MODELING THE RELATIONS BETWEEN RELIGIOSITY, ETHNIC AND CONFESSIONAL IDENTITY IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIETAL SECURITY IN RUSSIA’S ASIAN BORDERLANDS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.2298/IJGI241116004MKeywords:
religious identity, ethnicity, societal security, Altai krai, Republic of AltaiAbstract
The religion in a contemporary world still preserves strong cultural and social dimensions, ensuring diversity of modern societies, social integration, and spiritual development. In border territories, connecting culturally divergent countries, religiosity takes on fanciful shapes, reflecting historically driven patterns of resettlement of peoples and natural relationship with ethnic and confessional identities. Based on the results of sociological surveys in two regions of Russia (the Altai krai and the Republic of Altai, n = 981, structured interviews) and the Centrality Religiosity Scale (CRS), this study explores different facets of interdependence between subjectively defined and test-measured religiosity. Comparing the results with confessional and ethnic self-identification, various indicators of security allow not only the evaluation of similar tools with different functionality, but they also enable receiving insights about the congruity and divergence of religiosity, religion and ethnicity in societies with different ethnic composition. According to the results, the majority of the population in the two regions is rather “episodic” believers. In contrast, the level of high religiosity is more often found among women, residents of the national republic, and Buddhists. The highly religious Orthodox population is about 5.2%, and confessions differ not only by their dogmas and practices, but also by the configuration of dimensions of religiosity among adepts. In comparison with the CRS index, self-evaluation gives more smoothed results, showing that non-believers have higher degrees of personally defined religiosity. Statistical modeling shows that security is also a multidimensional construct, having different facets, and the salience of these facets depends on the importance of the religiosity dimension.
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