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Contemporary Religious Changes: from Desecularization to Postsecularization

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Contemporary Religious Changes: from Desecularization to Postsecularization YUGOSLAV SOCIETY FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION FACULTY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NIŠ INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES YSSSR Anuual – Year XXVI CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS CHANGES: FROM DESECULARIZATION TO POSTSECULARIZATION YUGOSLAV SOCIETY FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION FACULTY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NIŠ INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES YSSSR Anuual – Year XXVI CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS CHANGES: FROM DESECULARIZATION TO POSTSECULARIZATION _____________________ edited by DRAGAN TODOROVIĆ MIRKO BLAGOJEVIĆ DRAGOLJUB B. ĐORĐEVIĆ YUGOSLAV SOCIETY FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION FACULTY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NIŠ INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Niš and Belgrade 2020 Contemporary Religious Changes: From Desecularization to Postsecularization YSSSR Anuual – Year XXVI XXVI Annual International YSSSR Conference Processes, Trends, Extents and Limits of Religious Changes in the Contemporary World: (De)Secularization), Postsecularization, Revitalization of Religion – Theoretical Underpinnings and Empirical Proof Founder Yugoslav Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Niš, Serbia Editors Yugoslav Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Niš, Serbia Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Niš, Serbia Institute of Social Sciences, Belgrade, Serbia For the Editors Dragan Todorović Nenad T. Pavlović Goran Bašić Edited by Dragan Todorović Mirko Blagojević Dragoljub B. Đorđević Reviewers Danijela Gavrilović Ružica Cacanoska Sergej Lebedev Computer Support and Cover Design Darko Jovanović Print SCERO print, Niš Circulation 200 ISBN 978-86-86957-22-1 (YSSSR) 978-86-7093-229-6 (ISS) CONTENTS 1 Religions and Nations as Factors of Division and Desintegration in the Balkans 9 Ivan Cvitković 2 (De)Secularization in the XXI Century: Empirical Verification of the Revitalisation of Religiosity in Serbia 21 Dragana Radisavljević Ćiparizović Ana Vuković 3 Religious Change and the Internet: Dialectics of the Conflict over New Media Technologies 31 Željko Pavić 4 The Amish in Reality Shows 43 Dorotea Janković Ana Stevanović Anastasija Cvijanović 5 Aspects of the Relationship between Secular and Religious Worldviews in the Public Discourse of St. Petersburg 53 Alexander Alexandrovich Pelin Vladimir Dmitrievich Kovalenko Olga Mikhailovna Gladkaya 6 Богатство бедности, или может ли религия быть бедной? (Со-размышления с М. Эпштейном) 61 Наталья Шелковая 7 Religiosity and Altruistic Orientation in Economically Developed European Societies 75 Vladimir Mentus Nataša Jovanović Ajzenhamer 8 The Role of Religion in Banking Business in Islamic Law 89 Ranko Sovilj Sanja Stojković Zlatanović Ivana Ostojić 9 Восприятие прошлого и культурная память в ортодоксальной христианской традиции 99 Olga Olegovna Smolina 10 Church Choir as A Socio-cultural System 109 Yuliia Voskoboinikova 11 The Spanish Catholic Church and the Secular Institutions 117 Ivana Arsić Neven Cvetićanin Notes on the Editors 125 FOREWORD Religious life and the connections between individuals and social groups with religions and their institutions are subject to constant changes and different social influences. And the past of the Balkans undoubtedly bears witness to the degree to which extra-religious and extra-institutional circumstances (concentrated around the salvation of the believers) contribute to changes in religious and institutional life of individuals and social groups. The aforementioned changes are so strong and obvious that it would be very hard to give a complete account of them without underlining as essential for their explanation the social and even interna- tional political factors, even if we face the risk of falling into a kind of sociologism. However, between the claim that the entirety of religious life (both personal and institutional) is wholly dependent on a constellation of ambient social circumstances and the claim that the circumstances in question influence religious life realistically to a high or low degree, a clear distinction exists. And probably social sciences are the most invited among the sciences to analyze and explain the way and the degree to which the social events of the 1970’s in Europe and around the world influenced the changes in the relationships between people and social groups, for both long- standing religions that have existed for centuries and more recent ones, including brand new religious ideas, expressions and practices. Of course, the social changes in question also had an influence on the social position of religions and