The German Curriculum Story is Not About Germany

If you read my piece on Lower Saxony a few weeks ago, you already know the outline. A German state’s new Christian religion curriculum mentions Islam more than thirty times. It describes Islam as a sister religion of Christianity. It mandates mosque visits. It requires multi-religious prayer. And it reduces Jesus Christ to five mentions across six years of compulsory schooling. This in a class called Christian religion class.

I want to zoom out. Because the people who dismissed that piece as a story about Germany missed the actual story.

Lower Saxony is not the point. Lower Saxony is the example. The pattern is the point.

The same institutional logic that produced the Lower Saxony curriculum is running in classrooms from Cardiff to Calgary to Canberra. It is not coordinated in the sense of a conspiracy. It is coordinated in the sense that the same assumptions, the same language, the same bureaucratic instincts, and the same institutional incentives are operating across Western countries simultaneously. You do not need a central committee to produce convergent results. You only need institutions that have decided the most sophisticated response to Islamic claims is to validate them rather than engage them honestly.

And you need those institutions to have no principled framework for resisting when the pressure comes.

Let me give you the map.

Wales: They Renamed the Subject Itself

In England, Religious Education is still called Religious Education. In Wales, it is not.

In 2022, the Welsh government renamed the mandatory subject for all pupils aged three to sixteen. It is no longer Religious Education. It is now Religion, Values and Ethics, and it is explicitly designed to be, in the Welsh government’s own language, “pluralistic.” The parental right to withdraw a child from RE, which had existed in British law for decades, was abolished for the new subject. Welsh parents cannot pull their children out of RVE. Attendance is compulsory from nursery through the final year of secondary school.

The subject must now include, alongside Christianity, the full sweep of world religions and, in the government’s specific language, “non-religious philosophical convictions” such as Humanism. Welsh law now explicitly states that teachers must take an impartial approach to teaching RVE that does not require or encourage learners to be religious or non-religious, or to accept a prescribed viewpoint.

Think about what that sentence is actually doing. A Welsh teacher standing in front of a room of children is legally required to be impartial between the claim that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and the claim that he did not. She is legally required to present the Christian tradition’s central truth claim with no more institutional weight than ethical veganism. The law has not asked her to be fair. It has asked her to be a vendor who does not prefer her own merchandise.

Here is what an RE lesson used to look like in Wales, within living memory: a teacher who believed, or at minimum taught from a position that took belief seriously, walking through the Gospels, the creeds, the meaning of baptism, the significance of Easter. Children left knowing what Christianity actually claimed and why those claims mattered to the civilization they inhabited. They could accept or reject the claims as adults with the information to do so. The subject had a voice.

Here is what an RVE lesson looks like now: a menu. Six religions, Humanism, and ethical veganism, presented with equal institutional distance by a teacher who is legally prohibited from recommending any of them. The children leave knowing that many traditions exist, that all of them make claims, and that no one in authority thinks any of those claims are worth the institution’s conviction.

The name change is not cosmetic. When you strip the word “Christian” from the subject, remove the parental right to opt out, and write institutional impartiality into law, you have not built a more inclusive classroom. You have made an argument. The argument is that no religious tradition is true enough to warrant institutional commitment. That is not a neutral position. That is secular humanism administered as policy.

The menu has no recommended dish. That is the point. The absence of a recommendation is the recommendation.

 

England: The Pressure Is Building and the Michaela Battle Shows Why

In England, Religious Education retains its legal emphasis on Christianity. All locally agreed syllabuses must reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Britain are mainly Christian, whilst taking account of the teaching and practices of the other principal religions. On paper, Christianity is still primary.

In practice, the gap between the legal requirement and what actually happens in classrooms is widening, and it is widening in one direction. Islam is now the second most studied religion in GCSE Religious Studies nationally, after Christianity. The pressure to expand Islamic content in RE, driven by sustained campaigns around “Islamophobia” concerns and the stated need for Western students to understand their Muslim neighbors, is constant, organized, and coming from multiple directions simultaneously. RE journals, examination board guidance, teacher training programs, and diversity consultants hired by local education authorities have all been pushing in the same direction for years without any comparable organized pressure in the opposite direction.

