''Attend school and get a job or become a monk for life?'' : A comparative study of how peoples’ lived religion is represented in textbooks

The main purpose of this study is to illustrate to what extent lived religion is expressed in textbooks intended for use in late middle school to early high school. This was done with the hope of bringing relevance to the idea of involving lived religion in the religious education in Swedish schools. Lived religion, as described by Meredith McGuire, Katarina Plank and Daniel Enstedt, refers to how everyday people experience and express their religiosity, unlike how official representatives of certain religious faiths like priests and rabbis do. In addition to the previous description of lived religion, Nancy Ammerman’s four categories concerning lived religion as a scientific field, will also work as an underlying factor for further specification. Also worth mentioning is that this study is structured diachronically, which means that the survey material consists of four textbooks, each one from a different decade. This idea exists to also involve how the representation of lived religion has changed over time. Lastly the textbooks were put in correlation with the curricula provided by the Swedish national agency for education, to see if these could have had an impact on the content concerning lived religion. The textbooks were examined using a qualitative content analysis, as well as a comparative one. This allowed for the result to be divided into two different themes: the text within the textbooks, and the influence of the curricula. This study produced multiple conclusions, each one varying depending on which textbook was examined. In summary, the representation of lived religion varied in range from book to book. The book published in 1989 saw a relatively small amount of examples concerning lived religion, and instead focused on the history of religions. The following book from 1994 started to show an increase in content regarding lived religion, with it reaching its peak in the book from 2003. Lived religion in the study’s final book from 2014 did although decrease, with the authors instead choosing to base the book entirely on the active curriculum. Although descriptions of how three of these textbooks based their content on the certain curricula were lacking, every textbook nevertheless corresponded with the content of its curriculum. The conclusion drawn from this was thereby that the authors intentionally or unintentionally based the contents of their books on the then active curriculum