The article deals with the issues associated with transformational processes in the modern world through the prism of increasing the significance of the religious factor. The stresses are laid on the need to search for new epistemological frameworks that differ from traditional linear interpretative schemes on the polyvalence of manifestation of the religious factor in modern conditions. The author dwells on such parameters as the strategy of “soft power”, the identification characteristic, and the projection of social solidarity, which are new perspectives of the relationship between religion, society and politics. The fundamental contradiction of contemporaneity is the contradiction between the universal normative narrative of modernism and socio-cultural pluralism as the basis of modernity. It is concluded that the dichotomous opposition “secular – religious” begins to blur, and religious intentions penetrate personal life and collective behavior, while either the need for communication with God becomes more clear, or observance of rituals is the manifestation of their identification grounds. Institutionalized Russian confessions spread to a certain extent their influence on the antitheist part of the population, as a result of which the boundary between believers and non-believers is not opaque and inviolable. Religious organizations are acutely aware of the problem of social solidarity, in many ways proclaiming it the goal of their activity. In the era of globalization and the crisis of state institutions, the church as a structure consisting of separate cells with a strong civic asset that is capable of posing problems and participating in their decision and formulate strategies based on conscious and long-term interests, appears to be most effective and sought-after. In such conditions, religious institutions and traditions are more effective. Rethinking of the role of religion in the modern social and political process, the demand for new epistemological approaches to explaining the religious component of the political life of the society and the simultaneous strengthening of religious and confessional identifications in the context of the observed inversion of political and non-political spheres of society, devaluation of political and civil forms of solidarity in many respects become equivalent to the search for new meanings of our time.

religion, modernity, pluralism, identity, solidarity, politics

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