The Journey of Youth Religiosity: From Socialisation in Uncertainty to the New Forms of Fulfilment

Abstract

This paper analyses the religious experience of young people in contexts of digitalisation. The secularisation thesis has not been imposed. Youth, who are more open to the porosity of social and cultural boundaries, live outside of dogma and the church, with the signs of transcendence as a fundamental part of their personal narrative. Religiosity, a contingent temporality, and youth socialised in the unknown lay the foundations for this reflection.

1. Introduction

The notion of post-secularity (Habermas 2008a) has been gaining momentum in the academic concert of the last two decades as a defining slogan of an emerging cultural idiosyncrasy in Western societies. It designates an interpretative paradigm aimed at accounting for the advent of symbolic cultural forms that would be counteracting the hypothetical secularising process and, more specifically, evidencing a resurgence of the religious dimension on the social scene (Habermas 2008b; Casanova 2000; Beriain 2012; Beriain and Sánchez de la Incera 2012; Garzón Vallejo 2014; Lázaro Pulido 2017; Ruíz Andrés 2022). In the 1960s, the interpretation of the evolution of the religious phenomenon based on the presupposition of secularisation became canonical (Berger 1981). According to it, the unfolding of modernity gradually evicted religion from the symbolic centrality of Western societies, cornering it into privacy (Luckmann 1973; Beck 2009). It has taken almost three decades for the rigidity of the secularising thesis to be problematised (Berger 1999; Habermas 2006, 2008a, 2008b) to the point of re-signifying the secularising dynamic in a lexicon of “multiple secularisations” (Eisenstadt 2000; Casanova 2012; Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012; Berger 2014; Gil Gimeno 2017). This has been propitiated by the recognition of the non-fulfilment of the prognosis of the canonical format of the theory of secularisation (Ruíz Andrés 2022).

The notion of post-secularity has affected the way in which we rethink how today’s youth have redefined religious experience. There are strong enough indications that this experience is unfolding aside from or at the margins of institutionalised religions, as studies in the Spanish (Callejo González 2010) or the Swiss context (Monnot and Wernli 2023), among others, show. This does not imply, however, an experience of eradication of belief in itself, but rather its relocation to the scenario of a more informal religiosity without commitment to dogmas, in which, however, the flame of a more or less personal search for fulfilment is kept alive. This is materialised in the emergence of fluid and often undefined religiosities that take the form of a bricolage. The basis on which this bricolage is built is usually established in adolescence, affected by certain rites of passage (Toivanen 2023; Tervo-Niemelä et al. 2025) as well as the dynamics of intergenerational transmission, and change with national characteristics specific to each social and historical context (Silverstein et al. 2024; Gärtner et al. 2025), but both leave (an increasing) space open for individual decision making. The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the decisive sociological factors that account for this structural transformation in the religious experience of the new generations.

2. Post-Secularity and Expressive Culture

A fruitful theoretical framework aimed at revising the condition of truth of the secularising thesis could be that which admits as a premise the sterility of continuing to contemplate the cultural idiosyncrasy of late-modern Western societies by virtue of the conservation of the modern symbolic dividing line drawn between immanence and transcendence, a legacy of that drawn between the secular and the sacred (Pintos 1996). The maintenance of this line hinders the possibility of thinking about the actuality of the immanent sacred. At the same time, this theoretical framework allows us to see a phenomenon of the re-actualisation of the structural anthropological constants of originally religious roots in “immanent referential frameworks”, in “that by virtue of which we find spiritual meaning in our lives” (Taylor 1997, p. 32), as well as the presence of such constants in scenarios that at first sight appear secular such as The Nation or The Person (Beriain 2016). A correct path to circumvent both a canonical version of secularisation theory and, at the same time, an unsatisfactory rejoinder to it would be one that accepts that, in truth, the processes of desacralisation and resacralisation have coexisted and have fed back on each other (Joas 2023).

