With religious hostility surging in Australia, we need to rethink our approach to religious education
- Written by: Weekend Times
On June 23, Amin Moniri, a Year 12 student in western Sydney, won the inaugural Edith Brutman Award in the National Harmony Day Competition. His short film, Stronger Together, featured passers-by at
Bondi Beach writing short messages about what harmony means to them.
Brutman, the award’s namesake, was killed in the Bondi terror attack in December 2025. She had been active in the Jewish service organisation B’nai B’rith and was vice president of its anti-prejudice and anti-discrimination committee.
Social harmony is in short supply in Australia at the moment. According to the most recent Mapping Social Cohesion report by the Scanlon Foundation, just 46% of Australians say they have a sense of belonging, a sharp decline from 64% in 2020.
Similarly, in the 2026 Lowy Institute Poll, 73% of Australians said the country had benefited from cultural diversity. Strikingly, this is a nearly 20-point decline from 2024. The institute said it was largest movement on any societal question in the history of its polling.
The Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is beginning its final block of public hearings this week, with a specific focus on how social cohesion can be strengthened.
In my view, the impact of the COVID pandemic, the failure of the Voice to Parliament referendum and the Israel-Hamas war have exacerbated polarisation in Australia in recent years. Yet, I believe there is a fourth issue that has been insufficiently investigated: the role of religion.
Challenges relating to religious identification
There are several ways the issue of religion is dividing people in Australia, as well as other Western countries.
First is the rise of secularism and secular opposition to religious worldviews. In the last census in 2021, 39% of Australians classified themselves as having no religion – up from 30% in 2016. It was the second-largest group after Christians at 44%.
This scepticism of religions is being felt globally. In the early 2000s, two scholars, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, wrote books that are highly critical of religion. Dawkins says he chose The God Delusion as the title for his book because it speaks to “a persistent false belief in the face of strong, contradictory evidence”.
This narrative has fed into an increasing social hostility towards people of almost all religions. In the Scanlon Foundation survey of Australians’ feelings about people of different faiths, there was a growth in negative attitudes towards nearly every religion from 2023–25. Muslims had the highest negative score, with 35% of respondents expressing a negative view towards them.
Another recent survey of 10,000 Christians in Australia had similarly startling findings. Ninety-two percent of respondents said it was riskier to affirm their beliefs than it was five years ago, and 42% had experienced hostility or threats for expressing Christian views.
Sadly, incidents of antisemitism have exploded across Australia in recent years, with new research showing even those testifying at the royal commission are being subjected to abuse online.
Tied to this is a decline of religious education across Australia. This can be seen in the fact that special religious education or instruction classes in government schools has become more controversial.
An increasingly secular Australia is becoming resistant to any teaching about religion in schools. Yet, as I said in my testimony to the royal commission last month, “if we don’t put religion on the table, it will go on under the table”.
By including religious education within the school curriculum, Australia can ensure the approach aligns with Australian values and beliefs. This can help mitigate against problematic views being promoted outside formal education structures.
Educational approaches to improve social cohesion
Education, at both the formal and informal levels, has an important role to play in countering hate and encouraging acceptance and respect for different worldviews.
The research I have undertaken since 2018 with my colleague, Zehavit Gross, a professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, confirms this.
We conducted interviews with teachers and students of six different faiths involved with special religious education classes at Australian schools. Our interviewees told us religious education encouraged critical thinking in children, instilled kindness and tolerance, and helped expand their worldviews.
As one very devout Muslim graduate told us:
I joined the Christian faith for one class. It’s very similar to our faith obviously, but everyone’s got their own morals and their own rules toward their religion so it’s good to go in and have an open mind about every other religion.
Another Christian faith leader warned what could happen if special religious education classes were no longer offered in schools.
We run the risk of more extreme elements of faith communities being driven underground doing their work outside of the disinfectant of sunlight where they can be held to account.
The multi-faith organisation Better Balanced Futures has since used our research to establish the Faith Council of NSW. This group helps improve government understanding of policies and services that affect religious communities.
Together for Humanity is another key organisation working in this field. Its mission is to strengthen intercultural and interfaith understanding at schools through teacher development programs and online learning programs for students.
However, this important work should not be left to NGOs alone. State and federal governments need to play a more active role in promoting religious understanding and rebuilding a sense of belonging in schools.
The federal government has taken the first steps by launching the Social Cohesion Education Lab at the end of June with Education Services Australia (ESA). The site highlights the existing resources that can help educators discuss antisemitism and social cohesion in schools – and identify where there are gaps.
ESA has now moved into the next phase, which is producing new resources to fill those gaps, especially in religious discrimination.
Broader structural change
These programs are a start. But, as my research with Gross has found, progress depends on other systemic changes. These include:
Teacher education: Teachers need more training programs to better understand cultural and religious diversity and the specific challenges their students face. This includes strategies to develop a child’s positive sense of self, which can assist in combating bullying in the playground.
Classroom strategies: Schools must make a greater effort to bring children from different ethnic and religious groups together to learn from one another. In less diverse regional areas, creative educational solutions can be embedded in the curriculum to achieve this.
Religious classes: It’s vital for states to retain Special Religious Education classes in government schools. General religious education classes must also be incorporated into the curricula for all students, co-designed with faith groups.
School principals: Better strategies need to be developed for principals to respond to religious and racial bullying. This requires new programs focused explicitly on antisemitic and other ethnic and religious prejudices.
It is vital we ensure these recommendations are fully implemented because social cohesion begins to fray at an early age, in our schools.
As Amin Moniri, the young student from the western Sydney, reminds us in his film, harmony occurs when we all “have a voice at the table”.
The author would like to acknowledge Professor Zehavit Gross, with whom she has collaborated on research on religious education in Australian schools. Gross is an honorary research associate in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Sydney, and a professor and former dean of the School of Education at Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
Correction: an earlier version of this article incorrectly described Amin Moniri as female. He is male.
Suzanne Rutland has received an Australian Research Council grant for her research on the Australian Jewry and funding from the Pratt Foundation for research into Jewish education in Australia. She is also involved with numerous NGOs, including the Australian Jewish Historical Society (patron and Sydney editor), the Australian Association for Jewish Studies (past president and committee member), and the Australian government’s expert delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. In 2027, she will chair its Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial. In addition, she is a board member of the Freilich Project for the Study of Bigotry at ANU, and she joined the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism, where she is a director. These roles are all undertaken in an honorary capacity. She has also written the history of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Jewish Communal Advocacy in Post-War Australia (London: Routledge, 2026) in an honorary capacity. She has worked closely with Better Balanced Futures (BBF), a multifaith organisation in NSW, together with Professor Zehavit Gross, for which she received a travel grant. She is also a member of a number of advisory groups for the federal government’s Antisemitism Education Taskforce and has received an honorarium for her contribution to one of those groups. She has also been an expert witness for a number of court cases dealing with antisemitism, most of which were undertaken in an honorary capacity, and was commissioned to write a paper for the Centre of Independent Studies, Path to Perdition: Israel from peoplehood to pariah (July 2026).
