ‘prosocial sensitisation as holistic moral education’ (Hilger 2006: 239). This is articulated in forms of learning ‘that go beyond purely cognitive activation and also touch on feelings and imaginations, basic attitudes and life goals, lifestyles and role models respectively models’ (Englert 2017: 93). Based on the experience that before all morality to be created, a good life is based on an obligatory justification and from there gains strength, impulses, and reserves of resistance, religious values education aims for the ability to empathise, and at social cognition as learning through insight and prosocial action. Cognitive methods are thus to be complemented by learning from the model, by learning through instruction, and by learning through social affirmation. Performative experiences of morally relevant practice must be made possible (Mette 1994). It is always important to initiate such attitudes of perspective-taking, commitment to the community, participation, and socio-moral responsibility in an action-oriented way and with recourse to experiential and formative pedagogical foundations. Constructivist, strictly subject-oriented approaches prove their particular relevance here (Rekus 2000; Schlag 2011). Teaching and places of learning outside of school must be distinguished not least by their learning setting and – especially under the specific challenges of the all-day structure of the school – to be productively related to each other. Accordingly, subject-oriented, experience-oriented, and action-oriented approaches such as the dilemma method, narrative ethics, biographical learning, learning from local heroes and local victims, learning from injustice, diaconal learning, or social internships form important elements of ethical judgement formation (Meyer-Ahlen 2010; Kropač 2012; Mendl 2015). Nevertheless, where religious values education disregards the embedding in political-economic contexts – where one thinks that a change of heart or a transformation of the communitarian relations of interpersonal togetherness would correspond to the complexity of reality, the formative imprints of society, culture, and history as well as the dynamics of the Kingdom of God – the political framing of religious education draws attention to structural-systemic effects and transfers them into educational contexts that assert themselves without the person knowing. This, however, presupposes a concept of religious education that can constructively and critically confront the challenges and ideological tendencies of the discourse on values outlined above and already points to what such a concept of religious values education could introduce into the diverse public spheres of late-modern societies with their thoroughly heterogeneous value concepts, as the EVS shows with its comparative analysis of value concepts in Europe. Let us illustrate what has been said with an impressive example.

6 Compassion: A Role Model for Values Education in Late Modern Society

Compassion, a difficult term that can best be translated as pity, sympathy, involvement, solidarity, and ‘being human for others’ (Kuld 2008: 13; Kuld 2003), is the key concept, principle, and guiding word of a large-scale social project in schools in Germany. As part of a social internship, pupils usually spend 2 weeks in social institutions such as care homes for elderly people, kindergartens, institutions for those with disabilities, or hospitals. They are prepared for this in class and accompanied by (religion) teachers during the internship. After the internship, they reflect on their experiences and the internship portfolios they have created (Kuld and Gönnheimer 2000).

Theologically, the Compassion Project is shaped by a mysticism of compassion, as elaborated in particular by Johann Baptist Metz as the key word of Christianity:

The mysticism of the Bible – in monotheistic traditions – is at its core a political mysticism. More closely, a mysticism of political, of social compassion. Its categorical imperative is: wake up, open your eyes! Jesus does not teach a mysticism of closed eyes, but a mysticism of open eyes and thus of the unconditional duty to perceive other people’s suffering. (Metz et al. 2000: 8)

The main leaders emphasise that this religious meaning does not necessarily have to be connected with the Compassion Project, because it is not about normative pedagogy and imparting a religious world view but about practising an ethical attitude of social responsibility and solidarity. Nevertheless, this is certainly where the difficulty of the transferability of this project – initially developed for Roman Catholic schools – lies, because of the undeniable connection between the project and religious motivation. In a combination of experiential, reflexive, and pragmatic moments, it aims to ‘develop socially committed attitudes such as solidarity, cooperation and communication with people who, for whatever reason, are dependent on the help of others’ (Kuld 2008: 13). The project aims to develop dispositions towards altruism, willingness to cooperate, prosociality, affection, benevolence, and empathy and solidarity with those who are suffering. The Compassion Project can be distinguished from other forms of prosocial learning or practical social activities in education in that action-oriented experience, information, reflection, and evaluation are linked together. Only under these conditions can behavioural motivations and attitudes be initiated. Feelings alone oscillate and do not lead to the establishment of ethical attitudes. Therefore, the Compassion Project, which is accompanied broadly by religious pedagogy, pedagogy and learning psychology, and which has also just been evaluated on its success (Kuld 2004), belongs in the context of school learning, though it is, strictly speaking, a form of opening up school.

