Church and religious situation in the Ukraine: Trends 2019 - request for extension of questionnaires for sociological surveys
Authors: Horkusha Oksana 
Published: May 2020

Recently the Razumkov Center published new sociological data “State and Church in Ukraine - 2019: results of the year and prospects of relations development” and organized a round table on “Religion and power in Ukraine: problems of relations”. This sociological data is an extremely important fixation of the empirical indicators of the religious situation in contemporary Ukraine. Analyzing them, we can see a clear correlation between faith, religious and church affiliation, and the experience and position of those interviewed. However, for further in-depth understanding of how religious and denominational identity and church affiliation correlate with event experience, prevailing historiographical discourse, life position, and civic consciousness, it would be worthwhile to expand the questionnaires. Undoubtedly, religion is a significant factor in shaping Ukraine's future. Especially the influence of church affiliation on social reality is noticeable in the situation of armed aggression against Ukraine of the Russian Federation, which does not neglect to use as a weapon in the information war a religious sermon in the temples of the subordinate Moscow center of the church. That is why it is so important to systematically monitor the correlation of religious and ecclesiastical affiliations with world-view parameters and real events in the context of which transformations of the religious situation and socio-state-church relations take place.Current trends in religious change clearly include factors that are reflected in sociological research (such as a decline in the Church's recognition of moral authority is an indication of the spread and affirmation of secular tendencies and the activation of secular ideology in conjunction with cultural and world-view circumstances of the Church. and confessions turned out to be unsolicited, irrelevant, ineffective, incompetent, etc.) and factors that went unaddressed due to the fact that previous questionnaires did not contain questions that Anish not issued to date. Therefore, it is time to complete the questionnaires to explain the jumps unexpected in terms of previous sociological data.

The information age updates additional parameters: here it is necessary to find out the relation of religious, civil, state systems with the information environment, to understand how specific information flows influence the spread of confessional, religious, civilizational and other discourses. Another block of issues that need to be covered in future polls is to find out the level, form and type of religiosity not only in relation to religious, denominational and ecclesiastical affiliations, but also in the value-meaning parameters of the consciousness of believers / non-believers in Ukraine.

After all, religion is not only a religious activity, which is evidenced in the attendance at worship and financial support of the church, but also a vital position in accordance with the values and guidelines of the basic religion / denomination / church. Under these circumstances, a partial decrease in trust in the church as a moral authority will also be understandable. What will be manifested is the type of consciousness of the "Soviet human" brought up during the totalitarian-Soviet era. We assume that the transformation of the ideology of militant secularism into a quasi-religion of vulgar utilitarianism can partly explain the current world outlook in Ukraine.