The literature on the new religiosities in the urban middle classes. A perspective from Argentina

This paper proposes a tour of the recent literature about the new religiosities of urban middle class areas of Argentina, ideally embodied in Charismatic Catholicism and the so-called New Age. This description details two parallel movements linking religiosity and middle class. On the one hand, there are those analyses that focus on specific religious practices and experiences and refer broadly to the middle class condition of those involved. Among them refers to a movement that shows how religiosity entails in specific values associated to middle class culture as the idea of individuality and autonomy. On the other hand, those that-with a central preoccupation on middle class social mobility-discuss only marginally the new religious practices. This paper concludes that a comparative re-interpretation of religiosity and middle class is necessary focusing on specific and contrastive values, but also on the processes in which religiosity becomes a vehicle for class differentiation and identification.