Free Christian Religious Instruction in Anthroposophy

Glossary✦ Anthroposophy✦ 3 min read
Free Christian Religious Instruction n.

The non-denominational Christian religion lesson Rudolf Steiner established in autumn 1919 for Waldorf pupils whose parents belonged to no church, taught two hours weekly.

Free Christian Religious Instruction in Anthroposophy is the non-denominational Christian religion lesson Rudolf Steiner added to the Waldorf curriculum in the autumn of 1919, two hours a week, for pupils whose parents belonged to no confession. Its German name is freier christlicher Religionsunterricht. Steiner had deliberately left religion outside the school syllabus, delegating Catholic pupils to a priest and Protestant pupils to a pastor. Most of the first pupils came from the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart and were registered as dissenters, so a lesson was made for them and taught by Waldorf teachers, who were permitted to use the methods of spiritual science but forbidden to turn the hour into a course in anthroposophy. Like the confessional lessons, it was held only on the grounds of the Free Waldorf School, extraterritorially. From February 1920 it carried its own Sunday service, whose ritual texts are collected in GA 269. Waldorf schools still teach it today.

Free Christian religious instruction answered a practical problem in Steiner's first school year: the children of no church. Rather than leave them idle while Catholic and Protestant classmates went to their own lessons, Steiner appointed Herbert Hahn and Friedrich Oehlschlegel in October 1919 to teach a Christian hour that belonged to no confession and asked nothing of parents beyond a request to attend.

In Steiner's Own Words

Therefore I arranged, from the outset, that religious instruction should not be included in our school syllabus, but that Catholic religious teaching should be delegated to the Catholic priest, and the Protestant teaching to the pastor and so on. In the first few years most of our scholars came from a factory (the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Factory), and amongst them we had many “dissenting” children, children whose parents were of no religion. But our educational conscience of course demanded that a certain kind of religious instruction should be given them also. We therefore arranged a “free religious teaching” for these children, and for this we have a special method.

Rudolf Steiner, The Kingdom of Childhood (GA 311, Torquay, August 1924)

What it Means Today

The lesson Steiner improvised in 1919 is still on the timetable at the Freie Waldorfschule Uhlandshöhe in Stuttgart, which opened on 7 September 1919, and across the roughly 250 German Waldorf schools represented by the Bund der Freien Waldorfschulen. In Germany it now sits oddly against the law that grew up around it. Article 7 of the Basic Law of 1949 made religious instruction a regular subject in state schools, taught in agreement with the churches, with a parental right of withdrawal; the Länder filled the resulting gap with Ethik or Werte und Normen. Berlin went further and made Ethics compulsory for everyone, and the Pro Reli referendum of 26 April 2009, which tried to restore religion as an equal alternative, failed at the ballot. The modern German state offers the unchurched child a confession or a philosophy seminar. Steiner's 1919 answer was neither: a Christian lesson with no creed to sign, taught by the school's own teachers, with a Sunday service attached from 1 February 1920.

Thalira synthesis: the free religion lesson is the one place in Waldorf education where Steiner accepted a boundary his method could not cross. Everything else in the school he claimed as pedagogy. This hour he marked as extraterritorial, standing on school ground but outside the school's authority, entered only on the parent's request. The lesson is less a curriculum item than a measurement of how far Steiner thought spiritual science may reach before another person's freedom begins.

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