Abstract
How do young people in today’s society perceive and talk about religion? How do migration, globalisation and secularisation influence young peoples’ attitudes to religion? The study presented in this book concerns the school subject of Religious Education, and all school subjects must be understood in relation to their historical, political, social, and religious contexts. This section aims to describe some aspects of the religious landscape and young peoples’ perceptions and attitudes toward religion based on research conducted in the field that constitutes the context of Religious Education. In descriptions of religiosity in the Western world, not least in Sweden, secularisation is a concept that has been used in order to describe the changes society has undergone. However, the concept is contested, and scholars disagree on what it means and whether it is a useful concept to describe and understand religiosity in contemporary society. Therefore, I begin this section with a brief summary of different perspectives on the concept of secularity before I turn to the matter of research concerning the attitudes of young people toward religion.
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- 1.
This study was part of the REDCo-project: Religion in Education. A contribution to Dialogue or a factor of Conflict in transforming societies of European Countries (REDCo), which was an EU-funded project between 2006 and 2009, aimed to increase knowledge about religion in the educational sector. Participating countries were Germany, Spain, Norway, Estonia, France, the Netherlands, Russia and England (REDCo 2013).
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Flensner, K.K. (2017). The Religious Landscape. In: Discourses of Religion and Secularism in Religious Education Classrooms. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60949-2_2
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