Religion and Socioeconomic Rights among the Youth of South Africa

Abstract

Socioeconomic rights are very important in the South African context due to the history of apartheid and the high levels of poverty in South Africa. During apartheid, a large majority of South Africa’s population has not had access to basic socioeconomic rights. This changed in 1994 with the first democratic elections, the adoption of the new South African constitution in 1996 and the inclusion of a Bill of Rights. In this paper we discuss the development of and some of the objections to the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the constitution of South Africa. Furthermore, we discuss the role of religion as an extra-judicial entity regarding the socioeconomic rights of South African citizens. Against this background, we report on the results of an empirical study among Grade 10 and Grade 11 learners in secondary schools in three provinces in South Africa. We explore the understanding of socioeconomic rights that is present among this sample of learners in South Africa and investigate the relationship between the socioeconomic attitudes and certain background and religious variables. Regarding the understanding of socioeconomic rights, we found that these learners agree or strongly agree with all the items on socioeconomic rights. Gender plays a role though, with females scoring significantly higher on some of the socioeconomic scales. Agreement with the critical function of religion in society and an intellectual critical interest in religion are positively related to all four socioeconomic scales. Other religious factors, such as belief in God and an openness towards interreligious pluralism, showed mixed relations with socioeconomic rights. In the last section we briefly discuss the significance of the empirical results for the situation in South Africa.