Original scientific paper
Religion and the Breakdown of Modernity
Sergej Flere
; Faculty of Law, Novi Sad
Abstract
In Yugoslavia religiosity has often been regarded as a form of traditional culture and world-view, though this way of thinking has not often been taken as a method of research of religiosity.
In this paper the relationship between modernity, as a core world-view value, and religiosity is studied by means of interviews carried out on a representative sample of the adult Vojvodina population (N=1925). Religiosity is studied through the declaration of religiosity whereas the stance towards modernity is studied through four statements all referring to one central aspect of modernity - the positive attitude towards social change and scientific and technological innovation. The distribution of answers to the 4 statements didn’t result in a single extracted factor, by the method of factor analysis, but in a wider structure of value orientations and attitudes. The correlation of relationships between the stance with the statements in the sample is low moderate.
The connection between religiosity and the stance towards modernity is a weak one. Religionists were not significantly more anti-modernistically oriented than nonbelievers. The presence of an anti-modernist which can possibly be called a traditionalist stance was found to be the same in both groups 36-37%, whereas the presence of a modernist stance was found to be somewhat more prominent among the non-believers (43% in comparison to 35%).
The lack of homogenity of the modernist stances, the lack of connection between the level of education and views on modernity and the lack of connection between religiosity and stances towards modernity can be interpreted as the questioning of the plausibility of modernity in the studied population in general.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
155397
URI
Publication date:
31.3.1990.
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