Guilherme Borges is a postdoctoral researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning and at the Nonreligion in a Complex Future project, based at the University of Ottawa. Drawing on these dual affiliations, he conducts comparative analyses of the presence of religious education in public schools in Brazil and Canada. He holds a PhD and a master’s degree in Sociology from the University of São Paulo.
Keywords: Religious education, Secularism, Brazil, Teacher training, Pluralism, Diversity
Introduction
In the recent years of the pandemic, the need for social distancing led not only to the adoption of remote classes for students but also required many teachers to take part in online continuing education programs. In this context, the Brazilian State of Paraná stood out nationally by creating audiovisual materials to train teachers remotely. Even before the pandemic, Paraná already stood out among Brazil’s 26 States for its substantial investment in teacher training. This leading role became even more pronounced during 2020 and 2021, when hundreds of training sessions were produced to guide—at a distance—the professionals working in the State’s public education system.
As religious education has been part of the public school curriculum in Paraná for decades, nineteen remote training sessions were produced specifically for teachers of this subject. These trainings were officially produced and broadcast by the Paraná State Department of Education. Although there was no monitoring of who actually watched these sessions, teachers were instructed and expected to follow them. Despite being aimed at a specific audience, all sessions are freely accessible on a YouTube channel administered by the state government. Given this availability, it is worth taking the opportunity to examine the guidelines for implementing religious education in this State, which also stands out for the emphasis it places on developing “a form of religious education attentive to the secularity of Brazilian public schooling,” as stated in one of the training sessions analyzed[1].
A Brief Historical Overview of Brazilian Secularity
With regard to the secularity of Brazilian public education, it is worth noting that the formal separation between Church and State in Brazil began in 1889, when the country became a republic. In the preceding period, ecclesiastical leaders played a key role in legitimizing and sustaining political institutions, with Catholicism recognized as the official religion of the Empire[2]. The end of the monarchy marked a radical break from this context. The first republican Constitution, enacted in 1891, established the principle of religious neutrality, stipulating that no religion could receive any form of favor from public authorities, which drastically limited the Church’s influence over political, judicial, and legislative decisions[3].
This trajectory also encompassed the educational system, resulting in a process of separation between Church and State in the school sphere that was more uncompromising than what occurred in other South American contexts[4]. With greater or lesser intensity, this process reverberated over the following decades and continues to the present day. A clear sign of this is that publicly funded confessional schools—common in societally far less religious nations such as Sweden and Finland, for example—were completely prohibited in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century and have never existed since.
These changes can be observed in light of Max Weber’s reflections, which point to the progressive distancing of State institutions from religious regulations as capitalist modernity advances[5]. As can be seen in the training sessions analyzed, this distancing appears to occur even within the very model of religious education that is expected to be taught in public schools: “You don’t ask doctors if they’ve prayed or dentists what their religion is. You expect them to act professionally. […] a teacher, of whatever ideology or philosophical foundation, has to be impartial, and especially in religious education”. There is a strong emphasis in the training sessions on the fact that religious education teachers must not and cannot act as proselytizers of any particular faith.
Four Religious Matrices
The training sessions suggest that teachers should make their possible religious affiliations invisible while they are at school. Ideally, they should even be recognized by their students as nonreligious: “I think the best way to show this respect for the other person’s religion is for the students to say: ‘Teacher, are you nonreligious?’”. As noted by Weber, as modernization advances, religion tends to be privatized— not necessarily in the sense that it disappears from the public sphere, but because it is removed from the State apparatus[6]. This is a process of juridical-political secularization rather than societal secularization[7]. In the case of religious education taught in public schools in Brazil, this occurs through the expectation that teachers conceal their religious convictions when they are in the classroom.
The secular disposition is seen as a standpoint of impartiality, and this is treated as crucial for managing diversity: “The teacher must take an impartial stance, addressing Brazilian religious matrices without distinction: Indigenous, African, Eastern, and Western”. The reference to these four matrices is not random, as it is reiterated throughout the training sessions. Emphasis is placed on the importance of teachers adhering to the “four religious matrices” that make up the “rich diversity of religions in Brazil”. This multiplicity is anchored in these broad and clearly defined “civilizational” clusters, each representing one of the population groups that have historically shaped Brazilian society.
