Religious Individualization

NICOLAS VIOTTI

Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions

Springer International Publishing

Año: 2016; p. 1 - 5

Religious individualization defined as the subjects? tendency to build their own relationship with the sacred is one of the features used by the social sciences to describe a process that, at least in modern Europe, has been associated with the emergency of Protestantism not only as a strictly religious phenomenon but also as a new cultural device. In recent decades, this kind of analysis continues to be used to account for practices and ways of bonding with the sacred that are relatively new in Latin America, revealing continuities but also novelties in the religious ways of individualization. It includes religiosities such as diverse Evangelical Pentecostalism, which is strongly rooted in the popular world, as well as experiences closer to the middle classes such as the self-centered Catholicism and, particularly, the so-called New Age spirituality. In Latin America, religious individualization regimes account for new ways of privacy building that include elements of their own associated with the so-called religious syncretism as well as ways of person building (personhood) in which the relationability principles used for bonding with the sacred are well established in the religious culture of the region.