This study explored the relation between adolescent reports of parental religious socialization (i.e., cultural socialization, promotion of mistrust, and pluralism) and their religious out-group evaluations, externalizing and internalizing behaviors. Crosssectional data were obtained from 730 12- to 15-year old Belgian adolescents through questionnaires. Results from multilevel and ordinary linear regression analyses indicated that pluralism was associated with higher religious out-group evaluations whereas promotion of mistrust was associated with lower religious out-group evaluations and higher externalizing and internalizing behaviors. Cultural socialization interacted with the importance adolescents give to religion to influence youth externalizing behaviors. Despite its limitations, this study presents a complex picture of the association between religious socialization practices and adolescent outcomes and offers an alternative pathway to understand parental religious socialization.

The aim of this study was to assess the links between religious discrimination and developmental and contextual variables. Based on the assumption that discrimination results from the interplay of prejudice and moral thinking, discriminatory behaviour was hypothesised to be linked to age, school environment, minority or majority group membership, and parental religious socialisation practices. The results indicate that discrimination is more frequent during childhood than during pre-adolescence or adolescence, more common in homogeneous schools than in heterogeneous schools, and more likely when parents frequently express messages promoting mistrust of other religious groups. Participants from the minority group were more likely to discriminate against their own ingroup than were those from the majority group. Further studies are needed to determine whether these links are correlative or predictive, and to understand the underlying processes of religious discrimination.

The purpose of this study was to assess developmental and social determinants of the age at which children become aware that the social environment can be marked by categorization into religious groups and that those groups are associated with different religious beliefs. The results show that middle childhood is a critical period for this religious social categorization. Moreover, social factors play a role in the development. Religious categorization is likely to appear sooner in children attending heterogeneous schools than in those at homogeneous schools, and children from the minority religious group in the country understand religious categorization earlier than children from the majority group. However, no relation was found between the age at which religious categorization was understood and parents' religious socialization practices. This study is of both theoretical and practical interest: It complements what is already known about gender, race, and ethnic categorization by integrating developmental and social frameworks, and it can serve as a guideline for educational programs.

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This article presents the epistemological paradigm in which Philosophy for Children (P4C) is embedded and the personal epistemological positions that are promoted by P4C, in order to address the concern that P4C might induce relativism in pupils. On the basis of theoretical considerations and empirical results, it is shown that P4C does not promote absolutism or relativism, either in its premises or in pupils' personal epistemology. Rather, this method is related to a socio-constructivist and pragmatic paradigm and it promotes an evaluativist position. The relevance of promoting evaluativism (rather that absolutism or relativism) during RE lessons in pupils is then examined through a psychological perspective. The conclusion is that it is worth integrating P4C in RE because it stimulates an evaluativist perspective that is beneficial in terms of both personal need for meaning and social cohesion.