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Do religions uphold or undermine human rights? Do different religious traditions play differential role with regard to human rights? Our empirical research among college students in Tamil Nadu, India, has brought to light significant results with regard to the impact of religion on human rights attitude and activism. The findings reveal that among all the categories of human rights, the socioeconomic rights and the right to life issue of abortion for psycho-economic reasons emerge as distinct categories in the perception of the young. The young respondents manifest a clear agreement tendency with regard to socioeconomic rights, with Christians expressing significantly stronger agreement than Muslims and Hindus. The three religious groups affirm that they might engage in human rights activism. We also find that variables related to religion, democracy and personal traits have stronger and more numerous cases of association with socioeconomic rights than with human rights activism. The paper spells out the implications of these findings for the formal education and religious education of the young, taking into account the religious and cultural pluralism that characterize the educational institutions. Consolidating the human rights attitude and human rights activism among the young can be an essential way to upholding the universality of human dignity and promoting the common good in multi-religious contexts, and eventually forge a future worthy of humanity.

There is no gainsaying that in a globalized world, economic and technological development greatly determine human wellbeing. In the Indian context, the dialectics between socialist and capitalist economy, while giving way to the latter since 1991, has progressively led to the enlargement of the middle class, yet widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Such a situation points to the importance of socioeconomic rights for guaranteeing human flourishing. The question that we pose is whether religions can play a significant role in favoring these human rights, given their own specific vision of human life and of its socioeconomic facets, such as work, wealth, leisure, health, and education. In other words, can personal and contextual religious attitudes and religious socialization contribute to socioeconomic wellbeing? The empirical research undertaken in the pluralistic and democratic context of Tamil Nadu, India, seeks to verify among 1215 Christian, Muslim, and Hindu students, the impact of religion on their attitude towards socioeconomic rights. The emerging results reveal that some aspects of religious attitudes and socialization have a significant impact on students&rsquo, agreement with socioeconomic rights, particularly in the case of Christians and Muslims. We conclude with a discussion on the salient findings and their implications.