In: Psychology
1. Religion is considered one of the major agents of socialization. Discuss a few of the ways religion socializes people into roles and behaviors.
Social scientists and researchers have pondered over this issue and attempted to answer this question several times. Religion has not lost its value even today in the modern society. A new focus in the research therefore is to understand how society maintains religion is transferred onto the next generations. It has in fact been hypothesized that three major agents play a role in this domain: the parents, peers and the church. Religious socialization and the way people fit into roles and behaviours is due to the tremendous impact of these three agents. The parents, peers, community and the propagator of religious ideas (such as the church) play an indispensable role in conditioning minds of individuals. The values, belief systems, ideas and thoughts are all formulated through the functioning of these three socialization agents. This can be further linked to the social learning theory of psychology. It states that the most potent form of learning is through observation of one’s own society/community or surroundings. This tends to have the maximum impact on how the lens or outlook towards the world is slowly built.