Cosmopolitan Youth Religious Movements in Ethiopia: Ethiopian Orthodox Täwahədo Youth as Vanguard and Self-Appointed Masters of Ceremony

The trajectories of youth religiosity have not received much scholarly attention in anthropological studies of the Horn of Africa. The present article addresses this gap through an in-depth ethnographic study of contemporary developments around the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwahədo Church (EOTC). It also aims to advance the anthropological understanding of the agency of religious youth by going beyond the rupture thesis, which emphasizes generational shifts and the disruptive role of religious youth in calling for the reform of the religious practices of older generations. In contrast to this view, the thrust of the religious practices of the EOTC youth presented in this work is toward conservatism and protectionism in the context of a new competitive religious field. This article also argues against academic discourses that hint at direct links between economic deprivation and increased religiosity, authoritarianism and heightened religiosity, and the global and local religious activism resulting from new information technologies, and instead calls for an interactionist approach that looks into the interplay of these and other variables in order to account for the growing religiosity of the youth.