Young people’s experiences of religious socialisation in Sweden and Finland

ABSTRACT

The religious landscape in the Nordic countries has changed in recent decades. This article looks at what this means from the perspective of the religious socialisation experiences of Finnish and Swedish youth. Research has shown that the views and values of parents, family, friends, the youth culture and those that are prevalent in school and society as a whole are important for young people’s self-development. The intergenerational socialisation of religious traditions and values has diminished as societies have become more secularised. As this topic is scarcely researched, new studies are needed also on young people’s perspectives. This article aims to fill the research gap by investigating the kind of impact that parents, school and friends have on young people’s religious socialisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• youth
• religious socialisation
• Nordic countries
• gender

Introduction

In recent decades new ways of religious participation have emerged in the Nordic countries that enable youth affiliated with faith communities to participate as civil society actors in the public sphere (Furseth 2017). It is therefore timely to reflect on what this means from the perspective of young people’s religious socialisation. The countries examined in this study, Sweden and Finland, are among the most secularised in the world. Secularisation is a complex concept. In short, the term generally refers to the process in which secular institutions take over social responsibilities previously held by religious organisations. The concept can also refer to the process of religion becoming less important for people and religion being displaced from the public sphere to the private (af Burén, 2015). Even though Sweden and Finland are very secularised, they are, influenced by both immigration and interest in new religious movements and spirituality, also becoming increasingly multi-religious. Due to religious and cultural diversity increasing, religious plurality is in many areas such as schools also becoming more noticeable. The school is a place where young people come together regardless of their religious and cultural backgrounds and negotiate the identities and values they have been socialised in at home (Vikdahl and Liljestrand 2021). Schools in Sweden and Finland are also expected to communicate and respect human rights, such as religious freedom and the fundamental democratic values on which these societies rest (Utbildningsdepartementet, 2010), thereby acting as important contexts for the support of Nordic worldviews, values and belongings. In this new and continuously changing situation, it is important to acquire more knowledge and understanding about young people’s own experiences of religious socialisation, religious and worldview diversities and the processes that influence their values and perceptions.

Religion as a notion is in this study left intentionally broad, in order not to exclude its complexities (see e.g., Pals, 2015) and not to exclude the youths own understandings of how they perceive and define their spirituality and worldview. As regards the related learning, many elements and influences are important for an individual’s developing approach to religion. Personal encounters, impressions from the media and from other contexts all have an impact. A person’s beliefs, identity, and religiosity develop in relation to their surroundings. Childhood and adolescence are particularly important periods in a person’s development, because this is when they are the most formable and impressionable.

The religious socialisation of families has weakened radically (Tervo-Niemelä 2021). The recent study shows that Finnish parents want their children to choose their individual life view instead of children inheriting the traditional Christian view of life (Kirkon Nelivuotiskatstaus 2020). Discussions concerning religion and religious matters are not very common at homes.

(Spännäri, Kallatsa, and Tervo-Niemelä 2022). This rises the meaning of reflection about religious matters and issues in school.

Three contexts, or three circumstances, are assumed to have particular significance for an individual’s self-development: family, friends and the norms of society (Charon 2010, 73–77). The ideas of parents, the family, friends, the teenage culture, school and society are thus of great importance for an individual’s self-development and their approach to religion. In this article, our research question is: Depending on young people’s age and gender, what kind of impact do parents, school and friends have on their religious socialisation?

The article focuses on the religious socialisation experiences of children and young people between the ages of 9–16 in Sweden and Finland based on two empirical case studies. The varied methodological choices contribute towards providing a broader view of young people’s religious socialisation. The study was a part of a broader international research project carried out in Estonia, Finland and Sweden entitled Cultural and Religious Diversity in Primary School (CARDIPS), with data from comprehensive schools.

The socialisation process

According to George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), an individual develops in four stages: the preparation stage, the play stage, the game stage and the reference group stage (Charon 2010, 73–77). The play stage and the game stage are particularly relevant for this article, because they coincide with the ages of the young people included in the studies.

The preparation stage occurs during the very first year of a person’s life. At this stage, a person is unable to take account of the perspectives of others. Instead, the child mimics people, usually their parents, and tries to do what they do.