The asymmetry of pressure is the mechanism. You do not need to capture an institution. You only need to ensure that one side applies consistent pressure and the other does not.

The Michaela case in 2023 and 2024 illustrates where this leads when a school tries to resist it. Michaela Community School, a high-performing secular school in London with a majority-minority student body, introduced a policy in May 2023 banning prayer rituals on school premises after students began organizing group prayer in the schoolyard. The school’s position was that the prayer rituals had fostered division among pupils, produced concerning behavior, and generated a campaign of abuse and online harassment directed at the school and its leadership.

A Muslim pupil sued, arguing the ban was discriminatory and uniquely affected her faith. The High Court ruled in the school’s favor in April 2024.

The school won. But notice what winning required. It required a legal battle that lasted over a year. It required the headteacher, Katharine Birbalsingh, to endure a sustained social media campaign, organized pressure from Muslim community groups, and national media coverage framing the school as the aggressor. It required the school to justify in open court the proposition that a secular school is allowed to be secular.

A generation ago, that proposition needed no justification. It was the baseline assumption. The baseline has moved.

And the lawsuit itself, not its outcome, is the mechanism. You do not have to win a lawsuit to change institutional behavior. You only have to file one. Most schools in England do not have Katharine Birbalsingh’s nerve, her governing body’s nerve, or her school’s willingness to absorb a year of public battering for the right to maintain a secular prayer policy. Most administrators, when they calculate the full cost, the legal fees, the online campaign, the community relations problem, the staff morale hit, the press coverage, the Ofsted anxiety, decide that a prayer room is cheaper than a lawsuit. Most of them make that calculation quietly, in private, and the decision never surfaces in the news.

That is how the pattern spreads without a conspiracy. It spreads through cost-benefit calculations made by individual administrators in individual buildings across the country, each one invisible, each one rational given the incentives, the sum of them representing a substantial shift in what Western secular institutions are willing to defend about themselves.

 

Ontario, Canada: The Asymmetry in Plain Sight

Ontario is where I am most personally familiar with the on-the-ground reality, and it is the clearest case study in the pattern because the asymmetry is not hidden. It is written down in government documents.

The Lord’s Prayer has been absent from Ontario public schools since 1988, when the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled it unconstitutional. A state school system should not impose a specifically Christian prayer on children of all backgrounds. On the legal merits, within its own logic, that ruling was defensible. Christianity does not need the state’s endorsement, and the school is not the church.

What has happened since is more interesting than what happened then.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission has produced detailed policy guidance requiring school boards to accommodate time-specific Islamic prayers during school hours. The guidance is explicit: schools must accommodate students and staff who need to observe time-specific prayers, including when these occur during class time. Teachers are advised to keep prayer observance schedules in mind when scheduling exams, tests, class outings, and overnight trips. Designated prayer spaces are not merely permitted. They are described in official guidance as appropriate accommodations for large Muslim student populations, with specific reference to Friday congregational prayer.

Read those two things together slowly. The Lord’s Prayer: gone since 1988 as an imposition of Christian practice on a plural school system, unconstitutional, incompatible with the state’s role as a neutral institutional actor. Friday congregational prayer during class hours: accommodated by legal obligation as a human rights requirement, with guidance on scheduling exams around it.

The same institution. The same school system. The same province. Thirty-six years apart. One Christian practice removed as an imposition. One Islamic practice mandated as an accommodation. Both decisions made in the name of the same principle, the state’s commitment to religious neutrality.

I am not arguing the Lord’s Prayer should come back. I am pointing at the asymmetry, and I am pointing at it specifically because it is structural rather than incidental. The logic that removed Christian religious practice from Ontario schools is not being applied to Islamic religious practice. It is being applied selectively, in a direction that reliably moves the institutional center away from the civilization’s Christian heritage and toward active accommodation of Islamic practice.

And the people who point this out are accused of Islamophobia.

The accusation is the other mechanism. The social cost of naming the asymmetry is high enough that most people who notice it say nothing. Most people in school board meetings, most trustees, most curriculum consultants, most principals who observe the Friday prayer guidance and remember 1988 do not say what they are thinking out loud. The asymmetry accumulates in silence, protected by the social cost of naming it.

That silence is documented, too. It just does not make it into the policy papers.