If anything characterises the late-modern post-secularity, it is the display of a dissemination of the sacred where what is dignified is belief (Beriain and Sánchez de la Incera 2012). Notably, “…the interesting thing is to see how today this individual religiosity allows individuals (independent of the large instituted religious systems) to go the other way and produce small belief systems that enable them to gather, organise, and give meaning to their personal experiences, previously fragmented and marked by the extremely powerful differentiation of social activities, which make it difficult to integrate the individual personality” (Hervieu-Léger 2010). Perhaps the crux of the matter is to return to the distinction proposed by Georg Simmel between religion and religiosity. The former is affiliated with official institutions formally charged with the underpinning of a nomos based on a cultural heritage contained in a doctrinal message designed to be received by a congregation. The second is committed to a feeling of closeness to the sacred not so much of an official and institutional nature as an experiential and affective one, of sentimental and general unreserved surrender to something embedded in a “fundamental anthropological position before reality” (Simmel 1988a, p. 187). So this second one is explanation of the reason why “religion has so far always survived religions, as a tree survives the ever-repeated harvesting of its fruit” (Simmel 1988a, p. 189). Additionally, “…for people who are weakly religious or not religious at all from their very being, dogma is the only possibility of a somehow religious existence. The religious does not determine the life process in them as its immanent form; they must therefore face it as a transcendent” (Simmel 1988a, p. 196). If “a social-democratic association of workers acquires the same features of common and mutual behaviour, this analogy can teach, on the one hand, that religious behaviour is not exclusively linked to religious contents but is a general human form, which is realised not only on the basis of transcendental themes but also due to other sentimental motives” (Simmel 2002, pp. 39–40).

The gnoseological turn proposed by Simmel reveals that the medium par excellence where religiosity makes its presence felt is the singularity of a relationship contracted by individuals with certain things that is externalised at the threshold of immanence and not so much or not necessarily at the threshold of transcendence. This would account for the fact that, ultimately, “it is not a question of overthrowing religion, but, vice versa, of an elevation of certain earthly feelings and relations to its sphere” (Simmel 1988b, pp. 38–39). Simmel’s auguries have turned out to be prescient. With the eviction of a predefined system of meaning, of an instituted nomos (Berger), of the content of a “religious form” (Simmel), the relationship with the sacred has become a matter dissociated from the authority guaranteed by an institutionality, as is well reflected in the studies of the religious beliefs of young people in Spain and Switzerland carried out for at least a decade (Callejo González 2010; Monnot and Wernli 2023). The image that perhaps best illustrates this situation is that of a crossroads. Late-modern societies show signs of a polyhedral religiosity that, fulfilling the Simmelian predictions, does not easily allow itself to be chiselled into a conclusive defining encapsulation. Signs of a creative and plural religious quest for meaning (Taylor 2015), of a fluid, dynamic religiosity in movement emanate from an unquenchable thirst for affiliation to an identity ethos (Hervieu-Léger 2004). It reveals the rearrangement of belief in a versatility of registers, “at the extreme of credulity, so to speak, one only believes; the form of belief as such is effective in the soul, without its content being yet in any way adducible” (Simmel 1988a, p. 171). This situation has a significant generational component that, with its respective particularities, extends to the global level. Suffice it to say that a survey conducted in 106 countries showed that in 41 of them (including Canada, Denmark, South Korea, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Japan, Spain, and Uruguay), people under 40 years of age declared themselves significantly less likely to be affiliated with a religious group in 2017 compared to 2008, while people over 40 years did so in only 2 countries: Chad and Ghana (Pew Research Center 2018).

