a Protestant school in Northern Ireland had been taught that the
defeat of the Spanish Armada showed God’s favour for Protestant
England against Catholic Spain. The rhetoric of this might seem
persuasive at a superficial level: sectarianism, it could be argued,
fuels murderous hatred, thus proving that religion is a source of
social evil. But looked at more closely, the argument seems glib
and myopic, based primarily on an emotive rather than a rational
response to a particular situation.
In the first place, it is extremely doubtful that the eradica-
tion of religious education in schools would actually achieve the
result that the interviewee desired. Religious ideas are inculcated
by means of a wide variety of media, among them teachings
within the context of religious institutions (in churches, syna-
gogues, and mosques), wayside preachers, and billboard posters.
Stamping out religious education, then, would require clamping
down on a wide range of activities, raising questions of the
morality of such action since it might reasonably be interpreted
as persecution. Suppression runs the risk, therefore, of replacing
one form of intolerance with another. Even then it might not
be effective. In spite of all efforts to restrict or even suppress
religious activity in the former Communist countries of eastern
Europe, many religious groups have maintained their vitality and
emerged with renewed vigour in the aftermath of the collapse of
the Eastern Bloc during the 1990s.^4
The argument is also flawed in its uncritical assumption that
scientific education will be effective. There are surely numerous
obstacles to this. Can it be assumed that all school students will
be able to understand the extraordinary complexities of, say,
quantum mechanics or biological evolution? Any process of
education requires at some level the arrangement of material into
chunks that students can manage (as noted above in terms of peri-
odization); this often demands some degree of simplification in
the early stages of the learning process, with greater sophistication
being introduced later on. This might lead to imperfect under-
standing of the scientific theories under discussion. For example,
the popular visual image of human evolution emphasizes a linear
WHAT IS EARLY CHRISTIANITY?1
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