Eu sou sem religião com crença

: a fragilização da herança religiosa e a conservação da crença como elo de memória

Abstract

The phenomenon of people without religion, represented by the non-religious designation, corresponds to the third highest percentage of religious identification in Brazil. In the 2010 Census this group corresponded to more than 15 million people 8,04%. The group of non-religious in the Census comprises three subgroups, agnostics 0,87%, atheists 3,98% and non-religious non-religious 95,17%. The scope of our thesis are the non-religious without religion people, which we designate as non-religious with belief. The approach of this study was historical, systematic and empirical. Our main objective was to understand the reasons for non-religious with belief’ identification. For that, we researched historical aspects of Catholicism in Brazil, whose association between the colonial dynamic and the missions caused a fragmented and poorly institutionalized evangelization, which contributed to the formation of a fragile religious heritage. In addition, we analyze the urbanization in Brazil, the consequences of mobility and space alteration in the dynamic of identities and in the rearrangement of religious memory. The individual's autonomy in the context of multiple modernities and hybrid cultures promotes plurality, religious transit, individualization of belief and deinstitutionalization, all of which contribute to the weakening of the religious heritage. Urbanization in connection with secularization endorses the movements in the religious field, turning the Brazilian religious landscape more dynamic. As the phenomenon of non-religious people is transnational, we present some studies and data on non-religious people in Brazil and abroad for a better understanding. Lastly, field research was conducted to investigate the reasons for people to identify themselves as non-religious with belief. The utilized methodology was exploratory, quantitative, and qualitative and, encompassing bibliographic and field research through a structured digital questionnaire containing forty questions with young university students from PUC Minas, who were undergraduate students taking Religious Culture classes and Postgraduate research students in Religious Studies. We arrived at the conclusion that our hypothesis was confirmed because people, by identifying themselves as I have no religion, but I have religious beliefs, conveyed the message of the religious heritage weakening in the absence of religion and communicated the conservation of belief as a link of the religious memory.

Date of Award	24 Feb 2023
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Flávio Augusto Senra Ribeiro (Supervisor) & Alfredo Teixeira (Co-Supervisor)