Teaching about secular worldviews

Stenmark, Mikael

doi:10.1080/01416200.2026.2671181

Teaching about secular worldviews

2026-01-01

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Stenmark, Mikael *

DOI：10.1080/01416200.2026.2671181

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In several European countries, teaching nonreligious or secular worldviews in religious education (RE) in public schools is either mandatory or recommended. I maintain that there are several challenges that such education must address for educators to teach about secular worldviews as adequately as they teach about religions. To overcome these, I argue we need to develop a symmetrical conceptual framework that identifies what secular worldviews affirm (not just deny), in contrast to religious ones, while acknowledging the significant grey area between them. I develop such an integrative framework and explore how distinctions between collective and personal, elite and folk, reflective and non-reflective, and comprehensive and fragmentised worldviews can be applied to both religions and their secular counterparts. One outcome of these conceptualisations is the need to distinguish between religious nones and secular nones. Additionally, I contend that one important secular worldview missing from the religious education literature is scientism, or scientific naturalism. We must recognise the critical difference between scientism and secular humanism in worldview studies and education.

Keywords:

Nonreligious worldviews

secular worldviews

worldview education

scientism

Teaching about secular worldviews

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