In this article, the author comments on Professor White's response to his criticisms of White's attack on compulsory religious education (White, 2004). Religious education, the author contends, raises questions of fundamental importance and complexity that compulsion is necessary if people are to create anything resembling a religiously literate society. The decisions they make about their world views, and the quality of their appropriation of them, impacts on every aspect of their lives. Religious education at its best generates an informed, critical and reflective self-understanding in the light of one's developing relationships with others-in-community, with the natural world, and with the core question of the ultimate order of things. Such a process is best viewed as an end in itself, one from which no pupils should be excluded, and which demands sufficient curriculum space to enable the issues to be addressed at an appropriate depth and complexity.