Religious Literacy in Hindu-Majority School

Abstract

This study examines how religious literacy develops among students in a Hindu-majority senior high school in Indonesia and how school and library strategies shape inclusive religious attitudes toward the Muslim minority at SMA Dwijendra Denpasar. Indonesia provides a highly plural religious context, while Bali offers a distinctive local setting in which Hindus form the majority and Muslims constitute a minority, allowing majority–minority religious dynamics to be examined under conditions that differ from the national pattern. This study employed a qualitative single-case study design. Data from interviews with ten students, the principal, and the librarian, together with non-participant observations and documentary analysis, were analyzed using hybrid deductive–inductive thematic coding guided by Miles and Huberman's interactive model. Dinham and Francis's framework was used to identify the cognitive, affective, and critical dimensions of religious literacy. In contrast, the Theory of Reasoned Action was used to interpret how students' beliefs and perceived social norms relate to their inclusive religious attitudes. Within this case, religious literacy developed primarily through everyday interreligious interaction that school-level institutional arrangements enabled and legitimized, rather than through doctrinal instruction alone. Students demonstrated functional knowledge of Islamic practices, empathy toward Muslim peers, and critical rejection of exclusivist views. These dimensions were interconnected rather than developing as a simple cumulative sequence. The library’s contribution was primarily symbolic rather than instructional: its Islamic collection signaled institutional recognition of Muslim students, although the collection was rarely used. The findings are bounded to a single school and are offered as analytic rather than statistical generalization. Institutional arrangements represent one significant condition shaping religious literacy, but they are not sufficient on their own to produce inclusive religious attitudes. The study offers a mechanism-level account of how institutional arrangements shape religious literacy and, in turn, inclusive religious attitudes. It also proposes a conceptual model integrating the religious literacy framework with the Theory of Reasoned Action.