Secularity and Religion: Reality or Concept?

The article examines radical rethinking of the correlation between secularity and religion in so-called post-secular period, which has led to the emergence of a variety of concepts based on very different grounds. The article is aimed at searching an answer to the following question: are the common, taken for granted theoretical concepts of secularity and religion can be adequate to the reality they seek to describe, and, if so, how this could be proved? The article examines the concept of “secularity” in the modernity as meta-narrative according to which secularity and religion are seen as opposites where strengthening of one necessarily entails the weakening of the other; the disintegration of this meta-narrative in postcolonial critique and the theory of “multiple secularities”, which has raised doubts about the adequacy of the historical interpretation of secularity as a homogeneous project within the framework of modernization as a global process is studied. The history of the concept “religion” in relation to secularity is reviewed; it is proved that today, due to the infinite variety of empirical manifestations of religiosity (doctrines, symbols, rituals, institutions, etc.), their analytical description is complicated due to the lack of a common conceptual ground. The contradiction between institutional and individual religion, and various theories of new types of religiosity, are considered. The article analyzes the concept of pluralism as one of the research strategies in studying the correlation of secularity and religion; pluralism is seen as the situation when none of the competing worldviews can pose itself as the final arbiter of the available systems of ultimate meanings, which gives individuals and communities the right to freely construct their religious identity. The author pays special attention to Ch. Taylor and R. Bellah’s concepts of secularity and religion. It is concluded that in the crisis of the previous research strategy in the study of secularity and religion, the most adequate is meta-position as an attempt to assess the relationship between the reality being described and theoretical methods of describing it. In addition, meta-position presupposes a fundamental shift of the research focus from the subject as an object to the subject as a researcher and to the specifics of the research process.