The aim of this study is to examine the different types of challenges and struggles that religious students face in the Swedish school system, more specifically the different struggles that occur within the Swedish subject of religious studies. This will be done by analysing different types of opinion forming articles that expresses how religious students are excluded from the subject and the school environment. The questions that will lead this study and determine which direction of development it will take, are the following.

1.     What are the problems and challenges being expressed in each of the opinion forming articles?

2.     Do the different types of religious traditions problems and challenges that are more characteristic for their own specific situation?

3.     How can these problems and challenges that are identified within opinion forming articles, be depicted, and further understood through the Kittelmanns operationalization of secularity/secularism?

When it comes to the opinion forming articles that will be examined, a demarcation has been made to articles that concerns the Abrahamitic religions, i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These articles will be examined with a qualitative text analysis and more specifically, with the methods of qualitative text condensation and discourse analysis. Karin Kittelmann has in her thesis (2015) concluded that a secular discourse exists within the classroom for the subject of religion within the Swedish schools, and that the secular discourse perpetuates itself as a hegemonic position. This study will use Kittelmanns operationalization of secularity and secularism to analyse the articles to further understand how the classroom environment relates to a society that has been strongly described as secular. The conclusion this study makes is that a strong secularism is present within the classroom for the subject of religion in Sweden, but also that this presence is crucial for understanding the secularity of Sweden.