TRANSFORMATION OF THE RELIGIOSITY OF THE POPULATION OF POST-SOCIALIST EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPEAN COUNTRIES IN THE FORMAT OF RELIGIOUS, MIXED, ATHEISTIC CULTURE

Abstract

This process is studied in the context of a survey conducted by the international network of Catholic pastoral theologians in 10 countries in Eastern and Central Europe, which after totalitarian socialism and state atheism began the creation of constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience and religion. Among the problems studied by pastoral theologians, we highlight those that relate to the subjective perceptions of respondents about their understanding of the essence of God and the importance of religion for modern man and society. This allowed identifying the respondents as persons of religious, non-religious and atheistic tendencies such as: a sense of religious or non-religious meaning of life; attitude to religious rites and holy sacraments of modem youth; understanding the functioning of the church as a confessional institution or community of believers with a meaningful religious attitude. This format of research made it possible to study and identify three groups of post- socialist European countries, which are characterized by pastoral theologians as the countries of "religious culture", "mixed culture", "atheistic culture". The religiosity of the population in these cultures acquires the following verification: religious fundamentalism with a conservative attitude to the role of religion in personal and public life; religious indifferentism including indifference to religion and the church; practical atheism with a narrowed attitude to the religious development of the individual on the basis of spiritual values, accompanied by consumptionism, i.e. exclusively material development which replaced ideological Marxist materialism, giving a non-religious meaning to life in the secular world.