This values education project has been discussed quite critically. Is it not reduced to social learning? Does it reach the political level? First, one must consider its limited claim. It does not claim to create a better person. Nor does it intend to be a ‘repair shop for society’. The limits of school learning prevent immediate social transformation. Because the school reaches all adolescents like no other social institution or like no other social or civil society or church milieu, the school ‘cannot solve the problems of society, but it can show how to reflect on these problems and what approaches there are to solving them and what the consequences of these solutions are’ (Kuld 2004: 13). That is why targeted care for the neighbour cannot solve the phenomena of social crisis. ‘Nevertheless, the Compassion Project sees itself as a measure against the social death of cold. In this respect, the Compassion project is political’ (Kuld and Gönnheimer 2000: 10). The Compassion Project thus concentrates recognisably on social learning and opens up to the political in the broad and best sense of politics. Of course, learning at school is always subject to reservations concerning reality. Being able to bring socio-political reality into the classroom in a selective way only is an institutional limitation but at the same time an advantage of school. The question is to what extent those involved in this project aim to protect the concept from the danger, which they recognise, of it being a vade mecum (handbook or guide) and ‘repair workshop’ for social conflicts or merely a cure for the symptoms of crises. This danger could be minimised if the categories of thought within the concept were to go beyond the interpersonal into structural categories that would also consider structural interests, conditions of domination, power contexts, or economic contexts through social and civil society togetherness. These categories of thought would have to become effective above all in the preparatory and follow-up phases of the social internship. Furthermore, these structural and self-imposed limits would have to be made self-reflexive. Then the Compassion Project would be a model for how religious values education could work in the school public.

7 Religious Values Education in Public Religious Education

In late modernity, the public sphere has become a forum for the articulation of diverse traditions and values, where traditions have to prove their truth in a constructive-critical confrontation with others. Without being able to show it here, it can be stated that this also applies to a religious pedagogy that understands its approach in the light of the ‘signs of the times’ as the Second Vatican Council emphasised in one of its most famous documents. It must make audible in public its claim to truth and its prophetic-critical impulse, as well as its consoling, liberating spaces of experience, but without coming to undue self-absolution and thus undermining the achievement of the modernisation processes of functional differentiation (Grümme 2018b; Dreier 2018).

But what can this look like in practical, real-world terms? What needs to be considered? First, I will discuss formal, then content-related aspects. In the discourse on religious pedagogy, a multi-dimensional model of public spheres has been developed that can help here. According to this model, religious values education would instil its values into the public spheres of schools and civil society and into national and transnational public spheres in the same way as a public religion does: in a communicative-discursive manner. It would do so without a claim to primacy, prepared rather to learn and to be dialogue-oriented (Grümme 2018b; regarding the imparting of values Europäisches Parlament 2017). A central problem here is the question of how to deal with the normativity of religious values and their specific options without undermining the freedom of the subjects and the plurality of the public spheres. This is where the Beutelsbach Consensus (1976) – developed by researchers in the field of political didactics – comes into play (Grümme 2021). This consensus is the result of intensive discussions about the status of normativity in the field. In contrast to concepts of legitimation, in which the status quo was justified in terms of political didactics, but also in contrast to those of mission, where political education is instrumentalised for the implementation of democratic thinking, the Beutelsbach Consensus of 1976 has gained axiomatic significance with its three maxims within the framework of a concept of political education oriented towards maturity:

  1. (a)

    The prohibition of overpowering. According to this, the boundary between indoctrination and political education exists where learners are prevented from gaining an independent judgement. Political learning takes place in the sense of a desired, predetermined opinion.

