POST-SECULARITY AS A SUBJECT OF RESEARCH: PROBLEMS OF CONCEPTUALIZATION AND PLURALITY OF APPROACHES

• Published in: Ukraïnsʹkij socìologìčnij žurnal (Print) no. 23
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Ukrainian
• Published: 2020
• DOI: 10.26565/2077-5105-2020-23-02
• ISSN: 2077-5105

Today, in many countries around the world, the role of religion in the public sphere is strengthening. This causes the methodological problems of the theory of secularization, which claimed the gradual and irreversible decline of religion. At the same time, the processes of religious revival in societies that have undergone secularization do not lead to the restoration of religion in the forms that preceded it. To denote this state of society, which occurs after secularization, Jürgen Habermas proposed to use the term "post-secular". A number of both foreign and domestic scientists became interested in this issue. But the purposeful study of postsecularity is still in its infancy and is mostly descriptive. In the scientific works devoted to its research, insufficient attention is focused on specific characteristics of postsecular societies. Therefore, there is a need to generalize these characteristics in order to better understand post-secular society. To achieve this goal, the article analyzes some conceptual approaches to the study of postsecularity. These approaches argue that the "return" of religion does not preclude the preservation of a powerful (or even dominant) secularization cluster in society. Post-secularization is a move forward and the creation of a new system characterized by religious freedom, pluralism, competition between different denominations, rather than a return to the traditions of the pre-modern era. In a post-secular society, as the authors of the works analyzed in the article prove, religion has all the opportunities from secular power for its development. At the same time, there is a reduction in the role of religious institutions and the individualization of religious practices, ie the "privatization" of religion, which is an element of secularization. But this "privatization" is significantly different from secularization, because it is not due to coercion, but to pluralism of choice. According to many researchers, a post-secular situation is possible under the condition of ideological pluralism and parity between religious and non-religious people, when each party has the opportunity to propagate its opinion, but does not impose it, when there is no place for privileged and discriminated, but awareness of mutual coexistence. That is, post-secularity is possible only in democratic and legal societies. The post-secular situation is also characterized by religious competition, intensification of missionary work, manifestations of fundamentalism, globalization of religious piety, transformation of religion into a commodity and the emergence (mostly in the West) of the phenomenon used to refer to the term "spirituality". The situation of post-secularism is a situation of uncertainty, when it is not known how the processes of interaction between the secular and the religious will take place in the future, and it is impossible to make any predictions about how stable this situation is. As the analysis carried out in the article shows, the post-secular approach has not become a full-fledged theory, but is perceived mostly as a program of what should be paid attention to, as a certain correction and continuation of the secularization approach. But with its help, scientists are trying to describe religious processes in modern societies.