Specifically on the Western threshold, the 1960s were a cultural turning point. A generation sprang up, encouraged by a radical rejection of the instituted religious nomos. The in crescendo belligerence against traditional, religious moral principles was part of an unprecedented counter-cultural revolution in customs. Its underlying legacy was transferred without too many obstacles to subsequent generations. The 1960s radicalised the aesthetic–moral spirit fostered by the modernism of the previous decades of the century. They gave rise to an in crescendo of “a self without barriers” driven by an expressive urge to be “oneself” (Bell 1989). The prerogatives of institutional religion were seen as a limiting constraint on expressivity. The enemy was the normative rule contained in religion. The feeling that the orientation of action came from a source of authority external to the subject was weakening, becoming the result of personal preference. Within the perimeter of Protestantism, the evacuation of the religious nomos entailed the decline of the ascetic mentality that supported an essentially utilitarian self, focused on maximising its individual interest in relation to an end, and embodied in useful work, resulting in economic practicality. A self with an emphasis on its expressive facet will gain ground, devoted to personal self-realisation (Bellah et al. 1989) and inspired by the pursuit of an ideal of authenticity faithful to a singular inner voice nestled in each person (Taylor 1994). The emergence of this expressive self correlates with the consolidation of a change in the demographic cycle in the orbit of Western countries, which, initiated decades earlier, is characterised by a strong inclination towards a drop in birth rates. This factor favours a transition towards the formation of a new type of subjectivity profile, of a new “social character”. In this, the direction of action is not steered “from outside by tradition” nor from an ascetic self-discipline of the self, “from within”, consistent with the goals internalised by the self. On the contrary, it is at the mercy of “others”, of their acceptance and recognition distilled from the interaction itself (Riesman 1979).

Behind this cultural mutation is the crystallisation of a capitalism almost entirely based on the orbit of consumption, which has led to a historically unsuspected degree of economic well-being. Thus, the increasing coverage of basic needs for a wide range of the population uncovered the democratisation of post-materialist values (Inglehart 1991). The rise of an expressive sensibility is in the wake of the consumption boom. This sensibility was born out of romanticism and is projected onto an imaginative hedonism, awakening sensibility, emotionality, and greed for experiences, attitudes proscribed by the moral restraint urged by religious Methodism (Campbell 2001). The generation of the 1960s spurred the revival of this sensitivity, extolling a qualitatively different subjectivity of each person in rebellion against the standardisation brought about by the modern principle of generalised equivalence (Carretero 2021). It is a feeling where “each particular individual finds for the first time the meaning of his existence by virtue of his difference from others, by virtue of the personal uniqueness of his essence and his actions” (Simmel 1986, p. 278). The aim was to explore what the rationalist archetype, central to Western culture, silenced. The generation of 1968 passed on as a legacy to later generations an expressive anxiety that was the heritage of artistic, cultural, philosophical, scientific, and religious minorities.

The symbolic weft having been dispossessed of a pre-given structure of meaning, the incarnations of meaning clung to the attraction awakened by precarious, mobile, and fragmentary narratives. In this atmosphere, the deployment of expressive culture, in its transposition on the creation of a multiform plurality of orders of meaning, bears an embryonically contradictory two-faced aspect. On the one hand, it contains an inclination towards a mirage of reifying expressivity: a degradation of the ideal of authenticity into narcissistic individualism (Taylor 1994), a normalised self-determination of the singular self (Reckwitz 2020), and a fetishism of authenticity (Lipovetsky 2024). But at the same time, it harbours a counter-image that coexists with the above without denying it. It could provide a breeding ground for the appropriation of possibilities of being, of a resignification of “things-meaning” (Zubiri 1986). Given that in the actualisation of a possibility of being, the human being’s position before the world is determined, the possibilities of being fertilised from the development of expressive culture could promote an opening to horizons of meaning that have not been traversed or redefined, which are not and could not be normatively prescribed but which could eventually be illuminated as a result of an introspective deepening driven by expressive longing, oriented towards the incursion into forms of spirituality with indefinite outlines, far removed from and refractory to any dogmatic or doctrinal creed. The deployment of expressive culture would seed the dissemination of a religious restlessness recognisable in the Simmelian version of religiosity. Thus, in terms of religious tonality (Simmel), the becoming of late-modern Western societies would be recognisable in the Simmelian view of religiosity. The dilation of expressivity could serve, in its commitment to a deepening of the self-reflexive facet of the self, as an incentive for a desire for transcendence and for the re-imbrication of an original binomial woven between creation and transcendence in a prima facie secular framework (Sánchez Capdequí 2022, 2020), if not for a promise of resonance animated to counteract the discomfort provoked by a “relationship without relationship through the ferment of a more authentic way of being in its fundamental values” (Rosa 2019).

