Features of Religious Organizations Activity in Ukraine
Authors: Machulin L. 
Published: October 2021

Over the past hundred years, the secularization thesis has allowed religion to be left aside when analyzing economic development, evolution of political regimes, or, for example, the peculiarities of state structure in any country. But today religion is becoming an increasingly significant force, the church is regaining its lost positions. Scientists have counted four stages of desecularization, the last of which began on September 11, 2001 and has been continuing to this day.
The World Wide Web has challenged the Church by creating an otherworldly (surreal or virtual) world. And the church humbly accepted its existence, just as it recognized the presence of a man in space, next to God. And all this follows one goal — to be close to the own flock. The massive fascination of people with computers, gadgets and the virtual world, including believers, led the Church to understand the obvious fact: the virtualization of being is a long process and can become useful.
Using the examples of religious organizations activity on the Internet, the question is investigated: what will ultimately result in their presence in the virtual world — in a person’s cognition of a new (digital) formation in order to effectively keep it in his bosom, or will it become a reason for a new wave of desecularization in the post­industrial world?
The analysis of the content of the sites of the main confessions in Ukraine showed a more secular nature of the activities of religious organizations in comparison with the time before the emergence of the Internet. Their relations with all spheres — government, business, army, society have become public and stronger. The author came to the conclusion that the Church, as the personification of the main confessions, accepted virtual reality as a fact because believers have loved it. For the first time in the history of the Church, the attitude to a new phenomenon — virtual space — was dictated to her by believers. 2. In pre­Internet history, the Church fought for the “souls” of people. With the adoption of virtual space, human brains became its target. Using information technologies, computers, gadgets, smartphones and virtual space, the Church is fighting to remain an influential force in our time. 3. The content of the sites of religious organizations in Ukraine reflects a different level of trust (internal resistance, self­censorship) to the World Wide Web. They can be conditionally divided into three types. The first one — organizations fill websites like personal diaries, inspiring confidence with texts and illustrations of the church life of priests and parishioners. The second one — organizations use websites only for posting sermons, information about holidays, rituals, testimonies of a righteous life and so on. The third type of sites is a business card, which only declares the presence of an organization on the Internet: information about the chapter, about the organization, the schedule of current events and contact information. Accordingly, the first type has the highest traffic (site traffic), the latter has the lowest. 4. Common to all of them (with the exception of the UOC­MP) is the attitude towards the armed conflict in the East of the country (support for the institution of chaplaincy, guardianship of family members of military personnel who died in the combat zone, support of civilians that are suffering from hostilities, etc.) and to the unification of Orthodox communities into a single local church — the OCU (with the exception of the UOC­MP and the UOC­KP).