Practices and Power Relations Shaping Youth Religious Agency in Finnish Lutheran Confirmation Training

Abstract This critical ethnography examines how practices and power relations within Finnish Lutheran confirmation training shape youth religious agency. Religious agency is understood as the negotiation of a religious identity that shapes religious structures. Simultaneously, it is shaped by religious structures through the restrictions and enablement imposed by power relations. This study focuses on the latter – how religious agency is shaped in practices of confirmation training. The findings show that youths’ prior religious socialisation contributes to their interaction with confirmation training and religion. The practices in confirmation training serve the following functions: guiding youths’ choices, subjectivity, and theological interpretations. These functions include encouraging subjectivity while institutional norms and theology are reinforced. Authority practices reinforce those functions. These findings underline that confirmation training fosters subjectivity, but within institutional boundaries. This duality should be examined to reveal how authority shapes youth participation and to make confirmation training more responsive to their experiences.