Critical Religious Literacies and Opportunities for Alterity across YA Literature

In Toliver's (2018) article about alterity, innocence, and the character of Rue in The Hunger Games (Collins, 2008), she outlined how some readers reacted negatively to the casting of a Black actor to play the part of Rue, even though the text describes Rue in multiple places as Black. Because Rue is portrayed as innocent, sweet, and agentive, many readers have been so conditioned by racist stereotypes of Black girls as promiscuous, loud, or incapable that they couldn’t reconcile those qualities with Rue's Blackness. Toliver (2018) defined alterity as being created when texts ask readers “to push beyond their comfort zones in order to understand concepts that require them to expand their beliefs” (p. 6). Other scholars (e.g., Levinas, 1999; Spivak, 2013) note that fundamentally, alterity asks readers to attend to difference, particularly focusing on “the other of the other,” which “exceeds the logic of the self/other binary” (Bray, 2003, p. 74). Readers’ responses to the discomfort inherent in experiencing alterity is individual in nature: in Toliver's example, some readers reacted to their experience with alterity by taking to social media with racist rants against the casting choices for the movies. However, other research (e.g., Ivey & Johnston, 2023) suggests that some readers who experience alterity undergo emotional, social, and intellectual growth.

Historically and currently, religion works as a powerful sociopolitical force in global conflicts and events. Currently, in the United States, where the authors live and teach, the rise in white Christian nationalist rhetoric—which prioritizes a vision of the United States as a Christian nation with God-ordained hierarchies that privilege white, Christian men—continues to spill into public school spaces in school board elections (Prins et al., 2024) and (importantly for English language arts [ELA] teachers and literacy researchers) in moves to ban books from public school classrooms and libraries that challenge this vision. Groups like Moms for Liberty have quite successfully used religiopolitical and parents’ rights rhetoric to pressure school boards to ban books in public school classrooms and libraries in record numbers (PEN America, 2023; Prins et al., 2024), and most often, these banned books feature characters who have diverse gender, race, and sexual identities (PEN America, 2023)—leading us to believe that such movements are a reactive response to the alterity readers may experience when they encounter “the other of the other” (Bray, 2003, p. 74). The increasing ascendance of white Christian nationalist rhetoric in U.S. public schools has serious implications for all students (Johnson et al., 2024), but especially for students who are part of religiously or racially marginalized communities (Edwards, 2024; Hsu/Chhî, 2024), who are being increasingly positioned as an unwelcome and undesirable “other” in their own schools.

Why some readers respond to alterity with defensiveness, while others’ experiences with alterity result in increased empathy and expansiveness, is beyond the scope of this study; however, we highlight the crucial role the text plays in such encounters. We consider in this study how the stories told in young adult literature (YAL) might support readers as they build the skills, attitudes, and understandings to respond to alterity—particularly religious alterity—in ways that encourage their emotional, social, and intellectual growth. YAL has long been positioned (Ginsberg & Glenn, 2019; Hays, 2021) as a resource for teachers, librarians, and youth who wish to notice and name societal and systemic inequities through humanizing narratives (Paris & Winn, 2013) that portray youth who are affected by systems of power and harm as more than just stereotypes (Toliver & Timmons-Long, 2023). Social media movements like We Need Diverse Books (n.d.) and #DisruptTexts (n.d.) highlight the potential of relevant, representative, and diverse YAL to disrupt dominant narratives. These movements assert that YAL can be a powerful tool in consciousness-raising projects that build empathy and understanding and seek to explore how societal inequities around constructions of race, gender, class, and ability influence youth's ability to construct their own identity and read the word and the world around them (Freire & Macedo, 1987).

Scholars have noted that religion's influences on youth identity have been understudied in YAL scholarship (Campbell, 2015; DeWalt, 2018), even as there is a growing interest in how religious practices and religious identities intersect and influence youths’ literacy practices (Rackley, 2014; Skerrett, 2014). Anderson (2016) noted that “the imbrication of politics and religion is becoming a matter of growing interest for young adult writers and readers” (p. 182). Examinations of religious identity and literacy practices have both personal, social, and political implications for young readers, and thus warrant the attention of literacy scholars.