In the next stage, the play stage, a person develops the ability to imagine the perspective of others. In this stage, they can take the ‘role of someone else’ and adapt their own behaviour according to that person’s expectations, i.e., a person empathises with another, looks at themselves from the other person’s perspective and allows that perspective to direct their action. For example, a child can perceive that a parent wants them to remove their plate from the table after dinner and, as a result, the child removes the plate. Or a child can perceive that a friend wants them to be in a fantasy play and they therefore decide to join in. Also, significant others become important during the play stage. These are people, or other social objects that make an impression on the child. This is often the child’s parents, although friends, cartoon characters, idols and so on can also function as significant others. When a person is at the play stage, they have not yet developed the ability to bring in several significant others at the same time. This has the consequence that a child constantly changes perspective and ‘plays’. A child might, for example, take the role of in Nordic countries very famous classic children’s author Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking book character, and allow ‘Pippi’s perspective’ to direct their actions, or on another occasion choose a different character to guide their actions. Children thus segregate their significant others as well as themselves and can therefore be described as segmented.

In the third stage, the game stage, a person can adopt the perspectives of several significant others simultaneously and adjust their behaviour to different expectations. This stage is likened to a game situation, because a game presupposes that a person can ‘read the game’ and act according to its rules, i.e., a person can understand their position in the social order and act in accordance with it. Goffman describes the social order as rules on a game board, or on the football pitch. Some rules are common to all gamers, while others only apply to certain positions and in certain situations (Manning 1992). The game assumes that all gamers hold their positions, otherwise disorder occurs. If a person violates the rules of the game, for example by dressing in a norm-breaking way, they risk discomfort and punishment (Trost and Levin 2010, 72–74).

Also, during the game stage a person can have several generalised others. A person can combine different perspectives into a generalised other, which can be likened to a common culture, and act according to a common approach. For example, a youth can say, ‘In our school we do this’, or ‘In our country we are not very religious …’. However, sometimes the environment has different perspectives, which makes it impossible to perceive a generalised other. Mum and dad might have one opinion and friends another, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, for a young person to join the different perspectives together. A common way of resolving such a conflict is to redefine the situation, i.e., interpret it in a new way and sort out the opinions of some people in favour of those of others. During adolescence, young people usually take more notice of what their friends think than their parents’ opinions.

In the fourth stage, the reference group stage, a person can have several generalised others. Here, a person can interact with different groups and identify with different cultures. If an individual interacts more successfully with one group, it could function as their significant other.

Even though the various ‘stage models’ describing individual development have been criticised for giving a too simplistic impression of how the individual developmental trajectories proceed – sometimes also taking steps back between ‘stages’ and proceeding in a spiral rather than straightforward paths – the overall understanding of the general phases of development is still useful here. In their classic work, The Social Construction of Reality, Berger and Luckmann (1966) write about the primary socialisation in the home and the secondary socialisation in societal institutions such as the school that both influence and direct the ways in which the individual constructs their views about reality through social interaction. Religious socialisation is also often influenced by a particular religious community and its socialisation methods: shared values, identity, language, culture, networks of trust and social capital, all of which direct and support the religious socialisation of the younger generation (see e.g., Kuusisto 2011).

Research on religious socialisation

Previous studies have shown that the family plays a key role when it comes to children’s religiosity and conceptions of religion (Gunnoe and Moore 2002; Hyde 1990; Kay and Francis 1996; Mason, Singleton, and Webber 2007; Smith and Lundquist Denton 2005). A young person is influenced by their parents when it comes to matters of religion, at least during childhood, before friends and other relationships gradually become increasingly important in influence. Research has already for long indicated that parents’ religiosity is important for a child’s relationship to God, or the absence of one (e.g., Day 1975). A child’s religious ‘I’ is mainly influenced by their parents and by role-taking, i.e., by adopting the demonstrated practices the child experiences that it comes into contact with God (Vikdahl 2014). The British Youth on Religion (YOR) study (Madge, Hemming, and Stenson 2014) is of interest in this context, in that it focuses on processes that are important for young people’s identity development in multicultural environments in the UK. One of their research questions was: How does a child develop their religious identity and what role do parents, friends, teachers and religious leaders play in this process? The study utilised questionnaires, interviews in groups and with individual young people in three different multicultural areas in the UK. In total 10,500 people between the ages of 13 and 18 participated. The analysis shows that 62% of the young people involved the study believed that the family was important for their own religious stance. Many stated that the mother played a more important role than the father. Several of the interviewees talked about events that illustrated that their religious approach was influenced by their upbringing and whether or not they grew up in a religious family (Madge, Hemming, and Stenson 2014.).

