RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AT CHURCH AND SCHOOL AS FORMATION OF SHARED VALUES OF TRADITIONAL EUROPEAN IDENTITY
Along with the EU integration, the Bulgarian religious education had been interpreted as identity formation, rather than as confessional practice. Knowledge about the statistically dominant Eastern Orthodox Christian faith was generally perceived by local population as part of nationalist and ethnic patriotic upbringing, similar to what children were involved in socialist and previous times. Transition to democratic social order and deideologisation of education, as well as overcoming the memory of repressive cultural policy of communist regime, that excluded religious traditions as live heritage, and limited any faith to history, required new approach to religious education at churches, schools, and other cultural spaces for youth and adults as reading houses, non-governmental organisations, monasteries and convents. Multiculturalism that gave to the majority new opportunities to enjoy religious rights, at the same time empowered culturally ethnic religious minorities, that were previously discriminated. Minor religious communities demonstrated higher interest also in state-subsidised religious education in its confessional sense, as they earlier managed to organise for their members. International or ethnically and nationally diferent support to Bulgarian religious education reduced the value of its patriotic effect on population and therefore it had not become locally popular practice, until recent state edition of synodal set of Eastern Orthodox Christian church textbooks.
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