The Potential of Applying the Concept of Trust to the Study of the Religious Field of Ukraine in Conditions of Social Ambivalence

This article analyzes the Ukrainian religious field in conditions of social ambivalence using secondary data from national research organizations such as KIIS, SOCIS, Razumkov Centre, and the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine over various years. The authors highlight the challenges of measuring religiosity, which stem from (1) mass migration waves since 2022 and (2) the lack of accurate demographic data in a nation at war; (3) the discrepancy between declared and practiced religiosity, influenced by avoidance of church attendance due to COVID-19 restrictions and Russian terrorist attacks since 2022; and (4) numerous religious transitions among congregations and parishes. They conclude that, despite the persistence of society’s ambivalent character – where antonymous elements of different value-normative systems or opposing models and attitudes for behaviour often coexist – Ukrainians increasingly differentiate between religious institutions and figures, evaluating them through the lens of national security and moral imperatives, especially during the full-scale invasion. The authors propose broadening the conceptual framework of trust as a multidimensional construct in the study of the religious field of Ukraine, while avoiding measurement inaccuracies caused by semantic ambiguity (of both the term itself and the object of the study in the context of the church conflict), situational factors, emotional meaning of the term, and external influences from other institutions (the state, in particular) – focusing, in turn, on more composite methods, more rationally coloured indicators, as well as moving away from studying only the institution of the church as a whole: adding other levels to the study (for example, persons in the field of religion, as well as religious organizations).