In this critical content analysis of 107 award-winning or honored young adult (YA) books, our research questions were these:

How might the representation of religious identities, beliefs, and practices in award-winning YA books support critical religious literacy skills?

Religious Literacy and Critical Religious Literacy

For many scholars, religious literacy in the United States is a response to concerns about “how little Americans know about religion” (Soules & Jafralie, 2021). Prothero (2007) argued that Americans have surprisingly little knowledge about basic facts regarding world religions, limiting their ability to “participate fully in social, political, and economic life in a nation and a world in which religion counts” (p. 19). As such, Prothero's definition of religious literacy centers “the ability to understand and use religious terms, symbols, images, beliefs, practices, scriptures, heroes, themes, and stories” (pp. 16–17). However, the definition of religious literacy continues to evolve beyond simple knowledge of world religions. For example, Moore’s (2007, 2010, 2022) suggestion to address religion from an academic perspective using a cultural studies approach (Hirsch, 1987) emphasizes the distinction between devotional expressions of religions and the academic study of religion. This framework emphasizes an understanding of religions as dynamic, internally diverse, and culturally embedded. Moore (2007) argued that such an approach is not only constitutionally sound, but can also “help diminish discriminatory practices [while] providing information to help educators proactively shape their educational environments so that all students feel a sense of belonging” (p. 33). Thus, religious literacy as a concept has now come to encompass skills and practices that extend far beyond factual knowledge about religions.

How religious literacy ought to be developed among Americans continues to be discussed and researched within the field of education. Scholars and practitioners within the social studies, for example, have developed documentation explicitly delineating teachers’ responsibility to develop religious literacy in their curriculum (see the C3 Framework of the National Council for the Social Studies, 2017, p. 92). Such curricular standards have yet to reach other fields. ELA standards do not yet include any formal commitment (either in the Common Core or the National Council of Teachers of English standards) to religious literacy, aside from noting that literary allusions may be pulled from religious texts. Models from the social studies may provide resources useful to literacy scholars and ELA teachers seeking to support religious literacy development in public school classrooms, particularly when the goal is “effective and engaged citizenship in an interconnected and diverse nation and world” (NCSS, 2017, p. 92). However, many literacy scholars remain interested in the ways religion intersects with literacy practices (Dávila, 2015; Hadley, 2022; Juzwik et al., 2019; Muhammad, 2015; Skerrett, 2014), which implies there is potential for literacy scholars and ELA teachers to develop literacy-specific ways of approaching religious literacy.

ELA's discipline-specific ways of looking at the term “literacy” undoubtedly affects the ways we understand the boundaries of what religious literacy is and how it ought to be developed alongside our disciplinary commitments (Olshefski, in press). At its simplest level, we understand literacy to be the process of making meaning through practices like reading, decoding, and interpreting sign systems (many of which, but not all, are linguistic). Religious literacy, then, might be the process whereby one makes meaning through interpreting sign systems associated with religious communities. However, we cannot talk about how we understand religious literacy without engaging sociocultural theories of literacy that attend to how interpretive meaning-making of signs systems is part of a reader's identity formation (McCarthy & Moje, 2002) and deeply imbricated within communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). For example, an individual who grew up in a Biblicist Evangelical community has been socialized to make meaning of both the biblical text as well as their surrounding world through a distinct set of processes (Juzwik, 2014) that might differ from those of, say, someone who grew up in a Catholic context (LeBlanc, 2015), or someone who learned textual interpretation practices within an Orthodox Jewish day school (Hassenfeld, 2024). Religious literacy practices, too, influence how readers read and make meaning outside of explicitly religious contexts as well (Juzwik & McKenzie, 2015; Rackley, 2014).

