Women, Generations, and the Question of Faith

Over the past decades, women in Latin America have occupied a central place in processes of social, political, and cultural transformation. Across different generations—Millennials, Generation Z, and more recently Generation Alpha—a significant shift can be observed in how public participation, social commitment, and the experience of spirituality are understood. This is not a withdrawal from collective life, but a profound reconfiguration of its meanings.

Research on youth in the region consistently points to the Millennial generation as key in reopening the public sphere after prolonged periods of democratic transition and persistent inequality. In this context, many women integrated politics into everyday life, linking it to education, work, social rights, and gender equity. Political engagement ceased to be confined to formal activism and began to take shape through concrete, local, and cultural practices.

Generation Z inherits this momentum but reshapes it through a different sensibility. Recent studies show that young women today focus their attention on issues such as the climate crisis, animal protection, diversity in family models, and emotional well-being. Their participation is more flexible, less hierarchical, and strongly mediated by digital environments. In this shift, politics is experienced less as institutional belonging and more as an ethical practice oriented towards the care of life in all its forms.

Young People and Faith: Sharing Spirituality as a Network for Social Change

Young People and Faith: Spirituality as a Network for Social Change

This ethical turn also shapes the way younger generations relate to spirituality. Sociological research on contemporary religiosity suggests that many young people—particularly women—maintain an active spiritual search, even when it is not clearly tied to institutional affiliation. Spirituality becomes integrated into their sense of purpose, mental health, and the coherence between values and everyday practices.

These transformations are increasingly reflected in younger generations. Studies on contemporary childhood indicate that children today grow up amid intense digital exposure, global crises, and accelerated cultural change. In this context, the transmission of values and spirituality occurs less through explicit instruction and more through lived experience: care, emotional stability, adult presence, and coherence between what is said and what is done.

It is difficult not to read this moment as a direct challenge to how we build community, education, and meaning. New generations observe closely how ethics are lived in everyday life and assess, on that basis, the credibility of the spaces they inhabit. Here, a concrete opportunity emerges: to transform social, educational, and spiritual institutions into genuinely inhabitable spaces—places where questions are not a problem, but the starting point for building shared responses to the challenges of the present and the future.

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