Mapping youth religiosity in Santiago de Chile: contributions to the theological and pastoral reflection on youth and transcendence

Abstract

This dissertation aimed to generate new and more complex knowledge regarding youth religiosity in Santiago de Chile as a contribution to the theological and pastoral reflection on youth and transcendence. Following Van der Ven’s proposal on empirical theology, an empirical-theological study was developed, guided by three main research questions: (1) How is youth religiosity in Santiago de Chile today configured? (2) What personal and social factors influence the current youth religiosity in Santiago de Chile? (3) What contributions and questions do this new knowledge about youth religiosity in Santiago de Chile hand out for theology and the Catholic Church’s pastoral reflection on youth and evangelization? Religiosity –the guiding concept– was defined as an individual’s fundamental experience regarding vertical transcendence(s), namely, a supra-human kind of transcendence, and empirically studied among 15- and 16-year-old secondary school students, both male and female, contacted through non-confessional and Catholic schools within the big city of Santiago. Considering Glock’s, Stark’s, and Fukuyama’s multidimensional approaches, five dimensions of religiosity were explored: beliefs, events of contact, practices, consequences in daily life, and groups of references. Moreover, following an attributional approach, i.e., respecting that the experiences are “deemed” religious by the participants themselves, and the need to develop a new and more adequate instrument for the study of the topic in Chile, the “Exploratory Sequential Design” was selected, combining qualitative and quantitative research approaches. The results allowed describing in more detail how Chilean youngsters understand and experience transcendence and were, therefore, a relevant input to the until now available knowledge in Chile. They were also a valuable contribution to understanding better the current expressions of the religious dimension of human life, enriching the theological work in dialogue with “lived religion” and identifying some “problematic” issues that should be further reflected by theology. Finally, the findings also help the Church better understand the context in which it develops its evangelizing task and some clues to improving it by considering youngsters’ experience of transcendence more broadly.