Epistemic Injustice and Religious Education

Lately I have noticed philosopher and ethicist Miranda Fricker’s concept of “epistemic injustice” (Fricker 2007) employed across a wide variety of fields, from medicine and mental health to studies of race, gender, religion, and decoloniality, and even education—but not, to my knowledge, in religious education per se. This lacunae seems odd, given that the issues contained within both terms—“epistemic,” concerning knowledge production and practices, and “injustice,” concerning morality and uses/abuses of power—occupy prime real estate in the work of many religious educators. Epistemic injustice, as Fricker develops the idea, refers to “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower” (Fricker 2007, 1). It is about harm perpetrated by both personal and structural constraints on one’s ability to participate in a given knowledge economy. How might epistemic injustice relate to religious education? In what Fricker refers to as its testimonial form, epistemic injustice concerns a knower’s credibility: whose voice holds authority and legitimacy, and whose is ignored or silenced? Testimonial epistemic injustice occurs when bias against a person or group prevents their witness from being heard or treated as legitimate. Disregard for children’s spiritual insights, even if inadvertent, is a commonly occurring example in faith communities and schools in which children find themselves treated as incapable of significant religious knowledge because of their age. Against such disenfranchisement, religious educators such as David Ng, James W. Fowler, Elizabeth Caldwell, Karen-Marie Yust, David Csinos, and many others long have worked hard to underscore the legitimacy of children as people who can and do “know religiously,” not only as receivers of knowledge but also as those who construct theological meaning. They contribute to religious knowledge from their particular vantage point as children, whether they do so positioned within a faith tradition or through observation of others and in classroom learning about religion. Is it a stretch to assert that children experience real harm from testimonial forms of epistemic injustice in which their capacities as knowers are disregarded or belittled? Although the wounds accrued from epistemic injustice certainly differ from other forms of harm, those of us who view knowledge-and meaning-making practices as critical aspects of being human will recognize the potential for injury in such acts. To have one’s knowledge and insight delegitimated because of bias against youth (or old age, or race, or sexuality, or gender, or citizenship status, to name just a few examples) is to deny one’s full humanity. Epistemic injustice likely is tightly interwoven with other sites for enacting inequalities. Furthermore, epistemic injustice, while perhaps the derivative consequence of forms of bias that are its source, represents a specific double form of harm: the erasure of one’s knowledge from the collective wisdom (a communal-structural detriment), and the gradual diminishment of self-as-knower (an individual-personal injury). Religious educators sometimes may find themselves on the “receiving end” of testimonial epistemic injustice. Those who teach religious education in schools, for example, sometimes speak of bias against religious education as a “less academic” subject, and therefore, less important than the so-called core curricular areas like language arts or mathematics. People skeptical about the value of studying religion in schools may see both subject matter and its