Special Section: Socialization and Religion

Socialization is one of the main categories of sociological analysis, because it tends to satisfy the needs of all types of society, which range from maintaining almost unaltered, from generation to generation, the structures that bestow plausibility on institutional worlds and sub-worlds and enhance the exercise of the functions favouring conservation, breeding, limitation, control and social cohesion; from the inclusion of individuals in their reference contexts to the regulations governing relations between people. According to this classical interpretation of Durkheimian and Parsonian derivation, the socialization process plays a central role in the transfer of knowledge and the survival of a shared system of roles, values, symbols and norms of behaviour. It enables individuals to see themselves as sharing a culture, a social identity and a religious creed which are prevalent at a given historical time and in a specific place; it also ensures the creation of an organic, stable model of the self, capable of making the subjective personality unique and recognizable. If socialization has always occupied a significant amount of space within the ambit of sociological reflection, so too has religion and to no lesser an extent. In fact, at the time when the first social scientists paid attention to phenomena of modernity they also became aware of the essential role played by religion as a transmitter of meaning, ideas, standards and as a means of strengthening the links between collective and subjective identity while legitimizing the existing social order.