A revolutionary idea: teach about Jesus in R.E.

English people want Christianity taught in schools; and Christianity isn’t being taught well in schools, according to recently-published research.

58% of those asked said it is important for children to know about the history of Christianity. 56% want them to be taught about major Christian festivals; 51% about how Christianity distinguishes right from wrong. And the academic leading the project, Dr Nigel Fancourt of Oxford University, said lessons often lacked “intellectual development” and were not always “challenging and vibrant”.

So far, so encouraging. But dig a little deeper, and it’s not quite what it seems.

First, what the majority of English people want taught is not Christianity, but church-ianity. They said it was important for people to know how Christian faith shaped English history; they want their children to know about history, festivals and morality. All of which are important, and none of which are the core of the Christian faith, Christ Himself—who He is and what He did.

Second, Dr Fancourt uses a lesson on Jesus feeding the 5,000 to make his point about Christianity not being taught well in schools. He said such lessons could become “an exhortation to share your picnic rather than a discussion of whether miracles really happen or what significance they have for Christians today; for example those who say they have been miraculously healed, or pray for healing.”

Dr Fancourt is still missing the point of the episode. As with all Jesus’ miracles, the primary lesson is who Jesus is; in this case, since He can miraculously feed His followers in the wilderness, and since this is something that God does (Exodus 16), Jesus is God. The application is not “pray for healing” any more than it is “share your lunch”—it’s “This man is God—recognise Him and worship Him and trust Him”. But you’ll notice that Dr Fancourt didn’t mention Jesus in his thinking on what to teach children.

So this new project, which is going to provide online resources for trainee teachers, is unlikely to do what actually needs to be done: teach Christianity in its own terms.

That is certainly not what teachers are equipped to do at the moment. A few years ago, I trained as a primary school teacher. In our RE lectures, the lecturer told us that Jesus’ core message was that we should love one another; that Christians thought hell was an outdated concept; and that in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus got cross with God because He couldn’t see why He should die (this last point being based on the Gospel of Jesus Christ Superstar). Of the 30 trainees in the room, only two of us were Christians, with any knowledge of what Jesus actually said in Gethsemane; so you can imagine, a year later, the general standard of RE teaching of Christianity in 28 classrooms.

Christianity is not primarily about a moral code or an experiential yardstick; it is about a Person. RE lessons are not there to evangelise, to push Christianity. But they are (or should be) there to allow children to understand what Christianity actually is (and what Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, atheism and other faith positions are).

At the moment, it’s hardly a surprise that, as Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association pointed out in response to Dr Fancourt’s project, “two-thirds [of young people] have non-religious worldviews”. But it’s not Jesus Christ they’re deliberately turning their backs on. It’s a religion which has nothing to do with biblical Christianity, and which centres on sitting in drafty buildings, lighting candles, rewriting the Ten Commandments, and sharing your lunch.