The generation of the 1960s corresponded for the most part to young people in privileged segments of the social scale of the Western world. After the end of World War II, they were brought up in an educational and family environment that emphasised, as a gesture of openness and innovation, the virtues of creativity and expression typical of children (Roszak 1970). A factor inscribed in the beginnings of an “emotional culture” (Illouz 2007) subordinated to the parameters of a zeal devoted to the personal development of the offspring awakened as a result of the success of psychoanalytic discourse and other psychotherapeutic variants in a consumer clientele from socially favoured sectors. To this factor we should add the fact that these young people, because they were born into these social segments, could afford the privilege, unlike the youth belonging to the popular strata, of voluntarily postponing their entry into the bureaucratised and mercantile world of work, which they were so allergic to, until a later age than was common at the time. Within the framework of the sixties, the incorporation of expressivity into the shaping of subjectivity was still the preserve of minority circles. From then on, its wake would expand to the spectrum of the emerging middle classes, once popular, who emulated a gentrified lifestyle. From the 1990s onwards, under the impetus of the increase in educational levels and the democratisation of access to cultural goods for the population, expressive culture has permeated practically all social strata. So today’s youth, largely the offspring of an extended and affluent Western middle class, is fully immersed in this culture. They have been socialised from family and educational institutions according to its patterns (Durán 2021). It is revealing that, precisely in synchrony with these pronounced social transformations, since the aforementioned decade, there has been an intensification of an optionality in the choice of meanings, which has been channelled towards affiliation with a repertoire of spiritual identities. These contrast significantly with the classic ascription to an inherited religious identity. A tendency that is represented in the image of the never-ending seeker, faithfully embodied in the figures of the pilgrim and the convert. The one who joins a nomadic religiosity, always on the move, and the one who takes root, always temporarily, in a religious identity and community (Hervieu-Léger 2004). This is the effect of the institutional deregulation suffered by religion in Western societies. “The generation at the end of the century is the first post-traditional generation, the first to find itself trapped in a situation of structural uncertainty characterised by mobility, reversibility, and interchangeability of all references” (Hervieu-Léger 2004, p. 269).

Consequently, the relationship established with the religious fact by the new generation seems to follow an itinerary that is almost the opposite of the one followed by the generation of the 1960s. The spirit that moves them is not a liberating subversion of any value, a deconstruction of any authorised nomos. It is not, nor can it be, because, as Jean Baudrillard would say, these young people are living in the time of liberating post-orgy, the time of the day after the supreme liberation, not only of religious values but of all echoes of value attached to tradition. There can be no motive for breaking with anything when there is nothing left to break with. So the flimsy and shifting ethos of today’s youth demands to be understood in the framework of Baudrillard’s crucial question: What to do after the orgy (Baudrillard 1990, p. 9). The way of dealing with this question is the determinant that encourages young people to follow existential itineraries and to assume possibilities of being that are, to a large extent, the opposite of those of the youth of the 60s. Religious plurality is not only inscribed (Becci et al. 2013) and contested in the urban context (Bramadat et al. 2021) but also within each individual, generating intra-personal spiritual topographies relatively alien to instituted religious structures. No longer having to bow down to imperative religious values or go to war with them, young people are left to venture into the encounter with a spirituality that is not refracted in the institution. This attitude has been well condensed by Charles Taylor: in a postsecular symbolic universe, it is a matter of “being spiritual but not religious” (Taylor 2015), revitalising, in a glimmer, the religiosity thought of in the Simmelian way. It is a spirituality that is freer and more creative of meaning. Thus, adherence to the great historical religions has been succeeded by the enchantment of a cast of micro-religiosities. In this transition, we can see how the questions of ultimacy are now faced with a greater degree of authenticity than in the case of the historical religions, since these micro-religions are deprived of a kind of legitimacy derived from a referential dogma. Consequently, these questions are forced to pass the litmus test of life experience as a true source of authority. Thus, the essential crux of the late-modern turn around the religious fact consists in the fact that the approach to religiosity is no longer comprehensible by virtue of ascription to an institutionalised legacy accepted at the outset and transferred through intergenerational socialisation, but must be interpreted as the end point of a personal experiential itinerary.

