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On the 1st of July 2011 a new education act was carried out, which elucidate that all education in course of a public principal shall be non-denominational. In relation to this a public debate about the educational system's policy toward religious institutions, particularly the earlier nation church Svenska Kyrkan, and religious traditions burst out. This thesis reconstructs the “Lucia debates” that were kept during the years 2011-2012. The aim of this thesis is to identify the mechanisms of the Lucia debate's issue and progress. Further are the discussed question formulations “Why have the medial debates come into existence?” and “What forces manage the debates to progress?”. Through using an analytical qualitative argumentation method the debates were reconstructed of digital debate articles published at the Swedish forums Newsmill and SvT Debatt. The implications of the first question formulation are that the debates have come into existence through the concreteness of the Swedish secularisation among clusters of people in society, and that this people therefore force themselves to discuss the transformative process. The implication is also that several groups share variant normalized social structures which they will discuss when the dissimilarities become distinct for them. The implications of the second question formulation are that the debates have progressed through cluster's and individual's need to receive their social institutions confirmed as valid, but also by reason of the inability among the public representatives to create an universal secular legislation.

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This thesis elucidates the relationship between the emergence of literary aestheticism and ambiguities in the status and meaning of religious doubt in late Victorian Britain. Aestheticism has often been understood as a branch of a larger, epochal crisis of religious faith: a creed of 'art-for-art's-sake' and a cult of beauty are thought to have emerged to occupy the vacuum created by the departure of God, or at least by the attenuation of traditional forms of belief. However, the model of secularisation implicit in this account is now often challenged by historians, sociologists, and literary critics, and it fails to capture what was at stake in Swinburne and Pater's efforts to reconceptualise aesthetic experience. I suggest affinities between their shared insistence that art be understood as an independent, disinterested realm, a creed beyond creeds, and secularisation understood as the emptying of religion from political and social spheres. Secondly, I analyse how Swinburne and Pater use the apparently neutral space created by their relegation of religion to imagine the secular in far more radical terms than conventional Victorian models of religious doubt allowed. Their varieties of aestheticism often posit secularism not as a disillusioning effect of modern rationality but as a primordial enchantment with the sensuous and earthly, prior to a 'fall' into religious transcendence. I explore their tendency to identify this ideal of the secular with aesthetic value, as well as the paradoxes produced by their efforts to efface the distinctions between the religious and the aesthetic. My argument proceeds through close readings that reveal how the logic of aestheticism grows out of Swinburne's and Pater's efforts to challenge and refashion the models of religious doubt and secularism established by a previous generation of Victorian writers - Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Tennyson - and situates this shared revisionary impulse within larger debates surrounding the idea of secularisation.

This thesis examines how J.M. Coetzee's engagement with Christian thinkers and concepts has shaped his fiction. Through a series of close readings, I show how Coetzee, who does not identify as a Christian, reworks and reimagines concepts from key Christian interlocutors across his writings. Each close reading is informed by a consideration of what Coetzee had himself been reading during the writing process, based on evidence in interviews, essays, monographs, and archival materials. Attending to Coetzee's reading and writing, together, illuminates the distinctively self-conscious nature of his engagement with Christianity. Whereas current Coetzee criticism has given attention to specific Christian themes and lexical choices in his fiction, this thesis demonstrates that Coetzee's engagement with Christianity is more profound and pervasive than has been credited hitherto. In addition to the vast body of allusion to Scripture in his writings, Christian thinkers have in fact played a major role in his innovative approach to the novel, a genre predominantly forged in Christian contexts, and in his handling of narrative more generally. Through its explication of Coetzee's extensive dialogue with Christian thinking, and with the Bible, across the full span of his career, this thesis seeks to describe the nuanced and diverse ways in which Coetzee's writings have revised and reimagined this vast and complex religious legacy.

The Religious Census of 1851 revealed the registration district of Alresford in Hampshire to be a particular bastion of the Church of England. This study considers the basis of this Anglican strength and how the established Church managed to retain its dominance against the challenge from Nonconformity in the context of an apparent waning of religious commitment nationally. Starting from c.1780 to pick up the roots of any early signs of local dissent, the thesis considers the evolving relationship between church and community in this rural part of southern England which comprised a small but prosperous market town surrounded by a variety of agricultural parishes. The study is positioned in the national context of the major political, social and economic upheaval of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concluding with the period between the two world wars. The research consists primarily, but not exclusively, of qualitative analysis, which draws on a rich variety of primary sources including clerical service registers, vestry minutes, churchwarden and overseer accounts, school, court and parish records, enclosure and tithe agreements, parish magazines, local and national newspapers and private correspondence. The general historiography to which the work contributes is around secularisation and denominational rivalry, and regular reference is made to this and more specific sub-themes throughout the thesis. I will argue that the enduring local dominance of the Church of England was due to its enormous financial strength, its central involvement in the provision of charity and welfare, a re-invigorated commitment to pastoral care and the absence of any senior local sponsorship for Nonconformity. Underpinning everything was the formation of a particularly tight nexus between church and parish elites which served to preserve effective Anglican hegemony well beyond the First World War. It was not until the 1920s and 1930s, when the church started to lose its social relevance in welfare and education nationally, that the cracks in the façade of local dominance became irrefutable.

One hundred years ago, Max Weber postulated in his seminal work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that after a tremendous development, capitalism would either reach a dead end, or would enter a new era of development through the guidance of new prophets (Weber, [1904] 2003:182). The tremendous development foreseen has occurred but have Weber’s new prophets appeared? Through a close analysis of the context in which the word prophet is found in the Bible and through the description that Weber gave to the concept of prophet in The Sociology of Religion (Weber, 1963) a prophet’s ideal type was constructed with fourteen specific characteristics. This ideal type was then used as a grid of analysis to put to the test the nineteen most renowned leadership gurus, potential candidate to the title of prophet.

This bachelor thesis examines how three decades of textbooks in the subject religion for middle-school inform students about Jesus' life and to what level they conform to their decade's specific regulatory documents. The results are analyzed through an analysis schedule, showing if the texts are stating, explaining, analyzing, or normative in character and with the help of a secularisation theory determine if this is something that changes over time. The outcome of the analysis shows that textbooks written in the 1950s are both explaining and normative to their character and correspond well to the regulatory documents. This is also the conclusion for textbooks in the 1980s but these textbooks show an increasing amount of analyzing texts with just a few normative elements. Comparing textbooks from these decades to today's textbooks, the result shows that today's textbooks don't match the regulatory documents' requirements of emphasizing that students analyze and find their identity. Instead, these textbooks are to a wider range stating to their character but at the same time having no normative elements at all. An interesting result is also the fact that the textbooks from the three decades more or less include the same information about Jesus' life but, as written earlier, there are bigger differences over time in how the textbooks describe this information. The results support one interpretation of the secularisation theory, according to which a country's textbooks tend to be less normative the more secular the country is.

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