This lecture insisted upon negative liberty as the political complement to the human capacity for free choice, and made matching metaphysical claims: the nature of being, and especially the conflicts amongst values, were inconsistent with totalitarian claims. Berlin, arguing along this line, provided an account of the perversion of positive liberty into a warrant for such claims, discussed nationalism, and emphasized the value‐pluralism, now linked so frequently with his name.

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.