Highly Religious Catholic Youths in the (Post)-Secular World

Abstract The goal of the paper is to provide a comparative analysis of religious revitalisation among selected religious Ghanaian Catholic youths in Ghana and England. In the 1960s Peter Berger and Harvey Cox, two leading scholars of the sociology of religion, argued that the force of modernity, characterised by advances in science and technology, would marginalise religion. But global religious resurgence, especially after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, led them to revise this view toward desecularization. Using ethnographic methods and secularization theory, the study examines how factors like parental socialisation, education, religious plurality, and state control shape youth religiosity, particularly amid uncertainty intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper concludes that the definition of religiosity among Ghanaian Catholic youths is both morally valued and contextualised.