Child Theology, Spirituality and Intersectionality

Various authors have written on children’s spirituality and how spirituality of children can be nurtured. These reflections are mostly inspired by a clear view on children’s agency and an emancipatory form of child theology. In this chapter we discuss the question how discrimination on the basis of race, class, and gender can be avoided in initiatives to nurture children’s spirituality. What can a feminist postcolonial theology offer in the reflection on religious education and various approaches of nurturing children’s spirituality? We discuss the idea of the “oppression olympics,” where experiences of being oppressed as a child (in the context of adultism), as a girl or boy (sexism), as someone with less privileges in terms of financial support (classism) or as someone from another ethnicity (racism) are considered as competing each other? How can “child theology” include attention for other perspectives, without falling in the trap of strong “identity politics”? These questions are discussed in dialogue with a contextual and anti-essentialist reading of Mark 10:15.