Religiosity and Rural modernization in the Context of Community Development

This article is an approach intended as an effort to analyse the general factors that determine modernization, religiosity and social change in rural Romania. Rural religiosity is a specific way of relating to the sacred. The village is "deliberately placed around the church and the cemetery, namely around God and the dead" (Lucian Blaga, cited. Ilie Badescu, Ozana Cucu-Oancea, 2005, p 433). Village religiosity is concrete and practical without being embedded in theoretical speculation. Here, religious knowledge and information about religion are not that rich. The believers are less interested in doctrine and dogma. Usually, their religious information are transmitted by priests or other village intellectuals (professors, doctors, civil servants), but their precarious religious knowledge, formed in family or church, are authentic. We see in almost entire rural area that the peasant obeys and respects the priest, especially for his moral life and education. The villager is more stable as emotional fervour and mystical emulation, even if sometimes not so intense as some urban categories. The peasants are more open and generous about religion, they rarely offer large donations, but always give something of what they have. They tend to modernize, but they don’t embrace any modernization, in any case not one that "overthrows traditions, which would uproot him", because he understand the development of his environment in a unique way and "has a proper concept of quality of life", other than of a city dweller.