KAZAKHSTAN TODAY: POLITICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF RELIGIOUS TRENDS IN A SECULAR STATE
Keywords:
political reconstruction, secular nature, conversion, religious trends, Islamization, evangelization, neo-Orientalism, religiosityAbstract
Since the early 1990s, the political role and purpose of religion in Kazakhstani society has changed considerably. Freed from constitutional limitations that imposed a certain ideology, it plunged into an ocean of pluralism of worldviews. It turned out that in the context of limited influence of all socialization institutions (the family, education and the media), religion as a
means of socialization has moved to the fore even though the common trends of religiosity turned out to be highly contradictory and their political role highly ambiguous, to say the least.
The problems of the state and the functioning of religiosity and new religious trends remain in the center of public discussion. The authorities and society are equally concerned with the proliferation of non-traditional religious institutions and practices that are not only alien to the mental culture of Kazakhstanis—they operate according to patterns of Islamization, evangelization and neo-Orientalism.
The number of people who think that Kazakhstan should develop as a religious state is steadily increasing. The state, for its part, is trying to avoid the politicization of the religious factor and seeking the optimal model of secularization and a consensus between the country’s highly diverse religious institutions and their followers and those who remain outside any religion. The state is testing all sorts of ideological patterns and their impact on religious trends, eradicating the preceding ideas and stereotypes of interpretations of religion. This paper focuses on political reconstruction of the impacts of religiosity on decision-making in Kazakhstan as a secular state, analyzes the channels through which religiosity extends its influence and the options that a secular state has for its neutralization and auto-nomization.
Scholars rely on various methods of qualitative and quantitative sociological and interdisciplinary theoretical reconstruction to outline the religious situation, discover the trends, create adequate models and supply the relevant structures with their forecasts. The latter are rei and substantiated by a range of methods ranging from prolongation to foresight.
Experts, researchers and the state need practical recommendations based on the results of comprehensive studies of religiosity. Some of our results were discussed in scholarly articles and monographs. This research study presents integral results and conclusions on the above-mentioned topics.
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See: Religioznye konversii v postsekuliarnom obshchestve (opyt fenomenologicheskoy rekonstruktsii), Collective monograph, ed. By A.Kh. Bizhanov, Institute of Philosophy, Political Science and Religious Studies KN MON RK, Almaty, 2017, 431 pp.
See: A. Bizhanov, A. Amrebayev, E. Burova, N. Seitakhmetova, “Kazakhstan: Secular and Religious Politics,” Central Asia and the Caucasus, English Edition, Vol. 20, Issue 4, 2019, pp. 135-146.
See: Z. Bauman, The Individualized Society, John Wiley & Sons, 2013, 272 pp.
Data of the analysis of the large-scale sociological studies of public opinion carried out in 2011-2018 in 16 regions; in 2019, in 17 regions and in Astana (Nur-Sultan since 2019), Almaty and Shymkent. The studies in 2011-2019 relied on a representative national sampling; the sampled population consisted of adult citizens of Kazakhstan (18+). The respondents represented all most important demographic groups, including gender, age, educational level, social and professional status, ethnicity, level of incomes, types of settlement, etc. Data was taken from statistics and strictly adhered to during the selection process. Representation in the sampling structure was ensured by the multistage sampling stratified at the stage of selecting the points of the poll; interval at the stage of household selection and simple randomized selection of respondents in households. The methodology of sociological studies was elaborated by the authors; the field stage and empirical processing were performed by professional sociological structures. In 2011-2017, this was done by a public organization The Scientific-Research Association “Institution of Democracy” (Astana); in 2018-2019, the Center for Business Information, Sociological and Marketing Studies “BISAM—Central Asia.” We used the method of personal formalized interviews in the flats of the respondents, applying the CAPI/RAPI method. The answers were processed by IBM SPSS. In 2019, the sampling comprised 1,800 respondents who differed in the territorial and settlement structure types.
Here and elsewhere we quote the results of large-scale questionnaire polls of adult population (18+) according to the multistage representative sampling that reflects the territorial, gender-and-age and ethnic structure of population of Kazakhstan, which comprised 18,592,730 people as of 1 November 2019. The year and the volume of sampling are given in parenthesis.
[https://www.zakon.kz/4995645-polomannye-sudby-v-chem-opasnost-poiska.html].
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