Religious Belief: Another Way To Catering For The Rural Elderly's Spiritual Needs

Under the background that rural aging population grows more and more seriously, governments and scholars have given more attractions to the rural elderly's spiritual life. There are some studies having involved the elderly's spiritual life, but only talking the theme in generalities. Rural elderly are the special vulnerable group in the rural areas, due to their limited conditions involving the age, physical body function, economic capacity, the education etc, which make their spiritual life under a single dull style and low quality conditions. Under this context, some rural elderly resort to the religious belief. As a social fact, why and how does the phenomenon happen? And what will happen to the elderly's life, especially their spiritual life? All those questions need to be answered.This paper chooses 20 elderly Christians of M Christian Church in Shanxi province as research objects, and tries to discuss the influences of religious belief on the rural elderly's spiritual life from the intersection angle of the sociology and science of religion, and try to look for the policy direction to improve the quality of rural elderly's spiritual life. This try, no matter about its research topic or its research perspective, no matter in the field of sociology or the field of science of religion, is very valuable.This paper is divided into six parts.The first part is the introduction, which firstly introduces the background, the significance, secondly reviews the current researches about spiritual needs in the fields of sociology and religious belief in the field of science of religion at home and abroad, lastly provides some related definitions and illustrates its research approaches and data sources. The second part focuses on the introduction of the background information about the county where M Christian Church lies in, including its economic society, the M Christian Church's history and its current situation, which help us to understand the rural elderly's religious behaviors in the specific social circumstance.The third part presents the life of rural elderly Christians, including the normal daily life and the religious life. The investigation reveals that some rural elderly's life is dull and lonely, but rich and varied religious activities to some extent can make up for the emptiness of elderly's life.The forth part focuses on inducing the straightforward reasons converting the rural elderly to the Christian and analyzing the deep social reasons. This part represents the original reasons for the elderly Christian's empty life, in order to help us to find the ways to solve the problems of the elderly's.According the case survey, the fifth part explores the relationship between the religious belief and the elderly's spiritual needs, the latter including affection needs, entertainment needs, education needs, communication needs and self-fulfillment needs. The result indicates that religious belief is another way to rich the elderly's spiritual life and the alternative to the mainstream cultural and recreational activities.The sixth part is the conclusion and thoughts. This research indicates the rural elderly's religious belief has the complicated personal and social reasons, and induces some complex effects. The religious behaviors of the rural elderly to some extent satisfy the elderly's spiritual needs, and make up for the emptiness of elderly's life. At the same time, we should recognize that the religion, as an ideology, is illusory reflection of the present material world, and its negative effects shouldn't be ignored. This also suggests that the governments and the society should make measures of the material life security, spiritual cultural life security and religion managements and so on to provide full-scale supplies and protects to improve the sound development of the rural elderly's spiritual life and help to improve the quality of their whole life.