Mobility from the Catholic Religion to the “without Religion” Identification in Young University Students in Chile

Abstract

In recent years, Chile has experienced a highly significant abandonment of the Catholic church. This can be observed in young people, who have left its organizational spaces and their identification with it. The magnitude of this growing abandonment, which has been heighted by the public awareness of sexual abuse committed by priests, has been shown in quantitative studies, however, they do not delve into the reasons of those who distance themselves from the church. This article presents research results that identify the motivations expressed by young people that led them to stop being Catholic and places this phenomenon of disaffection within a bigger issue that has been occurring for some time: that of a religious mobility in an increasingly secular society, where the number of people who identify themselves as “without religion” continues to grow. By means of individual interviews, the reasons given by young people were identified and later validated in a subsequent group interview process.

Keywords:

• Religious mobility
• catholic religion
• without religion
• college student
• Chile

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ver Salazar, G. y Pinto, J. (2002). Historia contemporánea de Chile. Volumen V: Niñez y Juventud. Ed. LOM, Santiago. Ver en particular el apartado “La iglesia joven” pp.135-146.

2 Project: “Between adherence and disenchantment: Mobility in religious beliefs and disbeliefs in young university students’’ funded by the XVII Research and Creation Contest for Academics from Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, 2019.

3 To protect personal identities, interviews are identified according to number of interviews (“Entrevista”), sex, and type of educational establishment of the interviewee. H and M stand for male and female, respectively; M for municipal educational establishments, PS for subsidized, and PP for private.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Dirección de Pastoral y Cultura Cristiana and the Vicerrectoría de Investigación of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Notes on contributors

Patricia Imbarack Dagach

Patricia Imbarack Dagach Faculty of Education, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, Chile. [email protected]

Jorge Baeza Correa

Jorge Baeza Correa Department of Applied Ethics, Faculty of Religious Sciences and Philosophy, Catholic University of Temuco, Chile. [email protected]