Socio-Economic Forces as a Major Cause of Religious Crisis in Third World States

Abstract

Issues such as lower per capital income, low level of human capital, high level of poverty, high population growth rate, corruption, unemployment, coup d’etat among others are characteristics of third world countries. Indeed, these are salient features of poor third world states such as Africa, Asia and Latin America. Perhaps, it is appropriate to say the aforementioned are most prevalent in those
countries just as it would be correct to say they are almost non – existent in advanced western countries. The paper adopts the modernization theory which stipulates that third world countries are only going through a stage which western advanced countries had passed through. In other words, such issues aforementioned that are synonymous with third world states are clear manifestations of
stages through which they are going through before getting to the final stage of development just like first world countries went through. Consequently, these have impacted on the socio-economic as well as political forces of the states. To this end, certain structures and institutions have been affected negatively of which the outcome is devastating. The outcome of this faulty structure is multifaceted
but for the purpose of this paper, we shall limit ourselves to result that bother on ethnic divide, ethnic religious dichotomy to a more complex full blown religious crisis resulting in war as witnessed in many countries across the world such as Asia, Africa and Nigeria inclusive. In addition to these, it intends to expose some obvious or covert reasons for this through the study of documentation and
content analysis. At the end, the paper made recommendations could help minimize the indices of socio-economic crisis and invariably religious crisis.