Emerging Transitions in the Meaning of Religious Constructs: The Case of the Philippines

Abstract

Recent data from two local empirical studies on religion (Baring et al. 2018) and the sacred (Baring et al. 2017) show how an imminent shift in Filipino youth attitudes articulates new perspectives on religion, religiosity, and spirituality. This paper presents an analysis of three emerging peculiar characterizations of religious experience by young students culled from two previous empirical studies. These newfound descriptions indicate a departure from traditional binary religious categories (e.g., sacred–profane, religious–spiritual) typically employed in many studies. The first describes a peculiar interpretation of religious experience indicating an epistemological shift from an exclusive definition to a diffused interpretation of religious–spiritual categories: as “personal religiosity” and “institutional spirituality”. Personal religiosity reports an unexpected combination of personal ethical forms of de-institutionalized religious views of students. Institutional spirituality represents beliefs that honor institutional affiliation. The second describes the emergence of personal–communal poles discerned from their notions of religion and sacred. The third highlights the ethical orientation of students’ religious perceptions. These peculiar conceptual shifts may have pastoral and theological implications.