Quel sens donner à la notion de « cultures religieuses » ? Prescrits scolaires, débats disciplinaires et pédagogiques

Abstract

As much as the religious phenomenon is approached through the category of culture(s), the notion of culture(s) does not generally go without that of religion(s). Only one subject in the Plan d'études romand (PER) for schools in Switzerland explicitly contains the word culture: Ethics and religious cultures. What does “religious cultures” mean in this curriculum? This article takes a hermeneutic approach. First of all, an analysis of the PER reveals a certain polysemy of the term: it cannot be seen as a simple school transposition of a scientific discipline, but requires a consideration of its epistemological and pedagogical dimensions. The article then examines the links between religion(s) and culture(s) in the various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences; noting their diversity, it focuses on anthropology and raises the question of a critical interpretation of religion, oscillating between exemplarity and an unthinking of culture. The last section examines the relationship between culture and religious cultures in pedagogy: starting from the didactic debate on the teaching about religions and from a model of five conceptions of culture in education, it argues for a humanistic conception of the interpretation of existence, leading to the hermeneutic and interdisciplinary educational perspectives of a “meaning to be constructed.”