A new Pew Research Center study on the gap between the importance of religion in the lives of younger and older adults shows that faith is most important to young people in some sub-Saharan African countries.
In Ghana and the former Soviet republic of Georgia – both countries with histories of being heavily influenced by Soviet Marxist movements – faith is blooming since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
According to the report, this region has both the world’s fastest population growth and the smallest age gap on importance of religion. Here 88 percent of younger adults and 89 percent of older adults say that religion is very important in their lives.
While youth in the U.S. and Europe are following in the lapse in the faith of their parents, Stephanie Kramer and Dalia Fahmy of the Pew Research Center wrote that “it would be a mistake to assume the world overall is becoming less religious just because the young people are less devout.”
“In fact, many of the world’s least religious countries have populations that are either shrinking or growing only slowly, while regions with the highest population growth tend to be very religious,” they added.
Theories on why this may be the case include people becoming more religious as they age and approach their own morality or that “societies become less religious as economic conditions improve and people face fewer anxiety-inducing or life-threatening problems,” Kramer and Fahmy said.
As socialist ideologies have permeated the minds of atheist young people in countries that grew because of religion, they are neglecting to realize the correlation between prosperity, economic liberty, and spiritual freedom.
In Poland, for instance, the elderly population “may be significantly more religious in part because they were more affected by the Cold War, a time when the Catholic Church was associated with Polish nationalism and resistance to the Soviet Union,” Kramer and Fahmy wrote.
While their economy has thrived since the 1990s when their government moved toward economic liberalization, young people don’t realize what they’re leaving behind.
Meanwhile, sub-Saharan African countries are burgeoning places of faith in young people, coinciding with massive economic growth in Ghana and Georgia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
