Paper short abstract:

The ethnographies of the religious schools in Czech Republic and Slovakia will show the mutual redefinition of secular and religious framing of these schools. The school actors use a specific "rational" mixture of secular and religious arguments as "charter" for their school.

Paper long abstract:

Religious schools can be seen as ambivalent spaces where the secular and the religious engage in an ongoing mutual redefinition. This paper focuses on a set of cases from the Czech and Slovak republics, where equal state funding for religious, private and public schools has been ensured since 1990. These schools are invested with diverse expectations and motivations. The founding actors (be it a diocese, a religious order or a Protestant church, but more than 90 % are Catholic) typically expect that some level of religiosity is lived and offered to the students and parents. At the same time, only a minority of students of religious schools come from core religious families (even in the more traditional Slovakia); they choose religious schools based on their reputation of familiarity, safety and individual approach. The teachers and managing personnel often (but not always) see the school as an opportunity to seek and perform their own (sometimes particular) religiosity or spirituality. The state (represented by the school inspectorate) expects higher teaching quality or innovative approach. In my paper, I analyse how the different actors navigate themselves in the schools where secular and religious meet in mutual redefinition. It creates the possibility for different actors to bricoler the specific "rational" mixture of secular and religious arguments, which come to form a specific "charter" for their school. The differences of these "charters" reflect and illuminate the dynamic processes of renegotiation of the position of churches and church religiosity in (post) secular societies.