Students Read Other Faiths Through the Lens of Their Own Beliefs

When teenagers encounter a sacred text from a religion they have never studied, what do they see? According to new research published in the Journal of Religious Education, the answer is largely themselves. A team of researchers at Sakarya University in Turkey has found that high school students confronted with passages from unfamiliar religious traditions consistently interpret those texts through the filter of their own faith, culture, and moral intuitions, a phenomenon the researchers frame as interpreting the other through the self. The study, based on written responses from 35 high school students, offers one of the most detailed qualitative portraits to date of how adolescents actually make meaning when they meet religious diversity in the classroom, and it carries uncomfortable implications for how religious education is designed around the world.

The research team, led by Yusuf Keskin of the Faculty of Education at Sakarya University and including Sevgi Coşkun Keskin, Özkan Özer, and Ayşegül Kırtel, designed the study around a deceptively simple task. Each student was presented with sacred texts drawn from different living religions and asked to do two things: identify which religion the text belonged to, and explain the reasoning behind that judgment. The design deliberately avoided guiding prompts or corrective feedback, ensuring that whatever interpretive frameworks students applied were entirely their own. The researchers then subjected the responses to both content analysis and descriptive analysis, systematic qualitative techniques for identifying recurring patterns and themes in textual data while remaining faithful to participants’ own language and categories.

The findings reveal a striking asymmetry between what religious education curricula typically aim to teach and what students spontaneously do. Rather than deploying neutral or academically grounded criteria to classify the texts, students overwhelmingly reached for the familiar. They interpreted passages through their own religious understandings, their lived cultural experiences, and their personal moral evaluations. A passage’s tone, imagery, or ethical content was matched against the religious and cultural material the students already carried with them, and the resulting match—or mismatch—drove their identification of the text’s origin. In effect, the students were using their own tradition as a measuring stick for someone else’s scripture, projecting their internalized categories onto material that demanded, in principle, an outward-looking analysis.

One of the most theoretically significant patterns the researchers identified was what they call value proximity. Students frequently associated a text with a particular religion not because of doctrinal or historical markers but because the values expressed in the passage felt close to the values they associated with their own tradition, or with a tradition they perceived as morally similar. When a text emphasized compassion, charity, or submission to the divine in ways that resonated with the students’ own moral vocabulary, they tended to map it onto religions they regarded as sharing those values. Value proximity thus functioned as an implicit classification system, one that operated beneath conscious analytical reflection and shaped judgments that students presented as conclusions about the texts themselves.

Alongside this value-based matching, the study documented a more troubling pattern: religious ethnocentrism. In a subset of responses, students evaluated texts from other religions in ways that privileged their own tradition as the standard against which all others were measured. Rather than simply recognizing similarity, some participants treated difference as deficiency, framing other traditions through an implicitly hierarchical lens. The concept echoes a long line of social-psychological research on ethnocentrism and religiocentrism, including classic work on religious in-group bias in schools, and its appearance among adolescents in a plural religious environment underscores how deeply such attitudes can be embedded before adulthood. The researchers stress that these ethnocentric evaluations appeared in some, not all, responses, but their presence at all is a signal that religious education cannot assume neutrality on the part of its students.

The methodological choices of the study are central to the credibility of these conclusions. The researchers employed a basic qualitative research design with criterion sampling, meaning participants were selected because they possessed the specific characteristics relevant to the research question—in this case, being high school students with religious education experience. The 35 participants responded to the text-identification task in anonymized written forms, and the researchers adopted what they describe as a non-directive approach throughout data collection. No explanations, hints, or corrective feedback were provided, which means the interpretive frameworks on display in the data were not artifacts of the research situation itself. Content analysis, following established methodologies for systematically coding qualitative material, allowed the team to move from individual responses to generalizable patterns, while descriptive analysis preserved the texture and diversity of student reasoning.

The study situates itself within a broader hermeneutical turn in religious education scholarship. Over the past two decades, influential scholars such as Robert Jackson have argued that religious education should adopt an interpretive approach, in which students learn to study religious diversity as active interpreters rather than passive recipients of information. Complementary work on hermeneutical learning by scholars such as Didier Pollefeyt has emphasized that encountering the religious other is always mediated by the learner’s own horizon of understanding. The Sakarya study provides empirical grounding for these theoretical claims: it shows concretely that when students meet the religious other, they do so through identity-based and value-oriented meaning-making processes, exactly as hermeneutical theory would predict. What the theory underplayed, and the data reveal, is how automatic and invisible this projection can be to the students themselves.

The practical implications for classrooms are considerable. If students interpret unfamiliar religious texts primarily through their own frameworks, then simply exposing them to religious diversity may be insufficient—and may even reinforce ethnocentric readings if left unexamined. The researchers argue that religious education must help students critically reflect on the interpretive frameworks they bring to these encounters. In practice, this means making the process of interpretation itself an object of study: asking students not only what a text means and where it comes from, but why they judged as they did, which assumptions they imported, and how their own identity shaped the reading. Such metacognitive reflection transforms religious education from the transmission of facts about religions into training in interpretive self-awareness, a skill with demonstrable value for interreligious understanding in plural societies.

The Turkish context of the study adds a further layer of significance. Religious culture and moral knowledge education in Türkiye occupies a distinctive position between confessional instruction and non-confessional study of religions, and prior research on Turkish adolescents’ perceptions of religious education has documented a complex landscape of attitudes and expectations. This new study contributes a fine-grained qualitative account of what happens inside that landscape when students face texts from religions beyond their own. It also speaks to international debates, from Finnish and Dutch discussions of worldview education to British arguments about religious literacy, all of which grapple with the same underlying question: how can schools teach about religions in a way that fosters genuine understanding rather than reinforcing in-group perspectives?

Ultimately, the study’s central insight is both simple and demanding. Students do not arrive at the religious other with an empty mind; they arrive with a self, and that self does the interpreting. The research suggests that the quality of interreligious understanding a student can achieve depends not only on how much they learn about other religions, but on how well they understand the interpretive machinery of their own tradition, culture, and values. The authors, who report no external funding and no competing interests, position their work as a qualitative contribution to a literature that has often relied on theoretical argument or quantitative attitude surveys. By showing identity-based and value-oriented meaning-making in students’ own words, the study offers educators a concrete starting point: before teaching students about the religious other, teach them to notice the self that stands between them and the text. That reflexive turn, the researchers suggest, may be the foundation on which authentic interreligious learning is built.

Subject of Research: Student meaning-making in interpreting sacred texts from different religions in religious education

Article Title: Interpreting the other through the self: student meaning-making in religious education

Article References: Keskin, Y., Coşkun Keskin, S., Özer, Ö., & Kırtel, A. (2026). Interpreting the other through the self: student meaning-making in religious education. Journal of Religious Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40839-026-00310-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s40839-026-00310-w

Keywords: religious education, student meaning-making, sacred texts, religious ethnocentrism, value proximity, interreligious understanding, qualitative research, hermeneutics, religious identity, interpretive frameworks, Interpreting, other