By concentrating on abstract cultural frameworks, this approach enables teachers to overlook the concrete religious diversity within the classroom: “when we talk about matrices, the student’s religion doesn’t matter”. This process of distancing from the visible diversity in the school is emphasized in the training sessions as beneficial, particularly with regard to the students’ well-being: “Often some teachers choose to ask the student’s religion. I don’t think that’s a very good strategy. […] Some students feel embarrassed when they are forced to express their religious choice in public”.
Image of a religious education class in which the teacher presents the “African matrix”
Culturalist and Scientific Religious Education
During class, religious affiliations should not be brought up, either to maintain professionalism for teachers or to avoid discomfort for students. From the perspective of the matrices, the focus moves away from the individual beliefs of the teacher or student. Instead, the focus shifts to broad (imagined) ideal types. Perhaps it is possible to say that, in this approach, religions are viewed not through personal convictions, but as collective national and ethno-racial traditions. This culturalist perspective is also what enables religious education in Brazil to be seen as scientifically grounded. This is indicated in the teacher training sessions:
Another video similarly reinforces the scientific nature of this approach to religious education:
Rather than using theological terms, teachers must rely on the frameworks and reasoning of post-metaphysical sciences. This implies that the explanations provided to students should be grounded in social reality, not the supernatural. Teachers should present the study of religion as a cultural phenomenon. Additionally, teachers must adopt a stance of critical awareness, ensuring they do not neglect the essential fact that their explanations must remain within a secular episteme.
Post-Metaphysical Approach, Pre-Metaphysical Object
However, if the approach is secular—in the most strictly Weberian sense of the term—the object of this school subject is far from being so. This can be seen from the following excerpt, taken from one of the continuing education sessions:
There is an expectation in these trainings that both teachers and students may have a wide range of religious beliefs and sensibilities. Yet little or no room is made for the possibility that they may not have any religious convictions or aptitudes. According to the excerpt above, even those who self-identify as atheists, skeptics or agnostics would actually have an innate religiosity or spirituality. It may be possible to give up religion, but religiosity would be universal, because “it is in the subject”.
Such idealistic and transcendental statements contrast with a religious education that is culturalist and based on post-metaphysical sciences such as sociology and anthropology. The idea of a universal religiosity is also at odds with a religious education that aims to embrace the diversity of lifestances and worldviews. As secular as this religious education may be, the possibility of there being people without religiosity is not considered.
This blind spot, so to speak, does not simply reveal a conceptual inconsistency; it has broader implications for how diversity is understood and managed within Brazilian public schooling. By presuming that all individuals possess some form of innate religiosity or spirituality, the training sessions end up reinforcing a normative anthropology that marginalizes nonreligious worldviews. This assumption narrows the range of what can be recognized as legitimate diversity and risks reproducing a subtle form of epistemic exclusion, in which students and teachers who do not perceive themselves as religious become unintelligible within the very framework that is meant to include them. Bringing this dynamic to light helps us understand how secular projects may inadvertently reintroduce religious normativity and how policies oriented toward pluralism can, in practice, constrain the set of identities they claim to acknowledge.
To learn more about this topic, see the chapter ‘Religious Education in Brazilian Public Schools: Between Pluralism and Secularism’, forthcoming in The Palgrave Handbook of Religion in Public Education.
Endnotes
[1] All excerpts from the training sessions reproduced here were translated by me from Portuguese into English.
[2] Negrão, L. N. (2008). Pluralismo e multiplicidades religiosas no Brasil contemporâneo. Sociedade e Estado, 23(2), 261–279. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0102-69922008000200004
[3] Montero, P. (2006). Religião, pluralismo e esfera pública no Brasil. Novos Estudos do Cebrap, 74, 47–66. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0101-33002006000100004
[4] Montero, P., Borges, G., Copetti, A. B., & Armando, S. (2024). Ensino religioso no Brasil e na Argentina: entre confessionalidades e laicidades. Revista USP, 142, 13–32. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2316-9036.i142p13-32
[5] Weber, M. (1982). Ensaios de sociologia. LTC Editora.
[6] Weber, M. (1969). Economía y sociedad: Esbozo de sociología comprensiva (Vols. 1–2). Fondo de Cultura Económica.
[7] Pierucci, A. F. (1998). Secularização em Max Weber: da contemporânea serventia de voltarmos a acessar aquele velho sentido. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, 13(37), 43–73.
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