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The Agency of Children and the Study of Religion

What does it mean to take children’s agency seriously in the sociology of religion? This chapter reviews dominant approaches to the study of childhood and religion and assesses the underlying assumptions about the meanings of childhood, agency, society, and religion they index. It situates these approaches in relation to two different strands taken to children’s agency in wider childhood studies. It then examines how we can see two different understandings of children’s agency in play in conservative and charismatic evangelicalism through discussing two different national evangelical events focused on childhood. It argues that these events empirically demonstrate the importance of attending to childhood in the study of religion and suggests a way of understanding children’s agency in relation to religion as a fluid, dynamic convergence of different elements, which affords children more or less capacity to act as agents and shape the social and religious worlds they inhabit.