”Jag brukar säga att religionskursen är som en liten survival kit” – religionslärares uppfattningar av religionsämnets innehåll och roll i gymnasieskolan

This article departs from the educational reform of upper secondary school 2011, and the changing in the curricula for religion studies education. Our theoretical point of departure is inspired by Ivor Godson's and Thomas Popkewitz's understanding of a school subject and its relation to socialisation. In relation to their understanding of a school subject and its socializing role, we see a didactical implication that the subject of religious study education will fall back to transferring knowledge that is easy to teach, control, assess, and grade. We wonder how teachers in religion education studies respond to, and handle existential and pupil related questions in the classroom when they, for example, are addressed with questions about life and death, the environmental crisis or global poverty, even if there is no scheduled time for such matters. To answer this question, we have interviewed eleven religion education teachers from different programs in upper secondary school about how they consider the subject, its content and purpose and how this materialises in their teaching. The conclusions we could draw from our interviews are that most of the teachers try to be open and respond to existential and pupil-initiated questions, even if there is no scheduled time for this, while others focuses on facts about the Abrahamitic religions.