3. The Rebellion of Time and the Digital Society

One of the most radical changes experienced by contemporary society is the protagonism of time in social routines. The starting point is to be found in “the affirmation of ordinary life” (Taylor 1997), which brings with it modernity, as opposed to the relevance of eternity in the institutional design of traditional societies. The legacy of axial civilisations (Bellah and Joas 2012) based on the transcendence/immanence axis collapses. The transcendent and timeless plane of tradition is diluted and modernity unfolds its way of life on the immanent and intra-mundane stage. In the words of Reinhart Koselleck, “the religious profectus has been superseded or replaced by a worldly progressus. The goal-determination of a possible perfection, which formerly could only be achieved in the afterlife, has since served to improve earthly existence, which made it possible to go beyond the doctrine of the afterlife and risk an open future” (Koselleck 1993, p. 345). Koselleck himself gives an account of the particularity of modern society in comparison with traditional societies by stressing the inexorable separation between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation (Ibid., 333 ff.). The time to come is freed from the heavy burden of the old determinisms. Prophecy gives way to prognosis (Ibid., 33). Modern man sees in it the possibility of intervening in the course of events, thus removing God from the ultimate protagonism of things. From now on, time offers signs of contingency, defined by Niklas Luhmann as “everything that is neither necessary nor impossible” (Beriain et al. 1996, p. 175).

Without the legacies of the glorious past that forced the repetition of movements and episodes sanctioned by the authority of tradition, time is accelerating. It shoots its speed towards unpredictable destinations that are reached without a travel plan and in fits and starts. Immediacy colonises the public and private aspects of coexistence. The old historical and biographical continuities are blown up. Acceleration is installed as the keystone of the civilisation of accidents (Virilio). Things happen on the basis of the incrementalist impulse of which Harmut Rosa speaks. The dynamic stability of modernity to which this author refers indicates that the different social domains stabilise their structures by multiplying and accelerating their rhythms and activities. Any hint of stagnation or decrease is the beginning of a crisis. This need for incrementalism ends up also applying to subjects in every domain of their lives, such as work (Ulferts et al. 2013), school (Buddeberg and Hornberg 2017), or even sleep, which would seem to be immune to this process, but functions precisely as a key indicator of social acceleration (Hsu 2013). However, not all social domains have the same temporal rhythm. Times are asynchronous. The political life of today’s deliberative democracies does not keep pace with the time of economic innovation or scientific research. The era of multiple times is dawning.

If until recently the category of “space” explained a large part of the social structures of industrial modernity in aspects such as politics, economics, science, and research, among others, nowadays, time has become a variable that has transformed the face and spirit of the age (Harvey). In the context of a functionalist mentality, it was at the service of processes of the technical control of nature. However, after the expressive turn of contemporary culture, time has been freed from the old Promethean dependencies and opens the door to spaces of experience conducive to individual authenticity. Kronos is replaced by Kairos (Hartog 2012). Processes based on the need for a predictable and homogeneous course of events (Benjamin) give way to those arising from the time of subjective decision. The search for individuality of singularity (Rosanvallon 2012), in which the actor always longs for the recognition of others for his way of being and being in the world, finds its natural subsoil in a society in which time has multiplied its semantics and its fields of experience. The different planes of human activity find a place in immediacy as the new existential soil in which the conditio humana dwells. In it, the actor is concerned with every day and routine challenges but also with ricorsi (Bell 1991, p. 333), such as love, death, tragedy, war, ambition, transcendence, and others. Immediacy constitutes the basis of common sense.

