Public or private religion? Social representations of secularism between Christians and non-Christians
Politics and Religion. Laicity. Christian Religion. Social Representations.
The present work sought to investigate Brazilian secularism as a political-social phenomenon. This research is justified by the need to investigate the concept that is competed and practiced differently depending on the social group in which one is. We start from a psychosocial perspective having as main theoretical reference the Theory of Social Representations proposed by Serge Moscovici from the perspective of the structural approach. The psychosocial view of the theory of social representations allows a privileged look at the experiences and needs for understanding the reality shared by the groups in question: Christians and non-Christians. It was a data collection from a quantitative and qualitative perspective that allowed the identification of causes, consequences, characteristics and social practices related to the type of understanding that each group has about secularism through free evocation tasks, sociodemographic questionnaire and questions to aid the analysis. The survey was carried out online through Google Forms and covered the entire state of Rio de Janeiro, involving people aged between 18 and 40 years old, 100 of whom were Christians (Catholics and Evangelicals) and 100 non-Christians (other religious beliefs or not). The data revealed the terms “freedom”, “equal” and “religion” as probable central cognems of the social representation of Christians and “freedom”, “respect” and “impartial” as a probable representational core of non-Christians.