religious institu- tions. In that regard the ambient influence of society on religion and religious instituti- ons is not unidirectional, because the changed state of the religion subsequently influences social actors, culture, politics, morals and general social values. An approach to religious changes such as this bears certain markings of methodological reductionism as religion, unlike in a theological approach, has an auxiliary rather than a main role in this approach, as religious events are used not to explain religion itself but the behavior of individuals and the interactions between social groups as carriers of certain confessional self-consciousness. The historical circumstances of the Balkans, for example, strongly imply that the relationships between individuals and peoples cannot be understood without religious factors. Because this factor is so intertwined with the social and the public sphere even today the current Balkan societies and their relationships cannot be understood without their religious/confessional weft. And with that comes all the more reason for cau- tion – although social factors are important for the explanation of religious phenol- mena, this phenomenon is not only a social product – there are gnosiological, anthro- pological and psychological factors to religion and religiosity. The deterministic framework of religious changes is complex and is depen- dent on a set of several important social changes widely accepted as paradigmatic confirmation of the influence society had on the position of religion and religious institutions in society. On one hand at play is the process through which religious traditions acquire political importance, and on the other, the process through which those very traditions, announcing their return, deprivatize adopted, syncretic beliefs and behavior, which are important elements in the process of the desecularization of religious life. The events in question are those which showed that religion has not lost, or rather, regained its potential to inspire large, collective efforts of individuals for changes concerning the very core of their political and religious life. To be more concrete, the events in question are the following: 1. the strengthening of fundamentalism in Islamic countries at the end of the 1970’s, first in the figure of the Iranian Islamic revolution, later in a series of Islamic political movements in other countries and today in the figure of Al Qaida, or, the so- called Islamic State; 2. the changing of the religious state of affairs in a series of western coun- tries with events like, for example, the rise of Christian conservatism in the USA or the strengthening of radical Christianity in Latin America as well as the changing of the Catholic Church’s strategies in Europe, from a strategy of adapting to the modern world to a strategy of reevangelizing that same world, especially with incentives that should be coming from the Catholic Church in the east, mostly from Polish Catholicism as the most effective role-model; 3. the active or at least supportive role of religions and their institutions in the destruction of the communist order in middle and eastern Europe at the end of the 1980’s and, based on that, a religious state-of-affairs that can be described by the term of radical deatheization of these societies in the process of returning or brin- ging for decades suppressed or stigmatized religion back to the wider circles of the population. 4. the forceful rise of public, or more precisely, political (mis)use of religion with no regards to confession, in the territories of ex-socialist Yugoslavia and current Serbia in the 1980’s and especially in 1990’s during the Yugoslav war, and also the religious stabilization of the first decade of the 21st century after identiterian wande- rings occurring throughout the aforementioned period of crisis that even today cannot be described as mere distant memory; 5. the recent rise in public importance of the orthodox church in Eastern Ukraine and Russia as an identifier, homogenizer and method of cultural defense during a period of crisis. *** Of course, while the aforementioned social and religious changes are indisputable, conclusions of theoretical and empirical studies regarding the extent of influence of social changes on religion (and its institutions) are not. How to name the processes of religious change, what is the extent of those changes, how serious and provable are the tendencies of these changes in the context of (de)secularization, post secularization, revitalization, the vitality of religion and what are the limits of these changes in the religious life of individuals – are questions to which neither final answers nor wider consensus exists. We are of the opinion that these are impor- tant questions that should individually analyzed and that answers to them should be given in interdisciplinary and international conferences especially in the context of newer research conducted in the region and
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