This paper explores religious adolescents' reported experiences of secondary schools. Fifty‐four qualitative interviews were conducted in places of worship in three cities in England with Christians (n=46), Jews (n=38) and Muslims (n=15). Secondary schools of a religious and non‐religious character were reported as not providing a suitable environment for religious observances, nor as a place to act and behave according to participants' religious principles. Religious adolescents reported prejudice and criticism of their beliefs or religious affiliations from their peers and sometimes from teachers. They also perceived their religious traditions to be distorted, inaccurately or unfairly represented in some lessons. The focus of this paper is the identity choices religious adolescents reported in response to these challenges. Three groups of identity choices are theorised and explored: religious identity seeking, religious identity declaration and religious identity masking. The findings are discussed in view of religious identity construction theory, good practice for teachers and also the potential concerns of faith communities.

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Christians' experiences of anti-Christian prejudice are relatively unexplored in sociological research. This paper analyses perceived anti-Christian prejudice reported by Christian adolescents in England. Rich interview data were generated with Anglican, Baptist and Catholic adolescents (n=26) over a five month period in churches and church youth groups in an English city. They reported incidents of anti-Christian name-calling (slurs), bullying, labelling and aggressive questioning about their faith by non-Christian peers indicating that anti-Christian prejudice may affect the status of Christians in adolescent peer-group hierarchies. They also perceived formal aspects of schooling to be biased against Christian beliefs and practices. These episodes suggest that, like prejudice against other religious groupings, anti-Christian prejudice has historical, negative tropes and stereotypes based upon perceived inferiority. However, unlike other kinds of religious prejudice, the analyses also suggest anti-Christian prejudice can sometimes be related to philosophical objections to religious beliefs rather than negative racial or ethnic attributes. The relationship between these findings and secularisation are discussed.

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