La enseñanza religiosa en derecho internacional y comparado

Zusammenfassung

An analysis of religious education provides particularly useful insight into the different political models of freedom of belief. This paper does not approach religious education from the point of view of its legal application within the framework of a specific education system, but rather, provides a comparative study of the different models of application of religious education, taking into account relevant international legislation and, particularly, the rights and obligations derived therefrom. These models of application are, in turn, linked to the different models of Church-State relations in order to verify whether or not there is a causal relationship between both elements. This makes it possible to shed some light on the subject of religious education, where both ideological and political elements are often present, where assumptions are often presented as conclusions and where the consequences of the evolution of societies and law are presented as absolute truths. Thus, the term ¿religious education¿ is used to refer to concepts, contents and models of application that bear no relation to one another. For instance, religious education is not the same as teaching a religion; religious education in a cultural sense is not the same as teaching a religion in a confessional sense. Nevertheless, the term is used ambiguously to express all these meanings.