Christianity comprises an umbrella of communities with different orientation and heritage. This plurality entails a challenge for the RE-teacher, located in a classroom (often) including students with different orientations of Christianity (and non-Christian religions/worldviews). Christian plurality in West-European countries is, due to ensuing immigration from countries in- and outside Europe, such as Latin-America and the Middle East, further impacting on the composition of several school classes. Simultaneously Christianity represents an essential component of majority culture, in Sweden and several other European countries. As majority conceptions may impact on RE teaching content (Berglund 2020) this condition could imply a challenge for social cohesion including both majority and minority orientations of Christianity. Swedish RE-curriculum states that RE should support co-existence and cohesion in the plural society. However, we need to approach such an ambition critically regarding its curricular conditions. 

In this contribution we examine how Christianity is represented in national RE teaching books for Swedish upper secondary school. We have found a general tendency to favorize a modern liberal Christianity in favor of other non-majority (in different respects) conservative Christian orientations. The purpose of our contribution is to examine how liberal Christianity is shaped in teaching books for the Swedish upper secondary school. The selection of books is based on the actual use by RE-teachers in two Swedish regions. Eight books by different authors comprises material for our study. Based in the disciplines of educational research and religious studies, a practical-text-approach (Hellspong & Ledin 1997) is applied, discerning three levels of implicit meaning and their internal relationships: the overall composition, the intertextual links and semantic content. Our preliminary results show a tendency to favorize a modernized liberal Christianity, often through recurrent linguistic means. We will discuss the implications of our results in relation to the significance of religions and worldviews in education for social cohesion.