The aims of the book are multiple but simple, as revealed by the chapters that follow. We challenge the idea of religion as a problem, and recast it as something pervasive, nuanced and pressing in the contemporary world – something to be engaged with, not feared. We re-examine the perceived boundary between the secular and the religious, recognising that the world is complexly both. We explore the challenge to really understand the secular, as well as the religious, because this is the context in which religion and religious illiteracy play out. And we argue for a proper engagement with cutting-edge data and theory that reveal a real religious landscape which is quite different to the one frequently imagined in school Religious Education (RE), university Religious Studies, and in the popular and media imagination. Exploring various understandings of religious literacy in different contexts is a key aim of the book. In doing so, we hope to move towards an understanding of religious literacy as both generalisable and context-specific, exploring how it plays out in a variety of public practices and settings in the real contemporary world.

Why is religious literacy needed?

We were each brought up in a generation that believed one shouldn't speak about either religion or politics in polite company, and this book breaches that etiquette by doing both. This childhood rule is instructive of something that has really come to characterise contemporary thinking about religion in modern Western settings – that it is controversial, difficult somehow, and can only lead to rows. We want to challenge that idea of religion, and to suggest some ways in which we can – and should – move religion away from this anxiety and tension, and look at it instead as something far too pervasive, far too interesting, and far too nuanced to simply write off as too risky to talk about.

This reflects an observation we have been making all our adult lives – that contemporary British people are usually in a muddle about religion and belief (see Dinham and Jones, 2012). They’re not sure what religion is, how much of it there is, what it looks like, what it's for, or what to do about it.