During adolescence, a person may combine perspectives of different people into a generalised other (Charon 2010, 73–77), which can be likened to a common culture or a common approach. This implies that teenage culture, societal expectations and school values become increasingly important for them when relating to questions about religion. Swedish studies have shown that there is a distance between pupils with a religious belief and those who do not express a religious identity (Vikdahl 2019, 2021). This distance is not automatically or only linked to any religious faith but is also linked to the choice of lifestyle (Vikdahl 2019, 2021; Zackariasson 2016). A ‘successful’ youth in the Swedish majority culture may be perceived to entail sexual experimentation and a certain limitlessness regarding alcohol use. However, such inclination towards hedonism may collide heavily with the values of moderation and diligence emphasised in many religious traditions.

Research has also shown that religious young people tend to socialise in religiously homogeneous groups in their spare time (Madge, Hemming, and Stenson 2014; Smith and Lundquist Denton 2005), although some studies show the opposite (Baumann 1996). It has also been found that a positive development of religious identity can be nurtured by encounters with other young people sharing the same faith (Niens et al. 2013).

Another relevant fact in this context is that revealing religious identity can be uncomfortable for a young person in Sweden and Finland because they could be positioned as odd or different in a negative way by others (Berglund 2012; BRÅ and Forum för levande historia 2004; Gunnoe and Moore 2002; Hyde 1990; Kay and Francis 1996; Kittelmann Flensner 2015; Mason, Singleton, and Webber 2007; Smith and Lundquist Denton 2005; Vikdahl 2018, 2019; Zackariasson 2016).

Materials and methods

The here reported data were gathered as a part of an international mixed methods research design project, carried out in Finland, Sweden and Estonia. The overall data included surveys with children and youth in age groups 9–10, 12–13, and 15–16 in all three countries, individual or pair/small group interviews with the same ages, as well as complementary data from the educators (Sweden and Estonia) and from the older age groups of 16–19-year-old youth (Finland). The quantitative parts of the three-country survey have been analysed statistically, to an extent together with complementary qualitative data extracts, with both country specific and comparative or multi-case samples (Kuusisto, Poulter and Kallioniemi, 2017). The here presented qualitative content analysis focuses on the interview data from Finland and Sweden. Both the survey and the interviews had a broader focus on the everyday of the children and youth both at school and in their leisure time, particularly looking into how different religions or other worldviews are present in their daily life. For the present analysis, the interview data was analysed with a particular focus on the individual experiences of religious socialisation.

As mentioned above, we have intentionally used a broad and open working definition of ‘religion’ in order not to exclude the ways in which the youth themselves perceive and define their spirituality and worldview. This, however, naturally influences the operationalisation of the notion in the data gathering and analysis, when it comes to validity related matters, as exactly do the participants describe in their accounts may vary from individual to individual. However, this in a way is exactly what the study wants to grasp, as rather than aiming for a narrow definition of the notion, we did not want to exclude the complexities and the within-individual variation and change but rather to highlight it and the related learning processes.

The interviews in both the Finnish and Swedish studies followed the thematic outline of the surveys and aimed to deepen and ask further questions about the same themes. The idea was to let the pupils direct the conversation to the topics they found most meaningful for them. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim.

The analyses were carried out by first coding the data through an initial reading of the interview transcriptions and making notes in the margins/marking the key notions or topics related to religious socialisation. The data was gradually organised, and the broader themes classified based on the codes and broader, thematically interrelated code groups, once such became more increasingly evident through (re)readings of the data. Once the individual researchers had gone through the analysis for each of the data sets separately, these themes were brought together for the broader two-sample analysis (see also Patton, 1990, 381–383) As can be seen from Table 1, too, the sample size and age groups were similar in both settings, however, the Swedish interviews were conducted in small groups rather than individually. This may to an extent influence what the children and youth have been comfortable in sharing in the interviews in the presence of their peers. However, it may also have encouraged some to raise matters that they have been reminded to mention as the setting has been more interactive. Either way, we have been cognoscente of this variance between the samples throughout the analyses.

