Religious release : A text analysis of religious pluralism in the presentation of the world religions in upper secondary Religious education textbooks

The aim of this thesis is to analyse and discuss the ways in which the world religions are presented in Swedish upper secondary Religious education [RE] textbooks. The result of the study is the following: The RE textbooks have similar ways of presenting the different world religions. Nevertheless, Christianity is offered more space in the books, and is also more personally presented that the other world religions. This implies that upper secondary students may not be given opportunity, through these RE textbooks, to depict and to understand all world religions in an equal way. The result is being discussed through two theoretical concepts: religious pluralism and an agentic perspective. Taken together, the theoretical interpretation of the result stresses an ‘outside’ secular perspective, grounded in descriptions of religious life and experiences from an outside perspective of the world religions. While a perspective from inside or from within the world religions is rare, and if at all most prevailing in the RE textbooks’ presentations of Christianity. This may have didactical consequences for the upper secondary RE teachers, in terms of which textbooks to use in the subject matter teaching, when religious diversity as knowledge content and objective is at the fore of the RE subject in the Swedish syllabus for upper secondary RE. A religiously diverse and agentic RE teaching, it is assumed, needs to balance the didactical space through choices of RE textbooks that convey equally distributed perspectives from both an outside and an inside depiction of every world religion.