In his seminal work After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, Willie Jennings defines a concept he calls ‘whiteness’ and states that this plays the role of the ‘Paterfamilias’, a term born within the Greco–Roman period, which refers to the social system of rule and governance that was centred around the father–master archetype. During slavery, Jennings states that it was on the plantation that the life, logic, and social order of whiteness transpired. The more I engaged with Jennings’ work, the more (...) I began to realize the extent to which the religious education curriculum, and by extension the English education system curriculum, further perpetuated whiteness. Inspired by the works of Jennings and the activism of Black Lives Matter (BLM) following the murder of George Floyd, I was motivated to create and teach a unit in the religious education (RE) curriculum, ‘Black Religion and Protest’. As well as examining the teaching and reception of this unit, this article seeks to unpack the ways in which Britain’s colonial legacy maintains epistemological inequity and hierarchical knowledge. (shrink)

This paper challenges a foundational conjecture of the Religion in Education Dialogue or Conflict (REDCo) project, that increased interest in religion in public and political life as manifested particularly in education is evidence of counter-secularisation. The paper argues that rather than representing counter-secularisation, such developments represent an emergent and secularising European civil religion facilitated through European religious education.