Individualism, Communalism and Religiosity

Individualism, as a modern term, stands contrary to the communalism of traditional society in sociological literature. Re-interpretation of the self and various spheres of life constitute the basic characteristics of individualism. Within such circumstances and with the absence of social approval religious orientation may become questioned and evaluated. This situation often occurs amongst seculars of society most exposed to modern epistemology. Accepting this presupposition, we examine the existence of individualistic and communistic values among university students and the relationship between religious tendencies and liberal interpretations. In doing so we have used Stock and Clark’s measurement of religiosity combined with indexes on rethinking religiosity and individualist/ communalist values constructed by the researcher. This study showed that despite the dominance of communal characteristics individualistic tendencies exist almost with the same intensity. The co-existence of these two was shown using both survey and construction methods. The study also showed that among the students’ belief and experimental dimensions of religion are more acceptable than other dimensions. The study of the inter-relations between the indexes reveals that communalism has a direct and meaningful inter-relationship with all dimensions of religiosity but acts independently from re-thinking religion. Contrary to this, individualism shows strong relationships with experimental as well as rethinking dimensions of religion.