Table 1. The here analysed sample data.

	Age groups	Sample size	Method
Sweden	9–10-year-olds 12–13-year-olds 15–16-year-olds	N=40	Interviews (in small groups of 2–6 pupils)
Finland	9–10-year-olds 12–13-year-olds 15–16-year-olds	N=38	Interviews (individually)

In the following, we will briefly further introduce the national samples.

The Swedish study is based on qualitative interviews with 40 pupils from Years 3, 6 and 9 at secondary school. As mentioned above, the participant samples are divided into three groups according to age −9–10-year olds, 12–13-year olds and 15–16-year-olds.¹ The interviews with the pupils were conducted in focus groups (Dahlin-Ivanhoff 2016; Krueger and Casey 2008) of two to six pupils at a time in their school environment.² In order to shed light on the young people’s stories, some teachers and principals were interviewed as well (Vikdahl 2018).

The Finnish study makes was similarly collected from the children and youth in the age groups 9–10, 12–13, 15–16 (n = 38), however, in this sample, the interviews were carried out with individual pupils. The interviews were carried out in an empty classroom. The sampling was organised through an additional question in the survey questionnaire, where the pupils could indicate their willingness to also take part in one-to-one interviews.

The concept of religion was intentionally left undefined in the survey and the interviews. This was done to put the focus on how the young people themselves understood religion and the experiences connected to it (cf. Belzen 2009), rather than direct or limit their responses with prescribed framings. Likewise, what should be understood as religion was not predefined in the meetings with the young people. The participants themselves thus decided the definition when answering the questions based on their own religious perceptions. In practice, this meant that religion was treated as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon.

Results

Swedish sample

The Swedish study focuses on religious socialisation related to the young people’s ages. One obvious finding was that the younger participants were more positive to religion and religious diversity than the older ones and expressed greater curiosity and enthusiasm. Also, they had a more easy-going and uncomplicated approach to people’s different religious affiliations than the older pupils. For example, several of them agreed with the claim that the difference between religions was only about celebrating different religious festivities and said that they wanted to learn more about other people’s religions. Sonja³ had a constructive suggestion about how to learn more about other religions and festivities:

• There are also churches and… what are they called, syn …

• Synagogues?

• Synagogues.

• Yes, and mosques. And Buddhists. It’s the other religions, except perhaps Islam, that can go there. It’s only Christians who can go there … and only those who are Buddhist can go there … and those who are Muslims go to a mosque.

• What do you think about that?

• Mm … I want to learn more about the other religions as well.

• Me too [another girl enters the conversation].

• Me too [a third girl whispers].

[…]

• It would be cool if there was a big church that encompassed every religion and where people from all the different religions could celebrate the same thing.

• Would that be good?

• Yes. You can have different religions, but we could all be in the same church.

• Yes? Do you mean that there can be different religions in the same church?

• Yes, a big church, with different rooms. One room for Judaism, another room for Christianity, Islam and so on. Yes, so you could go to any room and see what happened there.

• Why would that be good?

• To learn. And to see what they do there. (Vikdahl 2016, 156-157)

The older pupils did not show the same interest in religious issues. When they were asked if they talked about religion with each other, one pupil said, ‘it is not something you focus on’.

One reason for the differences between the younger and older pupils’ interest in religion could be that most of the younger ones came from religious homes and had religious parents, which was not the case with the older pupils. It is very likely that religious people are generally more interested in religion than non-religious people, although this may also be due to their different stages of maturity.

The younger pupils had a relatively easy-going approach to religion and religious diversity. From a child’s perspective, it is reasonable to be a Muslim in some circumstances and a Christian in others. As one of the girls put it, ‘You don’t have to have one religion all the time’ (Vikdahl 2016, 160–161).

Joseph gave an example of such a religious conversion. He declared during the interview that he had just left Christianity for Islam. When the other pupils talked about changing religion, he interrupted and said:

• I have thought …

• Have you thought about changing religion?

• … don’t know yet.

• Let’s see, are you a Christian?

• Yes.

• Do you want to switch to Islam then?

Perhaps (Vikdahl 2016, 181.).

Some 20 minutes later, when the interview subject had changed, Joseph interrupted again and said:

• I’ve just changed religion to Islam!

• Just now? Why did you decide to change?

