Section III: Characteristics of the Influence of Various Religions on Children and Ways of Overcoming that Influence

Abstract

In developed socialist society, where the materialistic and atheistic world view is dominant, religious belief is undergoing a deep and many-sided crisis. Crises are also developing in the organizational sphere of religion, manifested first and foremost in the question of the younger generation, in the question of who will inherit religious and church traditions. As a result of the separation of church from the state and the school, religious organizations have lost their previous potential for influencing the younger generation and rearing it in a spirit of religious ideology and morality. The people in religious congregations are, for the most part, elderly, especially so in the Orthodox Church. A study of the attitudes of school pupils and higher education students has shown that there are very few religious young people. Atheistic conviction and a lack of belief in God have become a characteristic feature of the spiritual makeup of Soviet youth, which is a direct result of youth's ideological and political maturity and loyalty to the principles of the scientific world view, as well as a result of the high educational and cultural level of [our] youth and an expression of their social optimism.