Decolonizing Religious Education? Protestant Frameworks in Norwegian KRLE Textbooks after Curriculum Reform

Recent scholarship has highlighted how modern religious education remains shaped by Protestant assumptions about what religion is and how it should be studied. Drawing on Jenny Berglund’s concept of the Protestant “marinade” of Scandinavian religious education, this paper analyzes Norwegian RE textbooks published after the 2020 curriculum reform (LK20). The reform partially sought to move beyond the traditional “world religions paradigm,” but textbook analysis demonstrates that religions such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism continue to be constructed through categories historically derived from Protestant Christianities, including scripture, doctrinal belief, and theological concepts such as salvation and messianism. These frameworks implicitly position Christianity as the normative model for understanding religion and therefore present other traditions through a Christian lens. The paper concludes by proposing a pedagogical shift to relocate these categories within the study of Christianity, allowing other traditions to be presented through categories more closely aligned with their own internal logics.