The Religion and Public Education Research Unit | A Research Unit of the American Academy of Religion Northeast, jointly sponsored by Religion and Education

Affiliated with the American Academy of Religion Northeast (AAR-NE), this Research Unit brings together scholars, educators, graduate students, and other interested participants whose work engages the complex place of religion in American public life, especially as it relates to public schools, curricula, classrooms, policy, and civic formation.

At a moment when questions about church-state separation, religious literacy, Christian nationalism, public curricula, and democratic belonging have renewed urgency, this Research Unit provides a forum for sustained scholarly conversation, networking, collaboration, and public-facing intellectual work.

Context and Rationale for This Research Unit

Recent shifts in national and state politics have made the separation of church and state in the United States newly fragile. Across multiple states, lawmakers and public officials have advanced initiatives that seek to insert particular forms of Christianity, biblical material, or religious messaging into public classrooms, curricula, and school life.

These developments raise urgent scholarly questions, such as:

• How should religion be studied in public schools?

• What distinguishes education about religion from devotional or confessional instruction?

• How do public schools navigate religious diversity, constitutional constraints, curricular pressures, and local political conflict?

• What resources can scholars of religion offer to educators, administrators, policymakers, and interested communities?

The Religion and Public Education Research Unit exists to address these questions through sustained academic inquiry, collegial exchange, and collaborative scholarly work.

Mission

The Religion and Public Education Research Unit supports scholarly work on religion, democratic pluralism, and public K–12 education in the United States.

This Research Unit exists to:

• Build Scholarly Community

• The Unit creates a sustained network for scholars, educators, graduate students, and other interested participants working at the intersection of religion and public education.

• Support Research and Peer Review

• The Unit provides a setting for sharing research, workshopping emerging projects, and offering pre-publication peer review.

• Foster Collaboration

• The Unit develops resources, reflections, and public-facing materials that clarify issues related to religion, public schools, religious literacy, and democratic pluralism.

• Where appropriate, the Unit may serve as a conversation partner for educators, administrators, policymakers, journalists, and public institutions seeking scholarly perspective on religion and public education.

The Unit facilitates partnerships, supports co-working groups within the larger Research Unit, and helps connect participants with adjacent scholarly communities.

Scholarly Focus

This Research Unit focuses on religion and public education in the United States. The word “public” is central. Our primary concern is public K–12 education: public classrooms, public curricula, public policy, public institutions, and the role of religion in democratic civic life.

This is not primarily a forum for religious education understood as catechesis, spiritual formation, devotional instruction, or faith-based schooling. Nor is our primary focus on private, parochial, or independent schools, though scholarship on those contexts is important and often analogous. Our conversations are expressly academic in nature, though our projects and products may also serve educators, communities, and public-facing audiences.

We assume that participants will bring different frameworks, disciplines, areas of expertise, and perspectives. We also assume a general familiarity with conversations about religious literacy, religion and education, religion and legal frameworks, and pluralism in public life.

Relationship to Other Scholarly Communities

The Religion and Public Education Research Unit is distinct from, but complementary to, related organizations and scholarly communities, including the Religion and Education Collaborative and the Religion and Education Special Interest Group within the American Educational Research Association.

Our distinction lies in the expressly academic nature of our conversations and in our grounding within the American Academy of Religion. At the same time, the Unit welcomes interdisciplinary engagement with scholars of religion, education researchers, curriculum theorists, legal scholars, historians, theologians, public school educators, and others whose work bears on religion and public education.

The Unit is also affiliated with the AAR’s national Religion and Public Schools: International Perspectives Unit. Whereas that national Unit focuses on the global relationship between religion and education across diverse historical, geographical, cultural, political, and pedagogical settings, this regional Research Unit focuses primarily on religion and public education in the United States.

In this sense, the Religion and Public Education Research Unit complements the national Unit and may serve as both a partner and a pipeline for broader AAR conversations.

Activities

The Unit’s activities may include regular virtual meetings, reading groups, research presentations, project workshops, pre-publication peer review, collaborative resource-sharing, co-working groups, public-facing learning artifacts, and conference sessions or roundtables.

Through these activities, the Unit seeks to foster an ongoing scholarly community rather than a once-a-year conference gathering.

Who Should Join?

Participation is open to scholars, educators, graduate students, and interested participants from anywhere in the world. Although the Unit is affiliated with AAR-NE, participation is not limited to those located in the American Northeast. Virtual options will be available for every event sponsored by the Research Unit, including the spring 2026 roundtable session.

Membership in a learned society such as the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, or the American Educational Research Association may be beneficial, but it is not required. Registration fees for the 2026 AAR-NE conference will be required to participate in the roundtable, with considerations made for virtual participants.

This Unit may be especially useful for scholars of religion and public life, scholars of religion and education, public school educators and administrators, curriculum specialists, graduate students, policymakers, journalists, and others seeking scholarly perspective on religion and public education.