SECULARIZATION: A CROSS-NATIONAL STUDY OF CATHOLIC MALE ADOLESCENTS.

SECULARIZATION; CHURCH & state; RELIGIOUSNESS; CHRISTIAN life; URBANIZATION; SOCIAL history

Secularization is the object of controversy and unclarity. By restricting the concept to traditional forms of religiosity, and by distinguishing it multidimensionally, similar to Glock and Stark's model of religious commitment, it can be fruitfully applied. A priori hypotheses predicting increases in secularization based on differences in urbanization and industrialization from samples of Catholic male adolescents in Merida, San Juan, St. Paul, and New York are partially confirmed, and the need for a multidimensional concept of secularization is under- scored. A suggested expansion of the concept would include vocabularies of motives, e.g., Anglo respondents checked parental expectations as reasons for attending church considerably more than did the Latin respondents. Caution is in order, however, when applying data from a cross-sectional design to theories of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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