Religious legal consciousness in the conditions of the digital world and European conservatism
Authors:   Southern Federal University, Kazachanskaya Elena A. , Ovchinnikov Alexey I. ,   Southern Federal University; South-Russian Institute of Management of Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Oganesyan Armen K. ,   Sochi Institute of RUDN University
Published: February 2023

The article proposes to change the view on modern Western Europe, which is predicted crisis and death in the future in connection with its rejection of traditional values. The authors of the article, using the example of legal consciousness and human rights values, try to show that, in fact, digital globalization and the digital transformation of society cause a conservative reaction from religious confessions. The religious consciousness of traditional European confessions is recognized in the article as the most conservative. The authors are convinced that the reaction of the legal consciousness of representatives of both the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church in relation to artificial intelligence and digital technologies is due to the protection of human rights and dignity of the individual in the new digital era. The article uses the methods of philosophy of law, legal ethnology, legal anthropology, and sociology of law to consider the processes of transformation of legal consciousness. The work, based on anthropological studies of culturologists and sociologists, shows the erroneousness of the forecast regarding the unification and standardization of legal value-normative systems in the process of digital transformation of society and the state. The authors prove that digitalization, in its own way, has “sharpened” the long-standing disputes about the philosophical and legal nature of the categories “dignity of the individual”, “nation state”, “human rights”, “respect for the person”, “legal mentality”, “legal culture”, etc. An important conclusion in the work is the following: practically all Christian traditional confessions negatively assess the synthesis of artificial intelligence technologies and the ideas of digital capitalism. There is also a conflict between the conservative religious consciousness and the views of representatives of the fashionable philosophy of transhumanism. The article emphasizes that representatives of Christian communities pay special attention to threats and risks to children's rights, protection of juvenile rights and freedoms. The authors come to another conclusion: in general, European Christian conservatism adheres to a moderate assessment of new information technologies from the point of view of protecting the dignity of the individual and human rights. These processes provoke protest, since the conflict of values is very dangerous and can lead to a deep civilizational split. At the same time, the loss of the religious and moral foundations of the legal consciousness and legal culture of the inhabitants of the EU countries leads to anarchy and unrest. Rationalism and technocracy of the modern technological order do not unambiguously lead to unconditional acceptance by representatives of the countries that created this order.