To be religiously literate, then, is to be made aware of not only one's own but others’ religiously informed meaning-making processes (Francis & Dinham, 2015). As Biesta et al. (2019) suggested: “The religiously literate person has the intelligence and thoughtfulness to be able to converse with others in society in a way which respectfully recognises their religious beliefs” (p. 26). Thus, religious literacy does not necessitate religious devotion or belief, but rather the recognition of meaning-making processes gleaned from religious communities. Although knowledge or knowledges involving religion (Marcus & Ralph, 2021; Prothero, 2007; Soules & Jafralie, 2021) are useful in understanding particular meaning-making processes, religious literacy also requires a disposition that approaches another's religiously informed meaning-making processes with curiosity, regardless of what they already know about (or believe about, for that matter) the other's faith or beliefs (Kunzman, 2006).

Just as we cannot talk about our definition of religious literacy without appealing to sociocultural theories of literacy, we can equally not define what we mean by critical religious literacy (CRL) without appealing to critical theories of literacy that position the interpretative meaning-making process of sign systems as also always in relationship with politicized and institutionalized contexts and structures. Lankshear and McLaren (1993) fleshed out a definition of critical literacy that defines it as a process of meaning making that explores how and why some social and cultural groups have unequal access to both political and social power. Critical literacy praxis in an ELA context, then, might involve “textual studies that are analyzed at the discursive level in which the texts were created and in which they are sustained” (Bishop, 2014, p. 53) in a project of critical consciousness-raising (Freire, 1970/2000). Thus, a critical religious literacy approach to texts requires an examination of how religiously informed meaning-making processes might “engage the policies of daily life in the quest for a more truly democratic social order” (Lankshear & McLaren, 1993). Such an approach requires readers to grapple with both the positive and negative impacts of religious phenomena, communities, and experiences (Goldstein et al., 2013) at the individual, community, national, and global levels.

Critical religious literacy practices are marked by the ability of the reader to engage in critical religious readings of texts, compose texts that engage religion in complex and nuanced ways, and engage in conversations around religion that are richly contextualized and that acknowledge the power that religion has at the individual, societal, and global level. Such practices are foundational tools and skills for readers as they ultimately critique power and oppression associated with religious discourses in order to bring about liberatory outcomes. Critical religious literacy readings of texts differ significantly from devotional religious readings of texts. Most simply, we can consider devotional religious readings as the result of a reader using their religious beliefs, doctrines, and experiences as a tool to draw meaning from literary texts. Consider, for example, the following example of devotional religious reading practices from an evangelical Christian describing how she read literature as a teenager:

I really connected to God with books—like an odd amount probably. I remember reading The Great Gatsby. It was a very religious experience. I have tons of journal entries that are quotes from The Great Gatsby and then me writing about what it taught me about God and human nature. (Hadley, 2021, p. 121)

By contrast, a critical religious reading engages the reader in making meaning of religious material in richly contextualized examinations of religion, society, and power. If a devotional religious reading is an act of overlay, a critical religious reading might be characterized as an act of excavation, as the reader gets underneath the text using critical frameworks to examine the subtexts of positioning, power, and identity as related to religion. Consider, for example, the conversation in a middle school classroom around a painting (Miracle) from the picture book memoir In My Family, as described by Dávila and Volz (2017):

An African-American boy named Jon expanded upon the notion that being able to see the image of Guadalupe in the water tank might have been a reflection of one's alignment with the believers’ group. He proposed, “I think that one person saw it, and then like a couple other people saw it and then some more people came but they didn’t really see it, but they said they saw it.” Alluding to the possibility that the news of the image spread by word of mouth…Jon adeptly indicated that by claiming to see the image, one could include her/himself in the “insider” social group as opposed to the outsider “Other” group. We interpret Jon's additional comment, “And some people was wrong,” as a recognition of the power of social conformity. Regardless of their own views, people could avoid being constructed as the Other by pretending to see things the same way (literally or figuratively) as the dominant group in the social setting. (p. 8)

