RELIGION AND STATE: INTERACTION AND SOCIOCULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS (THE CHECHEN REPUBLIC CASE STUDY)

Abstract

The authors discuss the phenomena of religion and state in the context of various models of their interaction: a tandem, in which they cooperate as social institutions, and the model, in which there is freedom of religion and a political and legal field of conflict resolution, in order to arrive at the analysis of the problems created by the diversity of cultural and religious trends in the world today. They rely on the sociological poll, taken in Chechnia and the Northern Caucasus as a whole to define the sources of religious information. The subject of our studies is highly topical, since globalization, rejected or even opposed, has become a reality to be dealt with. In the past, when social, cultural, and informational interactions were slow, it was possible to separate the processes unfolding in different parts of the globe within the traditional dilemmas: East vs. West, North vs. South, tradition vs. civilization, and man vs. woman. The list can be even longer. Today we are witnessing the futile attempts to squeeze the variety of postmodernity into the frameworks of the traditional or civilizational thinking. The shifted borders of contemporaneity have given rise to a new “world of the worlds,” interpreted as the co-existing cultural and political communities that pursue identical interests and clash in the limiting spaces of these interests. The world, in which we live, may be defined as globalized, multicultural, multiconfessional and, in the final analysis, pluralistic. According to the assessments supplied by the Stiftung Weltbevölkerung Fund, by 1 January, 2015, the world population (7,324,782,000 people) consisted of Europeans (about 10% of the total), people born or living in Africa (15%) and in Asia (60%). Eight out of ten people identify themselves with a religious confession or group. About 2.2 billion (32% of the total Earth’s population) are Christians; 1.6 billion (23%) are Muslims; 1 billion (15%) are Hindu, 500 million (7%) are Buddhists, while 14 million (0.2%) are Jews. These figures speak of a much higher than before level of religiosity of the contemporary people. We have identified the human endeavor as the object of our studies, and the present and future of religions as our subject.