Children's concepts of God : A Study of Students in the First and Third Grade

The purpose of this essay is to examine different conceptions of God children express in speech and image. The essay also concern how children's images of God are shaped in a secular and pluralistic society, such as Sweden. The children included in the investigation are in first and third grade in middle-sized Swedish town's primary school. In the essay, two methods are used, which is picture analysis and qualitative interviews. The material consists of 47 children's drawings and a smaller selection of interviews with the child's drawing as a starting point. The children's drawings were then analyzed with the help of a narrative model. The results indicate that the majority of children in the sample have an anthropomorphic concept of God. The material is analyzed with the theories of George Herbert Mead's theory of symbolic interactionism and Peter L. Berger's arguments about secularization. The results show that the children interact with different people and groups from whom they take on different conceptions of God. The results show that the children are continuously influenced by their surroundings. In today's secular and pluralistic society the children meet people and groups who have different interpretations of reality. The children take into possession the conception of God that is the most prominent in their structure of plausibility. With the support of my material, I would argue that research need to take the children's environment seriously in studies of children's conceptions of God and not only depend on theories of cognitive development. My findings suggests that a majority of the children not only have an anthropomorphic concept of God, but also many times believe in an anthropomorphic God, which in turn is interesting in a secular society