ABSTRACT
Religious literacy is a term that has been in use for some years (Wright 2016), though it has been used relatively rarely and vaguely. More recently it has grown in use and popularity, and it has been observed that it has growing traction anywhere that people encounter increasingly plural landscapes of religion and belief (Davie 2015). This makes it an issue for everyone, regardless of personal religion or belief. After all, billions of people around the world remain religious, despite the assumptions of secularity, which had expected religion and belief to decline in social significance and eventually to disappear to a vanishing point. Indeed, sociology had predicted exactly this disappearance by the year 2000 (Berger 1967), though this statement has been challenged and revised since (Berger 1999). Eighty-four per cent of the global population reports a religious affiliation, according to the Pew Research Center (2012). Millions of these religious people are in Britain, Europe and the West. Globalisation and migration mean we encounter religion on a daily basis; however, the crisis is that, after decades in which we have barely talked about religion and belief, society has largely lost the ability to do so. In many cases, it has largely lost the understanding of why it might be legitimate and pressing to discuss religion in the first place.