• Oh, I feel that Christianity is boring!

• That it’s boring?

• Mm!

• Why is it boring?

• Well, all the time … in the class, we always work with …

• You’re just kidding [another pupil in the group reacts].

• Nooo! I just switched to Islam!

• You’re joki …

• Now it will be Islam! [Joseph in a determined voice]

• But is it more exciting?

• I think so.

• What is so exciting about Islam?

• Prophets! I like them.

• Really? You like them?

• You’ll have to change your name! [more pupils enter the conversation]

• You’re joking!

• You’ll have to change your name too!

[…]

• Okay. I’ll change my name to … I’m called Abdul [Abdul sounds convinced].

• Abdul! (Vikdahl 2016, 191–192.)

It would seem that Abdul’s friendships were important for his religious conversion. Abdul belonged to a Christian family but his close friends in the class were Muslims, which may have affected his decision to switch from Christianity to Islam. We do not know whether he retained his new religion after school, in his Christian home environment. He may have changed his religious view in the meeting with his parents and became Joseph again.

Several of the younger pupils talked about circumstances that showed that their parents influenced their approach to religion and were therefore important significant others when it came to religion. Miriam said:

• In some families they think like this ‘We’re Buddhists’. If I was a Buddhist and had children, then my children must be Buddhists too. It shouldn’t be like that! You should be able to decide for yourself what you believe in! Or perhaps not believe in anything. You don’t have to be like your mum and dad.

• Do you others think that you should believe like mum and dad?

• Yes, I think so …

• Yes.

• Yes.

• Mm.

• When I was in Africa my aunts were, my grandmother’s …

• Yes?

• … my grandmother’s cousin. He’s got a lot of daughters … When I was there – they were all Muslims! […] I asked some people … don’t you want to belong to Christianity? But they said, ‘I want to follow my mother’. (Vikdahl 2016, 184-185)

The older pupils were more likely to understand the religious norms that existed in the Swedish culture. As already indicated, Sweden is a secularised country, and the analysis shows that the older pupils’ statements were in line with a secular approach. These young people repeatedly expressed that religion was an individual and private affair and a matter of choice. Even though several of them emphasised the right to choose whether to be religious or not, others indicated that there were social gains to be made by concealing their religious identity – if they had one. For example, as a religious person they risked being regarded as strange and someone who was joked about. One of the teachers explained: ‘I think young people have a norm how to be and it is not cool to be religious’ (Vikdahl 2016, 84). Some of the interviewed teachers told stories about how religious youths tried to tone down their religious identity in the hope of being accepted by their non-religious schoolmates. Even though there was a positive attitude among the older pupils to people’s different religious affiliations, living a religious lifestyle could prove difficult. One of the teachers responded like this to the question: ‘Is it okay to show a religious identity at school?’

• Yes and no. In one way it really is. We say that it’s okay, but don’t really think that it is. Being religious doesn’t have any high status, it’s not okay in that way. I think that many keep it to themselves. It’s better to play football or hockey or to express a different cultural affiliation than a religious one. That’s typically Swedish. So, I say that it’s not okay. It is questioned! But still – when you ask pupils they say ‘well, everyone has the freedom to express their religion’, but … (Vikdahl 2016, 114-115)

The interviews gave examples of how pupils ended up in situations in which their loyalty to their parents was put to test with help from their school, which may have made it impossible for them to relate to a generalised other. For example, two principals from different schools said that Muslim girls remained in the school corridors after the school day. The principals found this problematic and offered them an activity that they knew that some of the girls’ parents would dislike. They ran youth clubs in the afternoons, immediately after the school day. But the club activities partly depended on the pupils not being honest with their parents. Instead of saying they went to a youth club, which was voluntary, the girls said they went to an obligatory activity that was part of the school’s regular teaching programme.

One of the principals saw the youth club as a free zone for the Muslim girls and was aware that this could be perceived as provocative by the girls’ parents. She said:

• We sometimes help our Muslim girls to be a little freer. We say they have a school activity, but really they are at the youth club. There they can dance and maybe put on makeup. They can be teenage girls. Then, before going home they remove their makeup and put on their veils. I think that this a good thing for them. They are given the opportunity to live a little, with no harm done. […] From a parent perspective it could of course be seen as a threat. But I’ll deal with that if it comes to the crunch. But this is what many schools do. (Vikdahl 2016, 136)

The principal said that the school staff sometimes lied to the parents on the girls’ behalf by saying that their daughters were involved in school activities when in actual fact they were at the youth club.