Contemporary youth design their interaction processes in scenarios in which presence is not necessary. The new generations born in contexts of digitalisation, the so-called digital natives, intervene in a social relationship in which there are no longer some people present, but all. Just as the possibilities of communicating are greater, so are the risks. However, this recent novelty does not radically alter the situation of the human condition in the world. Uncertainty constitutes the otherness that has always been with us since the dawn of time. Its structural presence explains human action in the search for certainties that guarantee a predictable experience. Human nature is born with a precarious and weak instinctive equipment that makes it an animal species with great difficulty in adapting to the natural environment. Its response is culture, the genesis of regularities and repetitions in social life that crystallise in provinces of meaning with which its precarious situation is stabilised over time. Arnold Gehlen speaks of the cultural nature of the human species (Gehlen 1987). Specifically, symbolic forms (Cassirer 1998) appear as linguistic resources with which human life mediates with reality, hermeneutically impregnates it, and through it organises and guides the instinctive background of the species. Ritual, religion, myth, philosophy, science, and technology are human symbolisations that have the task of responding with assurance to the constant levels of uncertainty that surround human existence.

Each of them has specific logics of operation that organise the expression of the world in different ways. Myth and religion make sense by analogy. Science uses truth by adequacy. Technology points to the possibility of human mastery of factual events based on the findings of science. As neo-evolutionism affirms, nothing from the past disappears definitively from the historical present (Bellah 2011, p. 267). These cultural crystallisations are rooted in the deep structures of evolution and continue to be part of current social usage. The first forms of semantic organisation of experience survive, inspiring possible updates of what the species has experienced. Ritual perfomativity (Donald), mythical analogies (Eliade), the living metaphors of religion (Ricoeur), and the correspondences of the age of the modern image (Heidegger) coexist in a cultural scenario akin to a plural and diverse symbolisation born throughout the evolutionary process.

Nevertheless, none of these symbolic forms has managed to definitively remove the unknown and the contingent from the social scene. Nowadays, the virtual domain in which the biographies of digital natives take place is home to uncertainty at different levels. It brings together dimensions that are predictable because they are repeated, strange because they are unknown, and ineffable because they are unknowable. Schutz and Luckmann (1989) define these planes of uncertainty as Small Transcendences, Intermediate Transcendences, and Large Transcendences, respectively. This is a complex architecture of common sense in which the social actor lives the different levels of experience that make up his biography. On each of these levels, human uncertainty is expressed in a differentiated way. The Small Transcendences refer to everyday routines, the Intermediate Transcendences point to the uncontrollable element that represents a relationship with the other, and the Great Transcendences evoke a level of reality that is ineffable and only expressible with the help of religious or artistic symbols. In line with the contributions of the phenomenological sociology of A. Schutz and Th. Luckmann, the incorporation of sophisticated digital material does not remove the human being from the different planes of uncertainty that define the human as human. The human being has become more central to the design of his or her life. Better access to information and knowledge is a substantial advance. However, this greater availability of technological resources does not mean a definitive triumph in the successful access to reality. Reality continues to offer resistance to the human attempt to get to know the ultimate secret of existence. Mystery eludes the dictates of the transparency that prevails in the institutional design of contemporary society.

In these circumstances, the fact of living with everything and everyone at hand can offer an image of plenipotentiary control on the part of the human being who has become, therefore, a new secular deity that seems to have the future of events under its control. Some authors speak of techno-functional neoinmanentism (Sánchez Capdequi et al. 2023) to explain the omnipresence of the algorithm as the new semiological language with which late-modern society knows and anticipates the course of human decisions. These would be the calculated prolongations of its own tendencies and reiterations. There would only be facts in the natural and social world. In the latter, human action is known by the regularities of its decisions embodied in digital memory. We are transparent facts stripped of secrets. The world would definitely be at the disposal of human whim after having lost the depth that existed in other periods of history. Everything would be resolved in the management of algorithms that anticipate future courses of action.

However, human beings (and today’s youth) find in the digital scenario the same questions that have marked the human adventure with fire. The digital transforms the context of coexistence. The possibilities of information and communication generate an atmosphere unimaginable a century ago. But, there is no hidden sign of the triumph of secularisation. There are also oases of sacredness. The Great Transcendences, i.e., the questions of ultimacy in which uncertainty is absolute, are still with us. Undoubtedly, everything can be done faster and, as Bauman says, more lives can be lived in one. However, in the individual, the depth of existence continues to call out to the conscience. In these religious trances, the real overflows to the point of dwarfing the individual. The individual resorts to digital relations with acquaintances and strangers in which experience seeks moments of plenitude, certainty, and meaning. This plane never ceases to challenge the man of yesterday and today.

