Religious Socialization in Diosig, Western-Romania
Religious Socialization in Diosig, Western-Romania

Summary/Abstract: Religious socialization is a process familiarizing children with the basics of religiosity, with prayers and ethical norms practiced within the Christian confessions. Our paper presents the peculiarities of religious socialization in Diosig, a village in Western-Romania, inhabited predominantly by ethnic Hungarian Calvinists. We present the historical alternations of the religious education and socialization, and the structural characteristics of the various time-periods in the last 70 years. The main purpose of the paper is to present alternations occurred in the religious socialization of the Calvinist community in Diosig since the middle of the past century until today. Therefore, we analyze the primary and the secondary spheres of religious socialization, such as the family, the school and the church, focusing on the elements playing a key role in the process of learning religious behavior, such as prayers, which define and consolidate the individuals` religiosity. The research extends over the ethnic Hungarian Calvinist community of the settlement. It turns out from the interviews that the family is the sphere of socialization where the most important norms, values and attitudes are passed on, and thus the family plays a vital role in the religiosity of the individuals. However, as time went by, the religious socialization went gradually out from the sphere of the family, and the school and the church became more and more important in this respect. The religious forms of knowledge, especially the prayers are today passed on primarily in the secondary sphere of socialization, in the frame of the religious education in kindergarten, school, and church-provided Bible lessons. Thus, these occasions mean the real beginning of the children`s religious education.

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