ABSTRACT
Religion as a cultural system is thus a source of information that individuals draw from in order to lend meaning not only to their own lives as individuals, but also to their life together in society. For Clifford Geertz, people believe primarily in an authority, on which they rely to understand or explain the world and the mysterious and profound order governing it. Social changes are sometimes so deep that they are not registered by the cultural systems with the same speed and intensity at which they occur. The organizational format adopted by the new charismatic and Pentecostal churches, or by the charismatic movements born within Catholicism. It seems to indicate that the religious belief system that people call Christianity has become flexibly differentiated to suit the various socio-cultural environments that it has encountered in the course of its history.
