The Guilt Phenomenon. An Analysis of Emotions Towards God in Highly Religious Adolescents and Young Adults

Abstract

In his model of religiosity, Huber postulates a “qualitative leap” between the groups of the “religious” and the “highly religious”. Correspondingly, the data from the Empirica Youth Survey 2018 underline that the topic of guilt and forgiveness is in itself only really present in the “highly religious”. Thus, this article aims to provide a detailed analysis of the relation between emotions towards God and the centrality of religiosity. One of the results of the exploratory factor analysis concludes that emotions towards God comprise three aspects within Protestant “highly religious” adolescents and young adults: a factor for positive emotions, one for negative emotions, and a third for emotions of guilt, release and fear. In this article, we focus on the factor that drives the experience of guilt (and release and fear) and conclude that it is a phenomenon only found within the “highly religious” and not the “religious” Protestant adolescents and young adults. We explicitly incorporate the journal’s main foci in two regards: First, we focus on the particularities of the group of “highly religious” people as identified by the Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS) along with the interactions between the theoretical concept of centrality of religiosity and the content of religiosity. Secondly, we briefly compare “highly religious” with “religious” adolescents and young adults.

Keywords

• CRS
• highly religious
• adolescents
• young adults
• God images
• emotions towards God