  2. (b)

    The controversiality of teaching, which reflects the controversial nature and pluralism of the political in science and politics.

  3. (c)

    To enable students to analyse a political situation and their own interests and to look for means and ways to influence the situation in terms of their own interests. What is presupposed here, in an emphatic sense, is an understanding of education ‘in the tradition of the elucidation as an engagement with politics shaped by the guiding mode of rationality’, which seeks to promote human maturity ‘in the sense of independent judgement and action’ and refers ‘to democracy as a desirable political order’ (Sander 2005: 28; Herbst 2019). According to the hard-won consensus, the prohibition of overpowering marks a boundary that cannot be crossed. Even if it were a matter of a judgement that affirmed the basic democratic order, this judgement cannot be forced. The form and content must be recognisably in agreement and oriented towards the postulate of maturity. The teaching methodology cannot be designed in such a way that it contradicts the goal of political education. An education oriented towards maturity and freedom is counteracted by a non-participatory, authoritarian teaching style. Conversely, participatory, student-oriented teaching practises what such a pattern of education is all about. Emancipation as a learning goal would be turned into its contrast if it were imposed doctrinally.Footnote 1

But this should shape the question of normativity in religious values education (Grümme 2021). Religious values education, which qualifies as a language school of freedom, must on its own terms make it possible for its values education to remain discursively oriented. In its performative execution, it must therefore itself be oriented towards the norms of autonomy and freedom. In doing so, it must not only critically reflect its hegemonic instrumentalisations within the framework of a socially demanded transmission of values, but must be sensitive – as has only recently happened in religious education – to processes in its practice that threaten to thwart its own goals. If values are generated and communicated in experiential practices – if God’s liberating message is communicated – then it would thwart precisely this normative values process if obscure exclusions were associated with it. Inclusion pedagogy or interreligious learning has shown depressing examples of this (Grümme 2021). In the desire to support people, they are earmarked in advance as worthy of support in the learning group and thus singled out in a negative way. The concept of values education as a basic foil of ethical education obviously needs an ideology-critical praxeological reflection.

It is a basic tenet of such self-reflective values education that the participants can also position themselves against other well-rehearsed values. Only in this way can religious education become a place of learning for strong tolerance (Forst 2014). The performativity of the educational process itself becomes a space in which this normativity is played out, controlled, and specified. Moralisation – which essentially consists in the fact that morality ‘means being able to leap over’ (Nothelle-Wildfeuer 2019: 453) factual knowledge – is avoided by discussing factual questions multidimensionally and deliberating procedural questions in discourse.

At the same time, this has consequences for the content profile of values education. A common distinction in political science could help to make the contribution in terms of content more precise and at the same time clarify the political implications. If one adopts the subdivision of the foundations (polity), processes (politics), and contents (policy) of politics (Meyer 2006), then the specific contribution of religious pedagogy to values education becomes apparent in school and in national and transnational terms. Within the polity dimension, aspects of the political system, the constitution, but above all the genesis of value attitudes, of willingness to act, of civil society and political commitment, and thus of political culture, make religious values education highly compatible. Crucially, it is the inalienable dignity of the other and the challenge of not being allowed to lose anyone in which this becomes real. Ulrich Riegel (2017) shows in empirical studies that it was precisely in the refugee crisis of 2015 that church congregations were involved in emergency accommodation, care, and accompaniment.

In the politics dimension, religious education, with its tradition of the image of God is important, which it introduces into educational processes with a claim to truth, bringing this claim into dialogue with other claims to truth and assessing these claims critically. In this way, the values education of religious pedagogy is challenged in its formal, processual design. Whether religious teaching or adult education is structured authoritatively or dialogically as a ‘language school of freedom’ (Lange 1980) is politically highly relevant; where they are designed authoritatively, they are likely to performatively counteract their claim to truth. This shows how religion can be introduced into a plural and heterogeneous society. On the one hand, religious moral positions are introduced critically and in a conflictual way by institutions such as the church, mosque community, or synagogue. This is especially the case in the field of sexual morality, abortion, and the evaluation of homosexuality. The evaluations of the EVS show impressively how much influence this situation can have on the respective European regions (Halman and Sieben this volume). On the other hand, the possible dissent also proves that ‘any moral resource in a democratically constituted society can only ever be an offer against which the individual must position himself’ (Riegel 2017: 51).

