IIPSI   26795
INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES PSICOLOGICAS
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Mapping The Contours Of Religion?s Other In Argentina: The Case Of ?adversative Believers?
Autor/es:
RABBIA, HUGO H.
Reunión:
Conferencia; 36th conference of International Society for the Sociology of Religion; 2021
Institución organizadora:
International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR-SIRS)
Resumen:
The growth of people without a religious identification in surveys has sparked interest in the study of nonreligious in general. In Argentina, the number of people without religious affiliation have doubled in the last decade, according to studies with national probabilistic samples, although the unbelief has not grown in the same proportion. This dynamic has also been accompanied by a growing criticism of the political and social interference of the Catholic Church, and some Pentecostal churches, in public debates regarding issues of education, family and sexuality. The present work explores how non-religious identifications are presented in Argentina from a critical reflection on the categories of responses available in questionnaires, and the content of open answers to questions of religious identification and beliefs in another 3 online surveys, and in 2 in-depth interviews? local studies. In addition to the frequent nonreligious identifications in other contexts, some of them with particular local meanings, we focus on those believers who may or may not identify with a religious tradition (usually Christian) at a certain moment, but who in their own identification resort to several adversarial markers (?but?, ?however?, ?although?, etc.) to indicate a personal challenge and distinction towards religious institutions in general or their former religious affiliation in particular. We have called them ?adversative believers.? These people, even when they may not meet the operative parameter established by Smith and Cragun (2019) for the ?Religion's Other?, play a central role in the Argentine case, where the historical predominance of the Catholic Church, and the recent Pentecostal advance, seek to prevail not only religion as cultural identification, but also an alignment with religion's moral and political positions. Adversative believers sometimes float between being ?within? and ?outside? of a religious tradition in their self-identifications, but they are always marking their distances as ?Other? with respect to religious leaders and communities. For this reason, they also seem to stress and dispute the ways in which the Religious-Non-religious continuum is configured in contemporary Argentine society.