Finnish sample

The differences between ages and self-reported gender in approaches to religion were also evident in the Finnish data (see also the statistical results supporting this in our Kuusisto, Kuusisto, and Kallioniemi 2016).

The young people also illustrated the complexity and fluidity of religiosity in their responses. The survey asked about the pupils’ own and their parents’ religious or worldview memberships. To the question, ‘which of the following do you identify with’, the respondents were able to choose more than one religious or worldview perspective. The following two examples illustrate the fluidity of the interview responses among the interviewees aged 12–13 in Year 6. A 12-year-old girl described the worldview in her family as follows:

Well at our home no one believes in anything, that my mom well she does not believe in God at all, not the Chinese or the Finnish one, and my dad was baptized [into the Lutheran Church, probably as an infant] but he cancelled [sic] that and he doesn’t believe in anything either. (Kuusisto, and Kallioniemi 2016, 96)

Furthermore, a boy of the same age said: ‘My Mom sort of also tries to somehow turn into … a Muslim so that she wouldn’t any longer be a Christian’ (Kuusisto, and Kallioniemi 2016, 96).

An interviewee in the age group 15–16 described her own worldview as: ‘I have my own religion which no one else has’ (Kuusisto, and Kallioniemi 2016, 97). This further illustrates the complex and mosaic nature of worldviews of young people in the societally secular and multi-faith Nordic setting.

Concerning the socialisation contexts in the Finnish setting, the examples here are also diverse. Some described a more religious home socialisation, whereas others said that religion did not have much of a role in their upbringing. The interview data also illustrated the importance of a mixed method research design for providing a more multifaceted picture of the topic area, in that interviews and open-ended survey responses often gave a much richer and more accurate view of what the pupils thought. In one of the interviews, a 15-year-old boy, Ville, wrote that his parents were atheists but that he was a Christian (Kuusisto, Poulter, and Kallioniemi 2017). When the interviewer noted that and asked him to say more about this, he said:

Ville: Well, it’s just that my parents just don’t believe in God, I don’t know why.

Interviewer: Yes … and is it so that you’ve been allowed to decide on whether you belong to the church or not, or?

Ville: Well, I do think my parents also belong to the church… at least I think so.

Interviewer: Yes.

Ville: But they do not. They are not Christians.

Interviewer: Yes. But you do not think of yourself as an Atheist, then, or?

Ville: No.

Interviewer: OK. Could you tell me about how it … what kind of role does religion have in your everyday, or your life?

Ville: Well, very big, yes. I read the Bible in the evenings, and I pray and all that (Kuusisto, Poulter, and Kallioniemi 2017, 117).

Ville’s example here also illustrates the individualisation of religious worldviews often raised in the discussions related to socialisation – that rather than parents aiming to teach particular values or worldview to their children, they may decide not to discuss their personal religious worldviews much with their children in the fear of exposing ‘ready ideas’ to them. This also connects to the discussion on religious or worldview education in the societal context at schools and preschools.

Conclusion

The Swedish study shows that the younger pupils were more positive to religion and religious diversity than the older ones. This is in an interest contrast with some of our previously reported statistical findings from Finland (Kuusisto, and Kallioniemi 2016) as well as the classic contact hypothesis (Allport, 1950), which assumes more openness with increasing familiarity with difference. However, we can assume the mechanism behind these results is simply different: One reason for this could be that many of these younger pupils came from religiously more active and involved homes, with a greater emphasis of religious socialisation practices. The same was not the case anymore for the older teenagers, who did also say that their parents were of great importance for their own approach to religion, however, perhaps the vastly secular societal hegemony and the thereby influenced peer group attitudes had already had more influence on their views. Also, the younger pupils had a more flexible approach to religion and people’s different religious affiliations, which is in line with the play stage.

The older respondents, aged 13 and 15, were at the age that coincided with the game stage. They did not show the same interest in religious issues yet were mature enough to understand the religious norms that existed in Swedish society. The analysis shows that the older respondents’ statements were more aligned with the secular societal hegemony. Some statements even indicated that there were social gains to be made if they concealed their religious identity – if they had one. In the game stage, people can combine different perspectives into a generalised other. However, the study showed that there were different approaches to religion that made it impossible for a person to perceive a generalised other, regardless of ability. The interviews also showed how the pupils’ loyalty to their parents was put to test with the aid of their school.

