1 Religiosity and Spirituality among Young

A widespread notion about youths and young adults holds that in this phase of their lives, their attachment to religious communities becomes looser, their agreement with religious beliefs more tentative, and religiosity overall less relevant to their lives. Nearly every era has joined in an elegy lamenting the rising generation’s failure to sufficiently internalize the corpus of handed-down religious convictions, resulting in the abandonment of religious traditions and the spread of secularization. Young people no longer believe in the gods – so went the complaint of a scribe who was still writing on clay tablets in Sumerian cuneiform writing. However, Ziebertz’s analysis (2007) of Religion Monitor data for Germany shows that one cannot simply speak of a rupture of religious tradition in the young adult years. It is true that younger people attend religious services less often; but just like their older counterparts, a third of young adults agree with the central tenet of Christianity: that a personal God exists. Do Ziebertz’s observations also apply to countries with other cultural backgrounds, such as Latin American or Islamic ones? Particularly in the latter, the public presence of religion is disproportionately stronger than in Western/American cultures shaped by individualism an