The question of what religion is could very well be asked of religious studies teachers bytheir students. It is, however, a difficult question to answer since there is a lack of consensusregarding the meaning of the term religion in the scientific field. An overview of research onthe topic shows a lack of studies regarding religious studies teachers in Sweden and theirview on the term religion in different teaching contexts. The aim of this study is to highlightreligion studies teachers´ view on the term religion in relation to their teaching, as well aswhether textbooks and/or the Swedish curriculum affects how teachers view and use the termreligion in their classrooms. This, in turn, might highlight didactic problems that could arisefrom the lack of a clear definition of religion in the subject of religious studies. The study isconducted by interviewing four teachers at the upper secondary education level in Sweden.The transcripts from the interviews are then analysed using essentialist perspectives onreligion as well as the secularist discourse present in Swedish classrooms as the essay’stheoretical perspectives.The results show that while there is some overlap between how the interviewed teachers viewthe term religion, they each have a slightly different view of what religion is and how theyuse the term in their classrooms. Some of the teachers´ views on religion showed signs ofessentialism while others tended to see religion as a more open category or that the termshould be problematised in classroom exercises. All the interviewed teachers took a nonsecularist stance towards religion in their teaching. Textbooks seem to play an important roleto a lesser or higher degree depending on which teacher is asked. Textbooks can guideteachers in a certain direction, especially those who recently got their teacher degrees, but theinterviewed teachers showed that they were able to use textbooks to their advantage in theclassroom while also being aware of problematic content in certain older textbooks. Theseproblematic textbooks tend to take a secularist stance towards religion while newer ones takea more nuanced non-secularist stance. All the interviewed teachers agreed that the Swedishcurriculum could be improved regarding how teachers should handle religion as a term,though the exact way in which the curriculum documents should be rewritten varied fromteacher to teacher. The curriculum described religion as an open category while also taking anon-secularist stance towards religion. The teachers also discussed whether the subject shouldeven be called religion studies as well as the subject not having enough classroom hoursduring the school year.