{"title":"Swedish Religion Education in Public Schools—Objective and Neutral or a Marination into Lutheran Protestantism?","authors":"Jenny Berglund","doi":"10.1093/ojlr/rwac018","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n This article takes its point of departure in the recommendations by the Council of Europe, and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) that recommend that European states should offer education about religions for all school students, regardless of religious or non-religious background. Sweden is one of the countries that provides such education through a compulsory non-denominational religion education (RE) school subject. The compulsory nature of the school subject is possible as long as the teaching is both ‘objective and pluralistic’. In this article, the concept of objectivity but also neutrality is discussed, using the Swedish school subject as an example. The argument pursued is that RE in Sweden, although presented as objective and neutral, also can be understood as ‘marinated’ in Lutheran Protestantism. In the end, the protestant taste of the Swedish non-denominational and compulsory RE is used as a call for further awareness of how the religious history of a given country affects not only education but also the way people perceive the phenomena called religion. These are important perspectives not only for RE teachers who are demanded to teach in a neutral and objective manner, but perhaps also for lawyers?","PeriodicalId":44058,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Journal of Law and Religion","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Oxford Journal of Law and Religion","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ojlr/rwac018","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"LAW","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article takes its point of departure in the recommendations by the Council of Europe, and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) that recommend that European states should offer education about religions for all school students, regardless of religious or non-religious background. Sweden is one of the countries that provides such education through a compulsory non-denominational religion education (RE) school subject. The compulsory nature of the school subject is possible as long as the teaching is both ‘objective and pluralistic’. In this article, the concept of objectivity but also neutrality is discussed, using the Swedish school subject as an example. The argument pursued is that RE in Sweden, although presented as objective and neutral, also can be understood as ‘marinated’ in Lutheran Protestantism. In the end, the protestant taste of the Swedish non-denominational and compulsory RE is used as a call for further awareness of how the religious history of a given country affects not only education but also the way people perceive the phenomena called religion. These are important perspectives not only for RE teachers who are demanded to teach in a neutral and objective manner, but perhaps also for lawyers?
期刊介绍:
Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of religion in public life and a concomitant array of legal responses. This has led in turn to the proliferation of research and writing on the interaction of law and religion cutting across many disciplines. The Oxford Journal of Law and Religion (OJLR) will have a range of articles drawn from various sectors of the law and religion field, including: social, legal and political issues involving the relationship between law and religion in society; comparative law perspectives on the relationship between religion and state institutions; developments regarding human and constitutional rights to freedom of religion or belief; considerations of the relationship between religious and secular legal systems; and other salient areas where law and religion interact (e.g., theology, legal and political theory, legal history, philosophy, etc.). The OJLR reflects the widening scope of study concerning law and religion not only by publishing leading pieces of legal scholarship but also by complementing them with the work of historians, theologians and social scientists that is germane to a better understanding of the issues of central concern. We aim to redefine the interdependence of law, humanities, and social sciences within the widening parameters of the study of law and religion, whilst seeking to make the distinctive area of law and religion more comprehensible from both a legal and a religious perspective. We plan to capture systematically and consistently the complex dynamics of law and religion from different legal as well as religious research perspectives worldwide. The OJLR seeks leading contributions from various subdomains in the field and plans to become a world-leading journal that will help shape, build and strengthen the field as a whole.