Welby: Teach children how jihadis think
CHILDREN should be taught to understand the mindset of jihadist terrorists to help them make sense of the world in which they are growing up, the Archbishop of Canterbury has signalled.
The Most Rev Justin Welby told an audience of headteachers that, for the first time in generations, it was becoming “essential” to grasp the logic of people driven by an obsessive religious belief that the end of the world is nigh.
He said that the current generation of teachers needed to confront the issue of religiously motivated violence in a way not seen since the Reformation.
Addressing the Anglican Academies and Secondary Heads Conference at Coventry Cathedral, he said that religious violence was at the top of the political agenda as a “powerful and, in- deed, at times uncontrollable and destructive influence” here and around the world.
“No one before you in the last 10 years as secondary heads has had to face the kinds of issues with religiously motivated violence since the 17th century to this extent,” he said.
“It has come back, and that means religious literacy is essential to building the kind of society that we need in the future, whether you believe in the faith of a particular group or of no particular group.”
While many experts turn to economic or sociological theories to explain terrorism, it is, he said, essential to grasp terrorists’ end-of theworld obsession, which is rooted in their faith.
He said: “The heart of their theology – which is the heart of their propaganda, so this is the driving force – is an apocalyptic understanding of human history, not as a loose term but in its strictest technical terms: they believe that the world is about to end.
“It’s very difficult to understand the things that impel people to some of the dreadful actions that we have seen over the last few years unless you have some sense of religious literacy.”