Characteristics of the Romanians' Religiosity Highlighted in Their Children's Drawings

Abstract

Abstract The religiosity of the contemporary Western World is marked by the process of secularization that strengthens atheism, but it evolves to a post-secular stage of recovering the values of Christianity in models of good social practices. Contemporary Western religiosity is also characterized by the revival of pre-Christian local beliefs and practices and the spread of new, imported forms of spirituality. Religiosity is a hard to tackle research topic, due to the reluctance of people to talk about their beliefs. Analyzing how children draw God is a way to overcome this difficulty. In the former socialist states of Europe, these characteristics intertwine with the effects of exiting from an atheistic programmatic political regime. Theoretical coding of drawings made on request by Romanian primary school pupils in 2004 and 2016 provides information on children's religiosity. They provide information on how Romanians see themselves on account of their religiosity compared to the trends of evolution of Western religiosity, as well as on the effects of introducing religion as a subject of study in Romanian schools