Abstract
A number of empirical studies have shown the continuous lack of adherence and the growing autonomy of the population regarding religious institutions. This article reflects on the kind of relationship between deinstitutionalisation and religious experience based on the following hypothesis: the evident decline in religious institutions does not necessarily lead to the disappearance or the weakening of religious experience; rather, it runs simultaneously with a process of individualisation. Our aim is to provide empirical evidence of such transformations; therefore, we do not get involved in speculations, but take into account the contributions of scholars concerning three key terms integrated in the conceptual framework of “religious experience’’: “experience of God”, “God image”, and “institutional belonging”. We analysed 39 in-depth interviews with a qualitative approach; interviews were conducted during the years 2016–2018 amongst Evangelical and Catholic populations in three Latin American cities (Córdoba, Montevideo, and Lima) and in the city of Bilbao (Spain). These interviews clearly indicate a growing autonomy from the religious institution, while evidencing a rich range of experiences of God and a great diversity of God representations. In both cases, they point to processes of individualisation of believers who elaborate their own religious experience in a personal and complex way.
Highlights
We focused on identifying whether the person manifested a greater or lesser degree of identification with the tradition or religious institution when narrating their experience of God and describing the divinity
We find representations of God without religious experience, as agnostics, nones, or openly atheists often express their own God images, even if our work does not consider these last ones as expressions, as we exclusively analysed interviews of people who expressed some kind of religious conviction and self-identify as Catholics or Evangelicals
God representations without being explicitly asked about their God images
Summary
It is not easy to draw firm conclusions from the empirical data currently available on the evolution of the percentages of belonging to different religious traditions, nor on their projection in the coming decades. It is not easy to quantify the non-religious population (the so-called nones), agnostics or atheists, nor their evolution. There seems to be a certain consensus among specialists on the following: we are witnessing a decline in institutional religious affiliation in world religions. This is the case of the general population in Western Europe or China, Western academics and intellectuals, and young generations around the globe
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