The Ethics of Alterity

Although Toliver (2018) defined alterity as occurring in texts when readers encounter concepts that require them to expand their beliefs, we guide our inquiry with the concept of alterity outlined by Levinas (1995/1999). Levinas's version of alterity insists “on the primacy of the well-intentioned relation toward the other” (p. 98), a stance that we think is an assumption that underpins both religious literacy and critical religious literacy frameworks. Such a stance centers the ethical responsibility of the self—or in our case, the reader as self—to understand the other as an agentive being who is a peer to the self. Levinas (1999) drew on Buber's distinction of the I-You relation and the I-It relation. Buber (1970) stated that in the I-It relation, my relationship to a thing (or an It) is a “that”—an object or a something that I can know. However, in the I-You relation, the I can never fully know the You because the You “presents a total autonomy with respect to the observation of things and with respect to knowledge” (Levinas, 1999, p. 100). Because of this, the I-You relation is fundamentally different from the I-It relationship. The difference is not only that the It is knowable and the You is not, but also that “when I say you, I know that I am saying you to someone who is an I, and who says you to me” (Levinas, 1999, p. 100). Thus, relations between an I and a You center the fact that the I and the other, although fundamentally unknowable to each other, share the same relationship with each other, and as such, individuals have to recognize that the others that they encounter are equally as human as they themselves are. This recognition, then, according to Levinas (1999), creates for each individual “an unlimited responsibility, one that we are never discharged of” (p. 30) to the other. Responding ethically to alterity, then, for Levinas fundamentally requires a “non-indifference for the other” (p. 139), a regard for “the absolutely other” (138) and the uniqueness of the “unique other” (p. 138).

Postcolonial theorists have explored how alterity and otherness is socially and hierarchically constructed, particularly in ways that position those who have been colonized through imperialism as fundamentally and irrevocably different from colonizers (Spivak, 2013; Türkkan, 2011). This imposed and fixed (and often violently enforced) alterity affects the identities of those who are colonized, in that they can only define themselves in relation to these social constructions, and thus the binary of self/other blurs so that colonized people ultimately form identities of self as other (Gray, 2021). Thinking about the role of alterity with postcolonial frames means that we may consider, too, how colonialism ultimately changes the colonizer's view of the other from an I-You relation, where the other is encountered as equally human and unknowable, to a perceived I-It relation, where the other is a “that” which is easily categorized, known, and ultimately dismissed as less than human. Levinas (1995/1999) warned about this when he wrote:

It is in the knowledge of the other as a simple individual—the individual of a genus, a class, a race—that peace with the other changes into hatred; it is the approach to the other as a “kind of this or that.” (p. 139)

Ultimately, for ELA teachers and scholars, attending to alterity and critical religious literacy practices means that we have to pay close attention to the way that the texts we teach and recommend to young people can offer examples of how encounters with religious others—and sometimes religious selves that are constructed as others by social hierarchies—might be ethically navigated to approach the religious other as equally human, equally unknowable, and equally unique as the self. Rather than viewing alterity as something to be avoided, as supporters of the current book-banning movement seem to be doing, we consider alterity as an opportunity to consider the “other of the other” (Bray, 2003, p. 74). Thus, the current project examines a large set of YA texts to consider not only the representations of religious identities, beliefs, and practices in YAL but also what models of religiously informed meaning-making are available to readers of YAL.

Alterity, of course, is experienced uniquely by individuals. Each reader might experience a text with various levels of alterity based on the experiences that they bring to the text. For example, for some American readers a representation of Islam as a lived religion with adherents who also have very typical teenage concerns, as presented in a graphic novel like Huda F Cares? (Fahmy, 2023), might create an awareness of religious alterity in ways that invite the reader to examine their assumptions about the media representations of Islam they have consumed in the United States that disproportionately draw on discourses of Islamic terrorism. However, a Muslim reader of the same text may experience very little alterity, or may experience alterity with some other aspect of the text, such as the exploration in the text of what it means to define oneself outside of religion. Alterity, then, is an invitation to examine the other of ourselves and the other of the other, and as such, it is an individuated response, as Toliver (2018) noted.