 Australian Priest stabbed by Muslim immigrant, just following his Quran. Priest loses his eye.

 

Australia: Growth Without Accountability

The Australian situation is harder to document at the curriculum level because education is administered state by state and the most visible changes are happening gradually enough that no single data point looks alarming in isolation. The pattern only becomes visible when you step back.

Start with the money. The Victorian government’s 2023-24 state budget committed funding to build and upgrade low-fee Catholic and independent schools, with $30 million allocated specifically to Islamic schools. That is not inherently wrong. Government funding for non-government schools is standard in Australia and has been for decades. The number matters not in isolation but in combination with the trajectory.

Islamic schools are the fastest-growing segment of Australia’s non-government school sector. Between 2006 and 2020, the number of Islamic schools in Australia roughly doubled. Enrollment in Islamic schools grew at a rate far exceeding both overall school enrollment growth and the growth of Islamic schools’ nearest non-government comparators. Government capital funding is following that growth without any proportionate public debate about what the curriculum inside those schools actually teaches, whether the version of Islamic identity being cultivated is compatible with liberal democratic civic norms, or what the long-term consequences of a parallel school system organized around a total religious identity actually are for Australian social cohesion.

This is not the same as asking whether Muslim children deserve schools. They do, the same as every other child. The question is the one Australia is not asking: funded by whom, accountable to whom, and to what educational standard regarding civic values, the treatment of non-Muslims, and the formation of democratic citizens. Every other religious school sector in Australia that receives government funding answers those questions in a regulatory environment that evolved over generations of public negotiation. The Islamic school sector has largely been exempted from the sharpest version of those questions by the same institutional instinct visible everywhere else: it is more comfortable to accommodate than to apply consistent standards.

Victoria also has formal government policy on multifaith prayer rooms in public schools. Schools may provide a space for prayer with specific policy guidance, including supervision requirements. A generation ago this was not standard infrastructure in Australian public schools. It is now official policy, normalized not through debate but through policy accumulation, one accommodation at a time, each individually justifiable, the cumulative effect becoming visible only when you lay the timeline flat and ask: what changed, in which direction, and why.

The honest answer is: Christian practice in Australian public schools has contracted steadily under pressure from secular legal challenges and the evolving concept of state neutrality. Islamic practice has expanded steadily under accommodation frameworks built on human rights language. The contraction and the expansion are happening simultaneously, in the same institutions, under the same governments, and the net direction of travel has a name even if the institutions decline to say it out loud.

The Mechanism Behind All of It

Here is the thing that ties Lower Saxony to Wales to Ontario to Victoria.

None of these outcomes required malice. None required a conspiracy. None required a single administrator who woke up one morning and decided to undermine Christianity in Western schools. Each individual policy decision, viewed in isolation, can be defended on reasonable-sounding grounds. Plurality is good. Inclusion is good. Accommodation is good. Hurt feelings should be avoided. Community relations matter. No single actor along the way said: I am going to use this curriculum to undermine Christian civilization. What they said, individually and in sequence, over years and across institutions, is: the most sophisticated response to Islamic presence in our schools is to accommodate it, validate it, and present it as equal to or integrated with everything else we teach.

The problem is that Islam itself does not make that offer in return.

This is the fact that Western institutions keep refusing to look at directly. The Quran does not present Christianity and Islam as sister religions. It presents Christianity as a corrupted version of an original revelation that Islam has now correctly restated. The Quran explicitly says Jesus was not crucified. It explicitly says God does not have a son. It explicitly says that the People of the Book who believe otherwise are in error. These are not the views of Muslim extremists. These are not contested interpretations at the margins of the tradition. They are what the Quran says, in plain text, in passages that have been standard in Islamic education for fourteen centuries.

When Western institutions describe Islam and Christianity as sister religions, they are not describing the actual relationship those two traditions have with each other. They are making a specific theological claim. It is Islam’s claim. The Quran’s claim is that the two traditions share a common origin which Christianity distorted. The institution that teaches this as neutral pedagogy has not remained neutral. It has taken a side. It has taken Islam’s side, using Islam’s own theological framework, and it has taught that position to children as if it were the generous, inclusive, cosmopolitan conclusion that thoughtful people naturally reach.