Contemporary youth live naturally in a state of secularization following a process of religious disaffiliation (which constitutes the main cause of the decline in the percentage of Christians in the world, as well as the increase in global populations with no religious affiliation) and the so-called “religious swifting” (Tong 2025). They were born into societies in which the centrality of institutional religion has weakened. For this very reason, in contrast to the model of their progenitors, they are not obliged to viscerally assert themselves against transcendence and religion. Their movements are more in pursuit of that personal religion of which James (2017) spoke, in which there is no other obligation for the individual than to take care of his or her soul vitality without attending to the routine rigours of religious life. The fundamental challenge for young people today is to find spaces of experience in which their existence is fulfilled, but without doctrinal schemes that demand discipline and rigid doctrinal commitments. Their movements do not seek definitive certainties. Rather, they are looking for transitory discoveries, light on doctrinal weight, evocative of moments of fusion with the whole and akin to a temporal dynamism that defines the era in which they live.

4. The Comings and Goings of Post-Secularity: Tradition and Heresy

It would seem that, in this context, one can speak of a kind of dynamic syncretic imperative, insofar as what is penalised would be religious traditionalism as a static following of an already formed universalistic norm or doctrine, and thus as a historical religion necessarily restricting the infinite possibilities of development and self-definition of the self. The obligation to freely take parts of one or another religious form in order to recombine them creatively in an individual and increasingly accelerated way would be presented as the norm. That is to say as a new device for ordering behaviour and the collective imaginary in terms of time and transcendence. There is no doubt that there are trends that point in this direction, given the rise of the role of interiority (Taylor 1997), particularist visions (Reckwitz 2020), and discontinuous narratives (Bauman 2007) in a large part of the spheres that appeal to the construction of identities and ways of being in the world. Here, the social capacity to construct meaning and even to create the world is compromised, insofar as this extreme fluidity and personalisation make it extremely difficult to consummate the processes of articulation, which require the transit from the particular to the general and back to the particular (Sánchez Capdequi and Echeverría Esparza 2024).

However, social phenomena that point in another direction must also be noted, showing themselves as a clear imprint of the incessant tension between secularising and counter-secularising impulses (Berger 1999; Joas 2023) that characterise the post-secular era. As an example of this, it is worth noting that the early twenty-first century generation has moved on from the heretical imperative (Berger 1979) and religious bricolage (Hervieu-Léger 2004, 2005) that were evident in the behaviour of the late twentieth century generations. If the former was the first post-traditionalist, the latter can be considered as incipient or subalternly neo-traditionalist, not because of its vindication of traditions and institutional religions, but because of its overcoming of the need to repudiate them. Analogous to what has happened in the political arena with the so-called conservative counter-revolution (Goodwin 2023), for today’s youth, declaring oneself a believer in a historical religion may well represent a sign of rebellion, perhaps traditionalist, but rebellion nonetheless. At the same time, the cultural and religious clash (especially with Islam) experienced in many Western societies in recent years has been conveyed by neo-conservative discourses that have championed the recovery of traditions and cultural legacies as a heritage to be defended in the face of change and what they consider to be an acculturation of their destination countries by migrants. Even so, as is also derived from the dynamics of nationalist regression inherent in the culture wars (Sánchez Capdequí and Roche Cárcel 2022; Sánchez-Prieto 2023; Aguiluz Ibargüen and Sánchez Capdequi 2025), the strength of this (neo-)traditionalist possibility does not refute the personal quest that we have been postulating as a non-established pattern representative of young people’s religiosity. On the contrary, it reinforces this idea, insofar as it implies the realisation on the part of this group that to necessarily avoid any doctrine is also prescriptive. On this point, the creative imperative of which A. Reckwitz (2023) speaks, together with the heretical imperative from which it emanates, are partially contested—or, if you like, re-signified—by the substantially creative social action of choosing not to choose. Questioning views of the absolute and supposedly necessary late-modern fluidity underline the hiatus between heresy and apostasy. Whoever is forced to make constant choices must also be able to choose what was once the norm. In other words, in a genuinely open and free religious market, tradition must also be a consumption option.

