‘Just leave it blank’ non-religious children and their negotiation of prayer in school

Abstract

This article examines how non-religious children experience acts of collective worship and prayer in primary school settings and analyses how they negotiate religion and their nonreligious identities in these events. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork examining nonreligious childhoods and collective worship in three English primary schools, the authors explore how non-religious children demonstrate their agency when confronted with particular boundaries and concepts related to religion and non-religion in school contexts. Attending to the experiences, perspectives, and practices of non-religious children adds to our understanding of the varieties of non-religion, which has to date largely focused on elite, adult populations.Focusing on non-religious children's experiences of prayer reveals how these children did not experience tensions between praying to God and their non-religious identities and articulated their own interpretations of these practices, deepening understanding of the lived realities of non-religious cultures and identities.

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