Secular state, religious education, and intolerance: the challenges of public education

Abstract

The re-emergence of intolerances and political-religious configurations of the far-right or the national-populist right, posed great challenges to public education understood as a space for building coexistence with otherness. The political-social deterioration was accentuated during the COVID-19 syndrome and raises a question: within public-state education, can religious education cultivate spaces of production of free intersubjectivities, autonomous and citizens? To answer the question, I propose a philosophical-sociological reflection, based methodologically on consecrated academic literature, online and physical primary and secondary documents. State secularism allowed secular, democratic, republican public education. Initially constituted as a Catholic religious reaction to the loss of official ties with the State, Religious Studies only began recently, a new page of its history, closer to plural secularism. However, reactionary religious clashes delay the implementation of the common curricular standard, the Common National Curricular Base (BNCC). To overcome the challenges, it will be necessary to see public education and religious education as common, plural, and secular goods to which everyone is entitled, constituting spaces of opposition to religious intolerance