Panel: (UN)EQUAL COMPARISONS: MOVING BEYOND SIMPLISTIC COMPARISONS AND WESTERN HEGEMONY IN COMPARATIVE LAW, RELIGION, AND THEOLOGY



480.5 - TEACHING RELIGION, REPRODUCING NORMS: RELIGIONIZATION AND THE POLITICS OF INTERFAITH PEDAGOGY

AUTHORS:
Moyaert M. (KU Leuven ~ Leuven ~ Belgium)
Text:
Interfaith dialogue is a prominent feature of contemporary religious education, promoted by European policy frameworks as a vehicle for cultivating tolerant, religiously literate citizens. This paper argues, however, that the dialogical turn in education is not religiously neutral. Drawing on the concept of religionization — the co-dependent processes of selfing and othering predicated on religious difference — it examines how interfaith pedagogy participates in the normative construction of "good religion": interiorized, individualized, privatized, and modeled on secularized Christian assumptions. Far from merely describing religious diversity, the interfaith classroom risks producing and reproducing this norm, rewarding those who perform 'normal' religion while marginalizing students whose religious identities deviate from it. This argument is situated within a broader critique of education's socializing function. Alongside knowledge, education transmits the values, beliefs, and norms of the dominant culture, while simultaneously discouraging what is deemed abnormal. When interfaith pedagogy operates within an unexamined framework of good religion, it risks becoming an instrument that conforms students to dominant powers. The dialogical classroom may reproduce hegemonic discourses about religion — producing dialogue fatigue, self-stereotyping, and the silencing of minority voices. The norm of good religion carries a colonial genealogy. A decolonial critical approach to interfaith pedagogy responds to it by foregrounding the stories of those who are marginalized because they deviate from normal or legible religion. Following Freire's question of what room we create for counter-formation, such a pedagogy does not prepare students to fit a given social order but to interrogate it — historicizing the category of religion itself, surfacing majority/minority power asymmetries, and making space for counter-narratives that unsettle the norm rather than confirm it.