Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World

Researchers who seek to understand the complex dynamics of rural schools and communities have investigated the circumstances and experiences of rural residents whose characteristics differ from the norm and whose life choices differ f rom conventional wisdom about how best to live one's life. This study follows our own path within that tradition (see, e.g., Barton, 2012; Burnell, 2003; Jacob, 1997; Sherman, 2009), focusing on the "life choice" among some teachers to be nonreligious in rural places where religious observance is expected-as it is elsewhere across the United States.To learn about the experiences of nonreligious rural K-12 teachers, we interviewed 24 individuals (working in all regions of the United States) who explicitly disclosed their nonbelief in a supernatural deity. Based on our reading of the related literature, we could find no evidence that anyone had previously studied nonbelieving K-12 teachers-wherever located. This report is part of a larger effort, in fact, that included 85 teachers from rural, urban, and suburban locales nationwide.As our background prominently includes rural education research, the study was attentive to locale, and we asked all interviewees what their communities were like. If locale were not evident in teachers' discourse, we asked about it. Probes often asked about social class structure and dynamics, race, and economic circumstances. As we explain later, our sample was neither random nor stratified, but because we were tracking locale, we were able to determine that 28% of our respondents worked in rural schools. Indeed, we were able to identify which schools they worked in and then retrieve additional contextual data from public sources.One might frame the principal issue of the study as "marginalization," with the implication being that life choices, including the choice to hold a particular viewpoint that differs sharply from conventional wisdom, are abnormal, perhaps even deviant.1 Atheism, for instance, would be read as abnormal on such a basis, especially considering that rural community members adhering to strong local norms with respect to religion (e.g., Elder & Conger, 2000) would be likely to make such a judgment. We predictably do not make that judgment, because we understand as legitimate the decision making (about life's meanings and purposes) that arises from many sources including various sorts of thought processes, commitments, and ideologies.We mention this view at the outset because it underwrites our efforts to keep systematic bias from influencing our data and our interpretation. Neither Barton (2012) nor Burnell (2003) presumed that the characteristics, practices, and beliefs of their subjects (respectively, homosexuality and refusal to pursue college studies) were abnormal, inadequate, or reprehensible. Those scholars' efforts to bracket their personal perspectives, whatever those perspectives might have been, enabled them to derive insights that would otherwise have been unlikely.2Therefore, we undertook this research with the assumption that atheism is normal because it can be a reasonable position that might even harbor interesting and useful insights for decision making about life's meaning and purposes. Furthermore, we made the assumption that what nonbelieving teachers think about the relevant issues and circumstances (e.g., what it means to hold a view counter to conventional wisdom, what personal skepticism contributes to one's views about teaching) might prove interesting to education scholars and curious practitioners.At the same time, some evidence suggested to us that rural places might not be uniformly narrow and judgmental in their treatment of difference. Some studies of international immigrants to rural places in the United States, for example, showed that they may find such places hospitable in part because they develop bonds within their own locallyestablished cultural groups before establishing bonds with others, especially those with long-standing family ties to the local mainstream community (e. …

The "Ins" and "Outs" of Rural Teachers: Who Are Atheists, Agnostics, and Freethinkers.

This paper explores religious adolescents' reported experiences of secondary schools. Fifty-four qualitative interviews were conducted in places of worship in three cities in England with Christians (n=46), Jews (n=38) and Muslims (n=15). Secondary schools of a religious and non-religious character were reported as not providing a suitable environment for religious observances, nor as a place to act and behave according to participants' religious principles. Religious adolescents reported prejudice and criticism of their beliefs or religious affiliations from their peers and sometimes from teachers. They also perceived their religious traditions to be distorted, inaccurately or unfairly represented in some lessons. The focus of this paper is the identity choices religious adolescents reported in response to these challenges. Three groups of identity choices are theorised and explored: religious identity seeking, religious identity declaration and religious identity masking. The findings are discussed in view of religious identity construction theory, good practice for teachers and also the potential concerns of faith communities.

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Religious Identity Choices in English Secondary Schools.

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Understanding fundamentalism: Christian, Islamic, and Jewish movements

Highly religious students from fundamentalist or sectarian religious communities face unique challenges in pursuing higher education, directly bearing on their educational opportunities. Th...

Ultra-Orthodox Women Pursuing Higher Education: Motivations and Challenges.

The aim of this article is to present a framework for studying the religious identity development of highly religious Christian and Muslim adolescents. Building on existing theories on identity development, the authors define highly religious Christian and Muslim adolescents as orthoprax adolescents and explore the consequences of this for reflection on the religious identity development of these groups of youngsters. This study is a first step toward gaining qualitative insights into the religious identity development of orthoprax adolescents and filling up a perceived gap in research on religious identity development.

Janneke Westerink

Papers

Developing a Framework for Research on Religious Identity Development of Highly Committed Adolescents