When it comes to teaching about religion, most Canadian schools get a failing grade.
That is the view of Alice Chan and Erin Reid of the Centre for Civic Religious Literacy, a non-profit that promotes understanding about religious, spiritual and non-religious people in all sectors of Canadian society.
As part of the centre, Chan and Reid run the Civic Literacy Youth Network. The network aims to boost religious literacy by bringing together youth and young adults from across Canada to discuss Canada’s cultural and religious diversity and how it affects issues like political polarization and Indigenous reconciliation.
Teachers are not to blame for the current state of religious illiteracy, they say.
“They are overworked and overcommitted in schools today,” said Chan, a former teacher who is the centre’s executive director. “Few have time to talk about local or global issues that relate to spirituality, religion and non-religion, or have been equipped to talk about it.”
This is unfortunate, according to Chan. “Religious literacy is just as important as media literacy and financial literacy, a practical and necessary knowledge and skill in today’s diverse society,” she said.
Part of the problem is that teachers are not trained to talk about religion, says Reid, who teaches education at St. Mary’s University in Calgary.
“They end up with very little capacity to understand or deal with religious diversity in the classroom,” she said. “It can be a blind spot.”
In her own classes, Reid seeks to “equip [teachers] to teach in a diverse cultural and religious environment . . . teachers will have students from all over the world with different religious backgrounds in their classrooms.”
“There are so many rich religious and spiritual traditions represented in schools,” she said. This includes Indigenous spirituality. “We can’t ignore that.”
At the same time, religion influences many world events. It is hard to understand these events without exploring their religious subtexts, Reid says.
If religious literacy is not taught in schools, most youth today will learn about it through social media — increasing the potential for them to misunderstand religion or accept negative stereotypes. “We really need to do better, go deeper, understand more about religion,” Reid said.
The Civic Literacy Youth Network, which was funded by Canadian Heritage from 2022-2024, is open to Canadians aged 16 to 25 based anywhere in Canada. The network’s free, online program includes eight, two-hour sessions in which participants learn from guest speakers about how religion impacts society. The sessions also include discussions about how religious literacy is important for leaders.
For Carina Mercado, a 21-year-old student at the University of Toronto, the program affirmed her interest in “seeing the world through the perspective of religion” and her commitment to interfaith relations.
“It’s important to talk about because religion and spirituality is ingrained for many people, informing their values,” said Mercado, who participated in the program in 2023. “Understanding religion helps us to understand why people do the things they do, why they hold the values they hold.”
She especially liked how it “creates a space where everyone is welcome and can flourish, and how it teaches dialogue versus argument.”
For her, being religiously literate is a way “to understand people and what makes them tick, and find ways to get along with other people.”
The Civic Literacy Youth Network is accepting applications for the next cohort, which begins January 2025. For more information, visit https://ccrl-clrc.ca.
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