Religious and political changes in the process of postcommunist transformations

Abstract

The question of the nature of postcommunist religious change is highly discursive. First and foremost, where exactly is the focus of change? Serious research suggests that they are the least obvious where there is a mass attraction for sacred and individual conversion to religion. Indeed, after the overthrow of the Berlin Wall, the proportion of citizens of the countries of the former "socialist camp" who declare their own religiosity has increased, at times quite substantially. However, an increase in the number of declaring their own religiosity is due to factors that are, in fact, outside religion. In addition, we must take into account the unreliability of Soviet (and not only Soviet) sociological research, which deprives us of a serious comparative basis and the ability to confidently measure the extent of change. But at least two things can be said here confidently: firstly, the former USSR, and especially its "national outskirts", have never been countries of "mass atheism," and secondly, in those communist countries where the study of the religiosity of the population was carried out systematically and were deprived of ideological pressure (Poland, Slovenia), significant changes in the level of religious declarations did not occur