Multidimensional Approach to Evaluation of Population Religiosity in Russia's Asian Borderlands

Abstract

The article is focused on an analysis of sociological methods of evaluation of religiosity in the context of current transformations of religious consciousness and worldview, the blurring of boundaries between the secular and the religious, and the prevalence of hybrid variants of religious identity, which imply religiosity "beyond confession" and passive religious practices. The authors defend the vision of religiosity as a multidimensional construct that combines objective and subjective, static and dynamic, internal and external characteristics and manifestations. The authors present the results of sociological studies of the population's religiosity in four border regions of Russia - Altai Krai, Novosibirsk Oblast, Republic of Altai, and Republic of Tyva (n = 400 in each region). The Centrality CRS index (Centrality CRS Sh. Huber) is used as the main tool for analyzing religiosity, which allows for an assessment on five dimensions (levels) - cognitions (information), belief (ideology), personal and public practices and religious experience, taking into account the polyconfessional nature of regional societies. The objectives of the study were to compare the results obtained on the national sample with the results in the conditions of the border region and its separate regions characterized by ethno-confessional uniqueness, to analyze the individual dimensions of religiosity and their interrelation with the general index on the basis of factor analysis. It is shown that the index has good psychometric properties, and its individual dimensions are well described by a single-factor structure. The level of religiosity in all four regions generally corresponds to the all-Russian level, while there are serious differences between the regions, caused not only by the axis - national (ethnic) regions - multi-ethnic regions with a dominant Russian and Orthodox population, but also by individual dimensions.