The Religious Education curriculum in the United Kingdom is currently prey to a wide range of vigorously conflicting influences and demands. These range from the policy imperatives of multiculturalism, the pressure to make Religious Education a primary site for philosophical, ethical and citizenship education and the trenchant criticisms that continue to be made of the teaching of religion from faith-based or catechetical positions in religiously denominated schools. In the face of these pressures, learning and teaching in Religious Education frequently withdraws to the zone of least resistance, assuming a descriptive and comparativist perspective on the phenomenon of religious practice and cordoning questions of belief, truth and commitment in the assessment-free spaces of 'personal search'. It is the major contention of this paper that the steady adoption of this strategy by the key decision-makers in Religious Education in the United Kingdom has been a signal disservice to civil society, colluding in the production of what Stanley Fish defined in his prescient and influential Columbia Law Review essay of 1997, 'Mission Impossible: Settling the Just Bounds between Church and State', 'religious illiteracy'. In response to the alleged 'return of religions', epitomised by the alarming and worldwide growth of inter-religious violence, the rapid spread of dogmatic fundamentalism and, above all, the active role assumed by religious organisations in debates about the future of education, the teaching of Religious Education in schools has offered little or no critical engagement, beyond vapid calls for tolerance, acceptance and mutual understanding. The paper argues that the roots of this paralysis of critical religious enquiry lie not, as some commentators have suggested, in the dogmatic origins of Religious Education as a curricular area, but in the failure of liberal constructions of Religious Education to take seriously the continuing role of religion in the creation of meaning and value for individuals, communities and even whole societies. Attachment to Enlightenment notions of secularisation--with their insistence that religion must inevitably decline before an advance of modernity in which the project of mass education itself plays a decisive part- -have tacitly delegitimised wide regions of religious experience and impaired the disciplinary area responsible for their educational investigation and critique. The resultant rise of religious illiteracy disables effective understanding and interrogation of those very forces and interests that would harness religion to irrational or illiberal ends. The paper concludes by drawing on the later work of Fish, Derrida and Caputo to rehabilitate an alternative conception of the content and pedagogy of Religious Education in which the development of religious literacy is the central dynamic.