Religious Mobilization in the Context of Cultural Path Dependency, Religious Practice and Modernization

Searching for examples of topics and forms of religious mobilization in Europe, it might be interesting to take a look at Pro-Life-Demonstrations, which are mainly organized by religious groups and take place in Rome, Berlin and other towns in Europe.

The aim of this paper is to analyze this form of religious mobilization in the context of cultural path dependency, religious practice and modernization aspects. Basically, the research focuses on the two dependent variables, the willingness to attend a demonstration and the attitude towards euthanasia. The paper deals with two main questions about religious mobilization.

• First, what differences can be found not only between Western European and Post-Communist countries but also between countries in which its citizens identify themselves mainly as religious or not religious?

• Second, what impacts do religious practice, cultural path dependency and modernization aspects have in this context?

In this paper the cultural path dependency is investigated by the Culture-Religion-Matrix, which I developed to explore differences between countries. On the one hand, the matrix distinguishes between Western European and Post-Communist countries. On the other hand, it defines a country religious, if more than half of the citizens identify themselves as religious, otherwise a country is seen as mainly not religious.

On a bivariate level, correlations between the religious practice and the two dependent variables are conducted. On a multivariate level, regression models are expected to identify the direct impacts of religious practice, denominations and modernization. Above all, the differences between countries are analyzed according to the four types of the Culture-Religion-Matrix.

The findings of the study show that there are quite remarkable differences between the Western European and the Post-Communist countries.