It is not. It is a two-thousand-year-old argument. The institution has resolved it without telling anyone that it was ever in dispute.

What Susanne Schröter, the German Islam scholar, identified in the German Green Party motion as the lawfare strategy of the Brotherhood, gaining control of institutional discourse without open conflict, is visible across all four of these countries not because Brotherhood operatives are sitting in every curriculum committee in Cardiff and Toronto and Melbourne. It is visible because the institutional logic of Western bureaucracies, which rewards accommodation and punishes resistance, reliably produces accommodation wherever consistent pressure is applied against institutions that have no principled framework for resisting it. You do not need to control the institutions. You only need to apply consistent pressure in one direction while the other side is either silent, disorganized, or afraid of the cost of speaking.

The people who suffer most from this, as I said in the original Germany piece and will keep saying because it keeps being true, are the liberal Muslims. Seyran Ateş said it about Germany: the proposals will strengthen Islamists, not liberal Muslims. The same is true in Wales, Ontario, and Victoria. The version of Islam being embedded in Western institutional life is not the progressive, reform-minded, theologically reflective version. It is the conservative, identity-politics version that treats accommodation as a one-way street, that defines the headscarf as a civilizational symbol, and that treats interfaith dialogue as a venue for da’wa rather than genuine exchange. Every time a Western school board validates that version as the official Islam for public consumption, it actively undercuts the ground that Muslim reformers are trying to stand on. The reformers are trying to argue that Islam does not require the coercive institutional architecture. Western governments keep building the architecture and calling it inclusion.

 

What the Pattern Requires

The response to this pattern is not panic. It is not hostility toward Muslim students or Muslim families or Muslim neighbors. Most of the Muslim parents sending their children to Ontario public schools are not orchestrating anything. Most of the Muslim students at Michaela who started praying in the schoolyard were teenagers doing what teenagers do when they feel a social current. The Muslim students sitting in Welsh RVE classes are not the problem. They are learning the same nothing that their Christian classmates are.

This is not a story about individual Muslim people. It is a story about institutional failure, and the failure has a specific shape.

Western educational institutions have decided that the most sophisticated response to religious diversity is theological neutrality: presenting all traditions as equally valid options without privileging any. What this looks like in practice is the Welsh RVE classroom, the Ontario Human Rights Commission guidance, the Victorian prayer room policy, the Lower Saxony “sister religion” curriculum. The institution stands at what it imagines is the center, equidistant from all claims, validating none.

But theological neutrality is not actually neutral. It is a position. It is the position that no religious tradition can make truth claims that other traditions are obligated to take seriously. That is, in fact, a secular humanist position dressed in procedural language. The institution is not neutral between Christianity and Islam. It is neutral between both of them and secularism, which means secularism wins by default in every room where the institution operates.

And applied consistently, that position would require Islamic content in schools to be presented the same way Christian content is: as one option among many, examined critically, held at arm’s length, not protected from challenge. Applied consistently, it would mean Friday prayers get the same institutional response as the Lord’s Prayer got in 1988. Applied consistently, it would mean the Quran’s explicit claim that Christianity is a corrupted religion gets the same curriculum treatment as Christianity’s explicit claim that Jesus is the only way to the Father. It would mean the growth of Islamic schools is subject to the same curriculum accountability scrutiny as Catholic schools.

It is not being applied consistently. It is being applied selectively. And the direction of the selection is not random.

The people who can interrupt this pattern are not politicians, although politicians matter. They are parents who know what the Quran actually says about Christianity and who can therefore recognize when a school curriculum has resolved that argument in Islam’s favor without announcing what it was doing. They are teachers who understand the difference between genuine pluralism, which requires honest engagement with theological disagreement, and the institutional cowardice that masquerades as pluralism by refusing to let any tradition speak in its own voice.

They are Christians who understand the Islamic Dilemma well enough to name it when they see it in a curriculum document. Who know that “sister religions” is not a generous description. Who know what five mentions of Jesus in a Christian religion class means. Who have read the books and done the homework and are therefore, finally, equipped.

That is what this Substack exists to produce.

Lower Saxony is not a German problem. It is a Western problem with a German address this week. Next week it will have a different address. The week after that, another one. The examples will keep coming because the pattern that generates them has not changed.