Method

Because we are interested in the ways that representations of religion in YAL might support young readers to develop critical religious literacies skills by providing models of religiously informed meaning-making processes, we used critical content analysis (Johnson et al., 2016) as our methodological approach in order to center criticality within our own inquiry. We especially attended to the methodological imperative of critical content analysis to center critical theories in multiple stages of the research process—a process that Mazzei and Jackson (2012) described as an iterative interplay between theory and data. When we encountered religion in the texts, we centered questions of focalization (Whose story is being told and from whose point of view within the selected texts?) and social process (Which characters have power and agency?), as outlined by Johnson et al. (2016), in order to consider issues of representation as well as to surface issues of power, inequity, and discrimination. As we familiarized ourselves with the texts, we found it important to create more focused questions that were more tightly aligned with the tenets of critical religious literacies (e.g., How do the characters make meaning when there are conflicts between their previous understandings of religion and a new lived experience? How does the community of practice the character is a part of influence their ability to make meaning?).

Further, as part of our own critical meaning-making process, we were mindful of our own positionalities (Bradford, 2017) as three white scholars who largely grew up within Christian traditions, although our current relationships with those traditions are ambivalent. Ultimately, as part of our research process, we tried to notice and name for ourselves how our positionalities impacted our ability to code texts from religious traditions outside of our personal experiences. For example, it was not uncommon for the three of us to look up terminology specific to non-Christian traditions, and we engaged in conversations that led us to consider how our own religious prejudices initially caused us to consider Hoodoo practices as outside of the definition of religion. We had to broaden our own understanding of what had been positioned in our religious discourses as “wholly other” (Derrida, 2000, p. 5), and we drew on experts like Chireau (2014, who argued that white supremacy has previously precluded Hoodoo practices from being considered an African ancestral religious tradition rather than a collection of superstitions. Thus, our analytical process involved educative moments for ourselves that highlighted for us how these texts engaged us in considering the “other of the other” (Bray, 2003, p. 74) and encouraged the development of our own critical religious literacies.

Data Analysis

Our coding process was iterative and followed several distinct rounds of coding and categorization. Each text was examined through a combination of a priori and emergent coding (Charmaz, 2014) reflective of our critical religious literacies framework and attentive to the iterative interplay between theory and analysis (Short, 2017). The first round of coding occurred as we read through the original 107 texts, noting religious passages that we found in each text. We demarcated a “religious passage” as an encounter with religion and coded the whole scene in which a religious encounter occurred so as to understand the context of the encounter. The encounters themselves could be quite short (e.g., a passing reference to wearing a cross necklace) or quite long (e.g., a long conversation between characters about what they think will happen in the afterlife). During this initial phase of coding, we eliminated 15 of the texts that we coded as having no reference to religion at all. During this first round of coding, our initial coding included such categories as religions represented, frequency of religious content, sense of religion (e.g., religious figurative language, religion in the setting/background, religion as a major plot point, or a character with a religious identity), and quality of religious engagement (substantive, casual, affirming, questioning, etc.). We also noted the genre and setting of each book.

Our second round of coding focused on the religious passages themselves as we worked to refine our understanding of how these passages might engage and support religious critical literacies. During this round of coding, we noted how the author engaged religious content and for what purpose (to educate the reader, to add descriptive details, to describe a character's identity, and/or to explore how religious beliefs and practices shape events, identities, and meaning-making processes—see Table 1). Many texts had multiple examples of all of these types of approaches, and our weekly research meetings (held over the course of two years) were opportunities for us to bring questions and engage in discussion about the historical and sociocultural aspects as represented in each religious passage (Bradford, 2017, p. 26). It was also during this round of coding that we identified conflicted meaning-making—where characters modeled how they made sense of gaps between their lived experiences and their understandings of religious practices and beliefs—as an approach within YAL that held the most promise in developing and supporting CRLs for young readers. We should note that there were titles that had significant mentions of religion and even discussions of religion (e.g., Dragon Hoops or Grasshopper Jungle) that we did not code as conflicted meaning-making because there was not an explicit or implied conflict or need to make meaning between a religious concept and a lived experience.

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Table 1.

