Religious education in Swedish schools aims to be as objective and non-confessional as possible. This sort of education can lead to that the different religions are presented in a way which is unfamiliar to the followers of the different religions. This problem is what I have focused on in this essay since I myself was a victim of a similar situation. As a syriac-orthodox youth I felt that my Christianity was not the same as the one presented in school. I felt that it had nothing in common with what I learned in my church, therefore I asked myself the question: Whose Christianity is being represented? Therefore I have focused on the syriac-orthodox church in this research.

The purpose of my essay was to enlighten the differences between religious education in syriac-orthodox churches and Swedish community schools. I choose In addition to that I also wanted to enlighten how religious syriac-orthodox youths are affected by the difference in the religious education in both the churches and schools. To gain the necessary information for the research I used qualitative studies in form of semi-structured interviews and observations. My informants were made up by five girls and three boys, all of them being eighteen years old and living in areas close to Stockholm.

The conclusion of my research was that there are several differences between the religious education within churches and schools. One of the differences is the approach towards religion, and the churches have a more positive and personal approach towards religion while the schools have a more negative and distant approach towards religion. Another one is that the churches seem to have more knowledge about Christianity than the schools and therefore the churches can provide a more in depth study of different topics regarding Christianity than the schools. Regarding how the students were affected by the differences the result was that the aspect of knowledge had made the religious youths to lose their trust in the education given to them by the school. This was an effect of how they experienced that the teachers taught the pupils wrong facts about Christianity and therefore they felt that they could no longer trust the teachers in school, because if they taught wrong thing about Christianity they could also teach wrong things about the other religions as well.