And after school, what then? Religious mobility among graduates of elite Catholic schools in Santiago, Chile: a longitudinal study

Most research on youth religiosity relies on cross-sectional snapshots, leaving unclear how individuals’ religious identification evolves after leaving the schooling experience that shaped it. This article presents a qualitative study of twenty-four graduates from four elite Catholic schools in Santiago, Chile, interviewed five, ten, and fifteen years after graduation to examine how they configure and reconfigure their religiosity and the challenges these institutions face in transmitting faith. Findings are organised around four axes: the religious educational experience itself, the reconfiguration of religiosity post-graduation, graduates’ retrospective views on faith transmission, and the religious objects they retain. Drawing on a longitudinal reading of the data, the study proposes a typology of eleven dynamics, or trajectories, of religious mobility. These trajectories demonstrate that static affiliation categories – believer/non-believer, practicing/non-practicing – fail to capture processes that are non-linear, reversible, and anchored in specific biographical milestones such as university entry, employment, marriage, and parenthood.