And finally, the policy dimension challenges the concrete content values that are brought in as a contribution to values education in religious pedagogy – the material core of religious traditions with their specific interests, perspectives, horizons of meaning, and liberating as well as critical-transformative promises of salvation. This can sharpen the depth of problems and contribute to the problematisation of the self-evident, to the politicisation of the apolitical, to the interruption of unquestioned mentalities and ideologies, and to the orientation of the content. Here, religious pedagogy must introduce its tradition of God’s hope as a tradition of freedom and justice, of hope for a life in abundance for all, and as a liberating as well as a critical message, whereby the only adequate form under the conditions of late-modern transformation and secularisation processes is a discursive-dialogical one (Grümme 2018b).

In summary, this commentary has outlined, through its passage through various aspects of religious values education, the contribution in terms of content and form that religious values education can make in a critical and productive way to the current values debates, to which the EVS wants to provide an essential impulse. Certainly, religious education in its axiomatic reference to the question of God is more than ethics and the imparting of values (Grümme 2018a). And yet, because of the historical-social relevance of hope in God, religious education cannot be practiced without ethics and values education. It is first about researching and taking into account the value-related learning preconditions of the subjects, and second about making values ‘represented and accessible’ in many dimensions in the midst of a heterogeneous society, offering value-based learning occasions ‘appropriate to the subject matter’ (Lindner 2017b: 7). It is critical and self-reflexive, especially against its political and social forms of value transmission, as it addresses the question of power and reveals the instrumentalisation contexts, attempting to overcome them in a critical-constructive way. In doing so, it also critically examines hermeneutics and methodologies with which questions of values are thematised and investigated. But what could this mean in concrete terms? This will be at least sketchily indicated in relation to three contributions to this EVS volume.

8 Concretisation

It is impossible to deal here with the multifaceted richness of the EVS as a reference point for religious values education. As an example, I will concentrate on three approaches in order to outline their potential in the values debate:

  1. 1.

    Correlation of religious practice and end-of-life-morality (abortion, euthanasia, suicide)

Inge Sieben and Loek Halman evaluate the EVS in the light of their research question as to whether there is a correlation between the transformation of the religious and moral landscape in the processes of modernity. They aim to investigate the relationship between religious practice and moral attitudes regarding the justification of abortion, suicide, and euthanasia. In doing so, they cluster the European countries examined in the EVS into five groups (Halman and Sieben this volume): (1) Northern Europe (most secular and mainly Protestant); (2) Western Europe (like Germany most secular, Catholic, or mixed); (3) Southern Europe (like Spain least secular, mainly Catholic); (4) ex-communist Eastern Europe (like Slovenia or Poland); and (5) ex-Soviet Union (like Armenia). They define the degree of religious practice by the frequency of attendance at religious services, whereas religious belief is defined by the answer in the binary logic of yes–no to the question as to whether someone is a religious person. They conclude that:

The associations at the country level between secularisation and end-of-life morality (measured by correlation coefficients) are clearly positive in all five regions in Europe, indicating that higher levels of secularisation go hand in hand with more permissiveness towards abortion, euthanasia, and suicide. This is in line with the ideas of modernisation theories. In addition, the assumption of the integration perspective that religious practice as an indicator of this secularisation is more salient for a population’s end-of-life morality than religious beliefs is confirmed for three out of five regions: in Western Europe, Southern Europe and ex-Soviet countries, the macro-level correlation coefficients between levels of church attendance and end-of-life morality are higher than the correlation coefficients between levels of religiousness and end-of-life morality. In the Northern region, the two correlation coefficients are about equal and rather modest, while in the ex-communist countries the correlation between the levels of religiousness and end-of-life morality […] is higher than the correlation between the levels of religious attendance and end-of-life morality. (Halman and Sieben, Chap. 4, this volume: 145)

  1. 2.

