In a recent article in the The Guardian’ Philip Barnes asks, ‘Is multi-faith religious education a failure?’ He argues that the way religious education is taught reduces religions to statements of beliefs, and that this attitude is false to the way believers experience the world. To go one step further, what if reducing religions in this manner actually has the deeper impact of corroding believers’ (and unbelievers) senses of identity? Clearly, the problem extends far beyond the classroom. To my mind, society is in serious danger of responding to the impossibility of adjudicating between competing beliefs with a whitewashed apathy (even when it is masqueraded as liberalism).

We cannot expect religious education to resolve religious difference (which is a strange sort of ideal in any case), but I think we can teach models of sincere, intelligent and affirmative dialogue. Instead of pushing out the beliefs that matter to us into the playground and beyond, the classroom can be a controlled space in which we can learn how to talk, perhaps even argue, about the differences that make us who we are. It is with conviction in this possibility that the youth branch of the Three Faiths Forum goes into schools on a daily basis, running programmes such as ‘Tools for Trialogue’ and ‘Encountering Faiths’. The aim is not to come to one shared perspective, but to learn how to see individual perspectives – in all their disagreement.