Transforming Post-Apartheid South Africa Through Shared Religious Education

Abstract

Ideas about shared religious education are in need of further exploration in post-apartheid South Africa. This is necessary, considering the contributions from faith communities in their shared resistance to apartheid. While some sectors of the Christian community, and particularly the Dutch Reformed Church provided a religious justification for apartheid, other denominations, together with Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu communities struggled against this white supremacist ideology. In other ways, the neglect of the potential of shared religious education provides an apt commentary on how some within-faith communities responded to a democracy by retreating into faith identities, as made explicit in the proliferation of faith-based schools. It follows, however, that if religious communities can mobilise together to resist the apartheid state, then it should be possible for these same communities to unite to work towards the kind of transformed society envisioned in their struggle against apartheid. Hence, the interest of this article: if faith-based schools are an inevitable manifestation of democratic and pluralistic societies, then what can these schools share in terms of content and ethos towards advancing democratic values? How might a shared religious education facilitate and sustain the reform measures, necessary for social transformation in South Africa?