There is a strong argument for seeing welfare and education as the two spheres that have most driven modern religious change, and that have largely defined the contemporary religious landscape. More than that, I think together they have left contemporary societies across the West with a serious problem – and this is religious illiteracy.

While other chapters in this volume address education, both in schools and in universities, in this chapter I work towards an argument for religious literacy through the welfare lens, which recognises a new religious landscape, and is relevant to everyone, whatever one's own religious stance, or none. Although it is the first of the chapters in the ‘policy’ section in this book, it bridges, in fact, between theory and policy, by attempting to show both how policy has affected religious literacy, and how it presents a challenge to improve it.

The story I want to tell starts – in Britain at least – in the 1940s. It has other starts at other times and in other places, but it is this particular time that will be illuminating here. The welfare story is in three phases, the first of which concerns what I call a willing transfer of welfare from church to state. This is no simple moment in time. Welfare had already been a preoccupation of politicians and churchmen alike for decades – perhaps centuries – before the 1940s (see Prochaska, 2006). The UK's liberal governments of the first two decades of the early 20th century had already introduced a National Insurance scheme covering minimal payments during ill health and old age to prevent the poorest falling entirely into destitution (Pederson, 1993, p 125). A minimal safety net against poverty had already gradually emerged – but its strings were overly spaced apart, and the gaps were great and many.

The willing transfer

In my ‘willing transfer’ argument, I suggest that the Second World War had formed a cauldron for rethinking society in the most ambitious of terms, and I think the churches saw this too. In correspondence and discussion between two of the leading protagonists – William Temple and William Beveridge – the idea of welfare took a much more focused shape in this context.