The Religious Dimension Beyond Pluralism and Secularisation: Education as Constitutive Openness

Contemporary debates on religious education are largely framed in terms of pluralism, secularisation, and the public role of religion. This article argues that these discussions risk overlooking a more fundamental pedagogical question: whether religious education refers only to the transmission of religious traditions or whether it expresses a constitutive dimension of educational experience itself. Adopting a philosophical-hermeneutic perspective, the article understands religiosity as a historically and culturally situated form of openness to an otherness that exceeds the subject and through which human beings discover meaning and construct personal identity. After critically examining phenomenological and psychological accounts of religious experience alongside contemporary approaches within Critical Religious Studies, the article proposes a more circumscribed thesis: educational processes recurrently involve the mediation of horizons of ultimate meaning, irrespective of their doctrinal or confessional content, and that describing this mediation as “religiosity” is justified where the horizon is experienced as exceeding the subject. Religious education should therefore not be understood merely as a secondary educational domain, but as a dimension of human formation that operates through symbolic mediation, narrative, relational experience, and faith development. This perspective, formulated at the level of the philosophy of education rather than of educational practice, provides a theoretical framework for reinterpreting current debates on pluralism and secularisation without reducing religion either to confessional instruction or to an exclusively subjective form of spirituality, while also outlining the foundations of a possible “pedagogy of religions”.