    Political values and religion: a comparison between Western and Eastern Europe

Susanne Pickel and Gert Pickel (Chap. 5, this volume) want to investigate to what extent democracy, values relevant to democracy, and religion are interrelated. They use the EVS data base to gain comparative insight into the complex interrelationships between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. The concepts of secularisation, individualisation, and a free-market rational-choice model of religion are the criteria for evaluating the data. The results are disillusioning. On the one hand, they show a growing tension between an increasingly secularised West and an East that is turning more towards religion and religious values. On the other hand, they show that religious values have an influence on democratic attitudes and practices and that they motivate and strengthen voluntary engagement, but that religious values vary according to the degree of secularisation and the form of religious ties and, especially in the East, stand in contrast to an open, democratic society:

While socially committed believers oppose prejudices and anti-democratic attitudes, dogmatic, orthodox, and fundamentalist believers more often come into electoral affinity with anti-democrats […]. Against the background of a still widespread revitalisation in Eastern Europe, this relationship – viewed with some caution – appears to be a cause for concern if one looks at it from the perspective of a supporter of liberal democracy. (S. Pickel and G. Pickel, Chap. 5, this volume: 195)

Religious values education can follow these two different studies both critically and constructively. It would critically question the indicators. Can religion really be measured by the binary logic of yes–no or even by the frequency of religious practices? This does not do justice to the multidimensionality of subjective references to religion as developed in religious education. Empirical research on the religiosity of Islamic youth in Germany has shown that they see their ethical attitudes as being conditioned by Allah’s commandments. However, the fact that this confession gives them a foothold and a home in an alien environment from which they feel rejected plays a role (Riegel 2015). Here, religion serves as a distinguishing feature that creates identity.

These studies also fail to take into account the specific logic of the construction of religion (Kropač 2019). A contextual education of values would examine, for example, whether the politically induced fuelling of national narratives by the PiS government in Poland has not led to a specific re-Catholicisation, which at the same time has motivated certain development regarding abortion. But is not the research question already too simple, insofar as it excludes autonomous, non-religious justifications of morality? Does it not play into the hands of those traditionalist currents (such as in Poland) which, by establishing such a correlation, pursue an unreflected transfer of values?

In both Halman and Sieben and S. Pickel and G. Pickel, a major problem lies in the simplistic concept of religion. To avoid this, Riegel and Schneiker (2017) instead prefer a more open approach that brings together individualised and institutionalised religion and religiosity in order to investigate the possible influence of religiosity on voluntary social engagement. Moreover, they call for the supplementation of purely quantitative studies with qualitative methods, because this is the only way to do justice to the complexity of the field. In other words, a purely quantitative study would need a triangular supplementation in which qualitative approaches are included. A hermeneutic and self-reflexive framing of one’s own methodology and a differentiated awareness of contextuality would be necessary. At this point, religious values education could constructively highlight the value-generating power of the subjects in their respective contexts, which are analysed in an ideology-critical way. It could draw attention to the fact that this is not necessarily connected with a moral permissiveness or with prejudices against minorities, homosexuals, Muslims, and gender, as Halman and Sieben or S. Pickel and G. Pickel assume in this volume, but rather marks the unquestionable theonomous autonomy of human beings in front of God. Religious values education would, under the specific conditions of the respective European regions, discursively introduce God’s message in a contextual, discursive way as a contribution to values education concerning these highly complex issues, insisting on the complexity of such issues in a multiperspective way in the sense of values communication.

  1. 3.