Texts Categorized by Approach to Religion

Approach to Religion	Religion	# of novels	Texts
Texts with educative references (N=8)	Historical Christianity	2	Boxers and Saints; Queer Ducks
	Islam	2	Revolution in Our Time; When Stars Are Scattered
	Afro-Caribbean	2	In Darkness; The Sun is Also A Star
	Sikhism	1	Dragon Hoops
	Other (Fictional Religion)	1	Midwinterblood
Texts with casual representation of religion (N=39)	Christianity	28	1919: The Year That Changed America; A Heart in a Body in the World; Code Name Verity; Concrete Rose; Dig; Dragon Hoops; Eleanor & Park; Endangered; Far from the Tree; Gather; Grasshopper Jungle; Hey, Kiddo; I, Claudia; Icebreaker; Last Night at the Telegraph Club; Long Way Down; Maizy Chen’s Last Chance; Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War; Navigating Early; Nimona; Noggin; Revolution in Our Time; The Hate U Give; The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle; The White Bicycle; Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers; We Are Okay; Why We Broke Up
	Islam	1	Threatened
	Judaism	1	The Way Back
	Buddhism	3	A First Time for Everything; Never Fall Down; We Are Not Free
	Shintoism	1	The Thing about Luck
	North American Indigenous	1	This One Summer
	Unspecified Religion	4	Scout’s Honor; The Beast Player; The Bone Gap; Too Bright to See
Texts with thick description of religion (N=19)	Christianity	9	Clayton Byrd Goes Underground; Everything Sad Is Untrue; Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir; Out of Darkness; Revolution: The 60s Trilogy (#2); The Carnival at Bray; The Passion of Dolssa; The Poet X
	Islam	2	All My Rage; Huda F Cares?
	Judaism	1	When Angels Left the Old Country
	North American Indigenous	2	Apple (Skin to the Core); Firekeeper’s Daughter
	Afro-Caribbean	4	Me (Moth); American Street; The Sun is Also a Star; In Darkness
	Chinese Folk Religions	1	When the Sea Turned to Silver
Texts with conflicted meaning involving religion (N=49)	Christianity	36	13 Doorways; Wolves Behind Them All; And We Stay; Asking for It; Boxers and Saints; Brown Girl Dreaming; Every Body Looking; Everything Sad is Untrue; Far, Far Away; I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter; I’ll Give You the Sun; Jasper Jones; King and the Dragonflies; Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School; March: 3; Ordinary Hazards; Out of Darkness; Out of Reach; Patron Saints of Nothing; Queer Ducks; Revolution: The 60s Trilogy (#2); Starfish; The Carnival at Bray; The Ghosts of Heaven; The Journey of Little Charlie; The Passion of Dolssa; The Poet X; Victory. Stand! Raising my Fist for Justice; What Girls Are Made Of; Where the World Ends; Where Things Come Back; Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe; Clayton Bird Goes Underground; Look Both Ways; Never Fall Down; Pet; The Lost Years: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine
	Islam	3	All My Rage; Huda F Cares; When Stars Are Scattered
	Judaism	2	Dodger; When the Angels Left the Old Country
	Afro-Caribbean	2	American Street; Me (Moth)
	North American Indigenous	2	Apple (Skin to the Core); Firekeeper’s Daughter
	Chinese Folk Religions	2	The Legend of Auntie Po; When the Sea Turned to Silver
	Unspecified Religion	3	Challenger Deep; Raymie Nightengale; Scythe

*

Of the 107 books in our larger dataset, 15 included no reference to religion and were thus omitted. Therefore, 92 different books are included in this table. Books can be categorized for multiple approaches, and therefore some texts (like Queer Ducks, for example) are listed in both Educative and Meaning Making. Books listed under casual representation were all coded as only including casual representation. Because thick description and meaning making conflicts imply some casual representation, those listed under casual representation tick no other boxes.

Our third round of coding focused exclusively on texts that provided examples of conflicted meaning-making. With the identified texts (n = 50) where conflicted meaning-making occurred, we categorized passages according to how religion was positioned within the conflict: as a source of strength, as a source of conflict, as a source of misunderstanding, and so on. Because we understand religious literacy to fundamentally be a meaning-making endeavor, we engaged in this type of coding in order to prioritize the meaning-making process rather than the outcome of the process—which is to say that we found as much value in a conflicted meaning-making process that resolved with someone walking away from their religion as in a conflicted meaning-making process with someone who drew on their religious beliefs to make sense of difficult circumstances. What was important in our coding process, rather, was the process of meaning-making, and so we also noted whether the meaning-making process accounted for personal, family, community, and societal perspectives that complicated the characters’ decisions or conclusions as they made sense of the role that religion played in their lived experiences.

