Entre lo institucional, la norma y la vida: Identidad de la Educación Religiosa Escolar en Colombia desde la Religión Vivida

School Religious Education (SRE) in Colombia continues to face challenges in defining its nature and identity within a landscape characterized by religious pluralization, shifting forms of religious and spiritual belief and practice, and the requirement of neutrality incumbent upon public schools. How can the nature and identity of SRE be understood when religion is viewed not merely through its institutional formulations but also as a lived experience? Through a documentary and conceptual analysis of Colombian literature on SRE and studies of lived religion, this article brings recent developments in SRE into dialogue with research on the lived religion of school-aged youth, drawing particularly on the contributions of Nancy Ammerman. It argues that SRE can be understood as a school-based hermeneutic of lived religion—that is, as an educational space dedicated to recognizing, interpreting, and critically examining the ways young people construct religious and spiritual meaning in their daily lives, without assuming a confessional role or reducing the religious phenomenon to mere descriptive information. This perspective allows for an SRE identity that is situated, pluralistic, critical, and pedagogically distinct, while remaining compatible with religious freedom, the neutrality and secular nature of the State, and the pluralistic character of Colombian society.