    Religious and political values among different classes

Pierre Bréchon (Chap. 8, this volume) examines the available EVS data using a sociological approach to education. He is not primarily concerned with the problem of social stratification. In a European comparison, he examines the barely researched sociological question of the extent to which the underprivileged and those living in the precariat show specific values orientations in the political and religious fields. In doing so, he forms four groups from the selected 21 European states according to regional order: Western Europe (like Austria, France, Germany), Eastern Europe (like Bulgaria, Poland), Southern Europe (Italy, Spain) and Nordic countries (like Denmark or Sweden). His results, obtained through a differentiated methodology, are also highly relevant for religious values education. Irrespective of finely worked-out regional differentiations, for example between quite Catholic states such as Austria or Spain and multi-confessional states such as Germany, he shows that people in the precariat do have specific value orientations in political and religious respects.

At the religious level, the precarious are slightly more religious and practise more than the more privileged categories. […]. This does not prevent them from being more dissatisfied with those in power, but they mobilise less strongly in public action, whether through voting or social and political protest. They do not easily trust in others and in institutions. They are less inclined to left-wing values, they also show greater xenophobia and nationalism, and they are less attached to democratic values. (Bréchon, Chap. 8, this volume: 308)

This is enormously revealing for religious values education, because the results coincide with its axiomatically anchored postulates of subject orientation and contextuality, not least that newer religious pedagogy develops a great sensitivity towards the marginalised and aims to constitutively bring the values and narratives of the marginalised to bear as the basis of correlative educational processes (Grümme 2013; Hermann 2002). It also critically analyses the middle-class orientation prevailing in current religious pedagogy and reflects praxeologically on her own practice for accomplished disadvantages and exclusions (Grümme 2021). Of course, this is not a side issue for her. From the heritage of the biblical idea of the image of God, which grants equal dignity to every human being, religious pedagogy actively demands educational justice for all, which constitutively takes into account the hegemonic structures in politics, economy, and education (Grümme 2014).

9 Conclusion and Perspectives

The connection between values, religion, politics, and education thus turns out to be a highly complex one. If one takes the comparative values research of the EVS as a testing ground, then it becomes apparent that a purely instrumental conception of the imparting of values is problematic. The attempts at instrumentalisation by society, the church, the economy, and politics are too strong, each in their own way pushing unabatedly to convey values. The subliminal revitalisation of a guiding culture and the tendencies towards a predominantly affirmative orientation avoid a preceding discourse about which values should be incorporated into the heterogeneity of late-modern societies. One might, for example, ask why the initiatives of both Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany in the field of democracy, ethics, and economics (and thus also values) are not articulated more strongly in the practice of values education. Actually, the German churches, with their statements on economic policy, democracy, and migration and refugee policy, should translate these directly and immediately into value-forming initiatives in religious education. This would also be of great interest in the field of religious education, as it could demonstrate the relevance of such education for society and the church, which it otherwise risks losing in the processes of secularisation and the crisis of legitimacy of the Catholic Church in particular. While religious education is not an agency for communicating values and is centred on the question of God, this question is certainly not to be dealt with without values, since Christianity sees itself as a religion of discipleship, which reveals its practical truth through discipleship. Here there are undeniable overlaps between ethics and hope in God. But the hope in God deconstructs in the end all conceptual and ethical practices towards the ever-greater God, who orients ethics exactly by this.

The considerations discussed here aimed to make it clear that a pure imparting of values does not do justice to this highly complex and dynamic relationship between values, religion, and politics. They counter this with a vote for a critical-constructive values education that is decidedly contextually oriented. This education should be formulated along the lines of a critical theory that critically reflects on the discourse of values itself regarding its hidden assumptions, its instrumentalisations, and its distortions. This applies to the processes of values education as well as to values research, including that of the EVS (Weymans, Chap. 3, this volume), which can probably only be protected from positivistic and contextually insufficiently differentiated undertones by this means. An increased interdisciplinary cooperation between empirical and hermeneutical research is necessary. Late modern societies need values. But an appropriate values education can only come from the value-forming power of subjects, who themselves stand in contexts of hegemonic subjectification. Such a critical-constructive religious values education, which is subject-oriented as well as capable of heterogeneity, admittedly still awaits its concrete shaping.