Finally, because our text set had a number of graphic novels (we might note that graphic memoirs were particularly fertile points for exploration of religious conflicted meaning-making processes), during our final round of coding we revisited the graphic novels to engage in visual analysis, borrowing vocabulary from scholarship in the fields of visual art and film (Connors, 2012) in order to account for the “visual, verbal, and spatial semiotics systems” (Jimenez & Meyer, 2016, p. 435) at play within such multimodal texts (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996/2006). Specifically, we coded each religious passage for general meaning but also for three visual elements that helped us understand how the visual and spatial semiotic systems engaged religion: use of dark/light/color, perspective, and composition.

Findings and Discussion

Authors of these texts approached religious ways of knowing and being in various ways throughout the text, and each approach has its own affordances for religious literacy instruction. In some instances, authors broke from the narrative to provide educative, direct information such as vocabulary, descriptions of holidays, and so on about a specific religious tradition in order to provide necessary background information to readers. These educative approaches provide young readers with vocabulary and schema to notice the ways that religion influences characters and people, plot conflicts, and social issues. Sometimes the representation of religion was casual—a glancing reference to Christmas stockings (Krosoczka, 2018; Stevenson, 2015), for example, or a mention of a character wearing a necklace with a St. Christopher's medallion (Caletti, 2019), or a reference to an immigrant character being sponsored by a Protestant church to enter the United States (Lo, 2021). In this way, casual approaches position religious identities and practices as normal facts of YAs’ lived experiences. Other authors took what we chose to call a thickly descriptive stance (a nod to Geertz's, 1973 ethnographic data-collection method), embedding rich, detail-laden information about religious beliefs and practices into the narrative in ways that highlight religion as a lived practice, replete with specific and often localized knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

For the purpose of this article, we focus on the approach to religion in YA texts that we think has the most potential to support and build readers’ critical religious literacy skills: models of conflicted meaning-making as characters experience religious alterity as part of the narrative. We defined moments of conflicted meaning-making as encounters with religion or religious ideas where either the character identifies a slippage between their own lived experiences and their religious understandings or draws on religion to make sense of conflicts in their lived experiences. As a result, conflicted meaning-making approaches situate religion as relevant, important, socially situated, and power-laden. Characters or historical figures engaged in conflicted meaning-making were typically grappling with their own experiences with religious alterity, making meaning of their own and others’ religiously informed meaning-making processes by examining both the other of the religious or secularized self and the other of the religious or secularized others. Conflicted meaning-making, then, is found in the interplay between lived experiences and religious beliefs or doctrines. At times, such conflicts are with religious belief itself, and other times, the conflicts are resolved through religious belief.

Conclusion

We found that texts engaged in conflicts around meaning-making may have the most potential for modeling critical religious literacies, particularly in modeling the kind of nuanced response to alterity that might lead to greater empathy and personal, emotional, and intellectual growth. A character undergoing conflict with their faith provides readers with examples of ways to navigate critique of one's faith (either from others or even from oneself). When handled alone, such an experience can be disorienting and challenging; thus narratives and nonfiction texts that provide models for readers of how such experiences can be ethically navigated are relevant to young readers. It is important to note that even within this text set, those who identify with Christian traditions have a clearly outsized set of narratives from which to draw insight and guidance (see Table 1). Readers identifying with religions other than Christianity have far fewer examples of characters facing conflict in their beliefs, although we have attempted to highlight some of the texts from other religious traditions that engage meaningfully with conflicted meaning-making in our analysis.

