Collective Worship: A Window into Contemporary Understandings of the Nature of Religious Belief?

This article gives an account of a recent qualitative research project which investigated the understanding of religious belief which underlies the current practice of collective worship in a sample of state schools in a large town in Southern England (Cheetham 1999). It describes four powerful themes which pervaded collective worship in the schools and argues from these that religious belief was effectively being understood as an ‘individually chosen, private, practical guide to living’. It is further argued that this understanding of religious belief falls almost entirely within a liberal, rationalist framework which is proving increasingly inadequate for a society which is more and more plural and postmodern in character.