Even so, we must speak of an incipient or subaltern neo-traditionalism, given that this does not imply a return to the past scenario of majority acceptance of historical religions. Currently, in contrast to both the aforementioned traditionalist context and the post-traditionalism that succeeded it, the adoption of Catholicism, Hinduism, or Buddhism represents one more personal option, neither preferential nor contemptible, but equally valid among many, notable for its low level of personalisation or novelty. To distinguish these contexts (traditional, post-traditional, and neo-traditional, with all the nuances that can be added to these labels) without drawing a clear fracture or division that would contradict the empirically observable reality, we could speak of a predominance of personal syncretism in which non-syncretic options are also acceptable, persisting as minority alternatives, but not necessarily tending towards gradual decline or irrelevance. For its part, the predominant personal syncretism could be described as a constantly re-elaborative process of invention of compatibilities (or creative resolution of incompatibilities) between religious forms that does not occur, at least primarily, in a collective or institutionally mediated way but within the personal and private sphere, and that is always susceptible to new re-elaborations, reaffirming the dynamism and vitality of today’s religious world.

At the same time, those who adopt one of the historical religions also do so differently from those who did it two generations ago. To begin with, they are not socialised into it, but it is presented to them externally as an option that can be chosen. On the other hand, their status of faith is downgraded to that of belief, since the religious option is not presented as a closed system, but is open to a kind of selective harvesting of minimal units of meaning, as well as to the appearance of unsuspected elective affinities between minimal units belonging to different options. In other words, in order to acquire a substantial part of the religious pack, it is not essential to buy it in its entirety, and it is possible to complete one with parts of others. And finally, the possibility of abandoning this religion, more or less altered from its heterodoxy, remains open, forming an autonomous relationship with the belief system, whether it is a construction of its own or a previously instituted and institutionalised social inheritance.

All of this can work in favour of the capacity of religions to bring us closer to scenarios of Habermasian deliberative democracy (Ruíz Andrés 2022), insofar as flexible religiosities also become debatable and revisable, even when they are filled with the content of the old religions. Their doctrinal component softens and becomes porous, accessible to criticism as it loses its monopolistic condition. Moreover, not only are they open to debate and reinterpretation, but for this very reason they can also be exhibited without contumacy or subterfuge, even in hyper-accessible scenarios such as social networks, contributing to the revival and return to the public space of religious discourses that seemed to be privatised and made invisible at the end of the last century (Luckmann 1973).

5. Conclusions and Discussions

In the light of our analysis, current youth religiosity should be understood and evaluated not on the basis of its similarity or disparity with respect to its historical precedents, nor on the basis of its closeness to or distance from the moral evaluations of each observer, but fundamentally on the basis of its capacity for articulation, understood as the potential for iterative access to the plane of intermediate transcendences from the surrounding small and large transcendences, which are necessarily involved in the processes of religious bricolage or late-modern dynamic personal syncretism. The prospects of success of the newly invigorated quests for certainty, as well as of the projects of overcoming and breaking with the certainties imposed as a principle of reality, will depend to a large extent on the establishment of routes of meaning that connect both the personal and self-referential as well as the numinous and inaccessible with the social and political instances of intervention in history that have never been alien to the religious (Weber 1958). However, the same porous and flexible condition that gives dynamism to the new religiosities may at the same time act to the detriment of their deliberative and transformative operability. Their fluidity implies adaptability but also instability, making it more complex for these constructs to serve as a real basis for the emergence of the (substantively) new. In line with the constant need for change for the maintenance of the status quo that characterises the dynamic stabilisation of late-modernity (Rosa 2019), constant religious re-actualisation may well have a similarly immobilising role to that once exercised by rigid religious structures.