In our introduction, we discussed how YAL has the power to provide examples to readers of how religious alterity might be productively grappled with, in a way that pushes readers “beyond their comfort zones” and helps them to understand concepts in a way that “expands their beliefs” (Toliver, 2018, p. 6). Although Toliver discussed this concept as one relating to racial identities, we believe it also applies to religious identities. West (2002) discussed the “equivocal character” of religion, noting its capacity for either “freedom and liberation” on one hand, or “domination and pacification” on the other (p. 118). In 2024, as the world experiences increased polarization, it is clear that religious beliefs and identities are consequential in some of the world's most divisive conflicts. Mere knowledge about other traditions is not enough to sustain the kind of dialogue and compromise that is necessary for a peaceful existence between diverse and at times conflicting religious traditions. Sometimes, the pathway to peace requires us to engage criticality in order to attend to religious alterity in ways that build mutual respect and realign systems of power that position some religious groups a “kind of this or that” (Levinas, 1995/1999, p. 139) rather than as unknowable and equally human.

As a result of district and state bans of YA novels (particularly those that represent marginalized communities), many teachers and schools have retreated into teaching more canonical novels that do not face such intense scrutiny. However, such retreats into canon are also retreats into racism, Christian hegemony, patriarchy, cis-heteronormativity, and more (Hadley & Toliver, 2023). For YAL researchers, then, critical methods that encourage careful examinations of power and representation in YAL become vital tools in responding to book-banning movements and highly surveilled and highly standardized book selections by ELA teachers. For teachers themselves, the development of CRL frameworks become even more important, because such frameworks equip readers to get underneath the text to examine the subtexts of positioning, power, and identity as related to religion, religious identities, and religious practices. Because the YAL in this study provides such poignant examples of characters and historical figures engaging in conflicted meaning-making as a CRL practice, we advocate for defending and expanding the role of YAL in literacy classrooms.

One of the strengths of using high-quality, diverse YAL might be that it invites readers to see the religious other as more than a “kind of this or that” (Levinas, 1995/1999, p. 139), by inviting readers to join imagined communities and take on imagined identities (Norton & Toohey, 2001; Pavlenko & Norton, 2007). Youth are already shaping their identities, beliefs, and ways of being in relation to the religious and secular communities that they are a part of. YAL can encourage youth to also create imaginary ties with religious and secular communities that they may not be personally affiliated with in ways that deepen their understanding of such groups, humanize and make legible “the other of the other” (Bray, 2003, p. 74), and lead to increased empathy and understanding for such difference. By immersing readers in the conflicted meaning-making processes of individuals who make meaning out of their own religious beliefs and their own lived experiences—particularly in the way they navigate the slippage in between those beliefs and experiences—YAL encourages young readers to, as Norton and Toohey (2001) put it,

feel a sense of community with people they have not yet met, including future relationships that exist only in a learner's imagination … these imagined communities are no less real than those where learners have daily engagement and might even have a stronger effect on their current actions and investments. (p. 3)

Finally, we assert that religious identities, critical religious literacy development, and opportunities to explore religious alterity are important considerations for teacher text-selection processes in shared readings and independent reading recommendations, not only because representation matters, but also because religion remains a powerful and relevant force in U.S. and global politics. We hope that our list of texts that engage with religion through various approaches might serve as a resource for teachers who want to open conversations with their students about their own conflicted meaning-making processes in the face of their own personal religiously informed alterity. Additionally, defining and giving examples of CRL practices hopefully makes space for teachers to engage with critical religious readings of texts alongside other critical frameworks and lenses for literary analysis. Building critical religious literacy practices, then—using YAL as an inroad—ultimately builds readers’ ability to direct criticality both outward and inward, in a way that allows them to build understanding and empathy for religious traditions outside of their own while also examining with clear eyes the commitments of their own faith tradition (or lack of). Criticality enables readers of texts and narratives to determine if the religious tradition, community, and context is one that supports “freedom and liberation” or “domination and pacification” or something in between. Encounters with religion in YAL can serve as an important entry point to these kinds of readings and classroom conversations, particularly in texts where characters model complex, nuanced responses to the alterity that religious and secularized identities experience when faced with “the other of the other” (Bray, 2003, p. 74).

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