Issues relating to religion in British society, and higher education more specifically, are rarely just about religion. Intersectionality is a helpful tool to understand how religion cannot be neatly separated from other subjects, such as race, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality.

The idea of secular society means that discussing religion is difficult, uncomfortable and avoided. However, as much as many ‘non-religious’ people use secularity as an excuse to ignore issues involving religion, these issues are still there. More crucially, they are accompanied by other social matters ‘non-religious’ people deemed more personally ‘relevant’.

Ignoring religion can be a marker of social exclusion, as religion is often an important identity marker for many minorities and ethnic communities.

Religion is generally not well taught, hence the difficulties in discourses and debates around it. I’m part of the problem. I teach Fashion Histories, and although I incorporate subjects such as politics, economics, race, gender and sexuality to my lectures, I don’t talk about religion. Not unless is connected to an ‘extreme’ event, such as Holocaust, terrorist attacks by Islamic Extremists and antiabortion campaign by Christian Extremists. As the text highlights, this creates a biased understanding of certain religions and can perpetuate issues such as racism, homophobia and gender inequality. I need to incorporate religion to my lectures with the same level of sensibility, compassion and honesty as I do to the other subjects.

• Could use candomblé as a case study for my lecture on Colonialism in South America.
• Religion is an important tool to promote social justice, activism and wellbeing. Radical Dharma (2016) is a great example, which I’ll add to my reading lists.
• Be clear and opened to the students about how I used the Religious Observance and Festivals Calendar to schedule the timetable.

The text discusses the Church of England, but fails to acknowledge that the head of the Church is the monarch. If we are to further our discourses around religion, shouldn’t we discuss the intrinsic links between religion and colonialism? How Catholicism promoted the erasion of indigenous culture in South America, the issues in the Middle East as a result of the Crusade, the exploitation of natural resources across the world to decorate European churches. And the divine claim of imperial figureheads.