The differences between children and young people’s peer groups illustrate that as young people they often feel more comfortable to ‘come out religiously’ in some of their peer groups and at school. Religion may be perceived in many peer groups as something that is ‘uncool’ and not so relevant. This phenomenon is often reflecting the broader societal hegemony, which in both countries has been described in previous research as a special interpretation of secular Lutheranism in the Nordic countries (Kuusisto, Poulter, and Kallioniemi 2017). Accordingly, religion may be perceived as somewhat marginalised and isolated from the rest of the public sphere. This may encourage some children and young people to regard religion as uninteresting.

Previous studies have found gender differences in experiences and practices related to religion, examples of this have to an extent also been raised here. Perhaps what is perceived as the girls’ peer group culture allows more openly expressed interest in religion. However, the differences between individuals are more likely to differ more than what such a small sample could indicate in any broader level, so any generalisations should be made with caution (see also Kuusisto 2011, for descriptions of similar processes and negotiations on values and identities).

In addition, the place of domicile plays an important role in young people’s socialisation processes. In both Finland and Sweden, the variety of faith communities is not evenly distributed in the cities but is concentrated in different areas. Also, religious minorities are often both spread out across the country but also have some tighter local clusters (see e.g., Kuusisto 2011). Thus, the abilities of young people to understand religious and ideological differences but also to find like-minded peer groups can also notably vary. The socialisation processes of children and young people are complex and vary across contexts, each with their particular challenges and/or supporting factors.

This study shows the many sides of the religious socialisation process. Nowadays young peoples’ religiosity is fluid and fragmented. Results of this study shows young peoples’ religious socialisation at a microlevel and how they interpret living religion. In the study of lived religion, the study of individuals should be based on the actions, experiences, and views of real people (Ammerman 2016). In this way, research opens the role of religion in the everyday experiences of young people and in their own interpretations.

The study is based on interviews. Further research could use some auto bibliographic methods, such as young people’s writings, to gain a more comprehensive picture of the phenomenon being studied. It should also be in mind that research on religious issues is very sensitive, and it can be difficult for young people in particular to express their views on religion in interviews. Therefore, the picture provided by the study should be supplemented with different types of research methods.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, Sweden.

Notes on contributors

Linda Vikdahl

Linda Vikdahl is an associate professor at Södertörn University, Sweden. With a PhD in Religious Studies, her main research areas are disability and religion, young people and religion, religious diversity and newly resettled refugees and social participation. At present (2021-2022) she is principal investigator (PI) for the research project Stakeholders: Perspectives, Policies & Strategies - Social participation and mental health in laws and policy documents concerning the establishment of newly arrived refugees at Red Cross University, Sweden (https://www.rkh.se/forskning/var-forskningsinriktning/resiliency-mental-health-and-social-participation-among-refugees/stakeholders-perspectives-policies--strategies/).

Arniika Kuusisto

Arniika Kuusisto is a professor of Child and Youth Studies and heads the ECEC Teacher Education and Research Unit at Stockholm University, Sweden. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, and Research Director at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki. Her research interests are children’s and youths’ values, worldviews and how these are negotiated across different social contexts, including the societal educational arenas. At present (2018-2023), Kuusisto is PI for an ongoing Academy of Finland funded (Grant 315860) research project entitled ‘Growing up radical? The role of educational institutions in guiding young people’s worldview construction’ (https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/growing-up-radical/people).

Arto Kallioniemi

Arto Kallioniemi, ThD is a professor at the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki. He has specialised in religious and worldview education and is interested in issues related to inter-worldview dialogues and human rights education. Kallioniemi holds the UNESCO Chair on Values, Dialogue and Human Rights.

Notes

1. The project was approved by the Regional Ethical Review Board according to Swedish legislation (Regionala etikprövningsnämnen i Stockholm 2015/1618–31/5)

2. The interviews were conducted in 2016. The translations of the quotations from Swedish into English were done by the authors, checked by professional translator and edited with respect to confidentiality and readability.

3. The names of the people have been changed.