‘Re-enchantment’ and religious change in former socialist Europe

ABSTRACT

This essay presents the concept of ‘re-enchantment’ as a useful heuristic tool to identify, analyse, and explain new forms of religious change in contemporary Central-Eastern and Eastern Europe. It seeks to understand new religious and ‘spiritual’ configurations in an area and in a period known as ‘post-socialist’. It also attempts to map out the historical conditions structuring both patterns of religious change and scholarly output on the subject, which continue to be particular and at times unique in this region. In so doing, this essay also raises questions about the persistence of the East/West divide, problematising it and seeking to go beyond this binary. Some of the new religious phenomena studied in this essay as well as in the entire thematic issue seem to emerge independently from the once typical state-church dynamics and seem to be more related to the both specific local and general global trends. We argue that the concept of ‘re-enchantment’ and a typology of the re-enchanted practices it encompasses allows to account for, analyse, and understand these dynamics and transformations.

KEYWORDS:

• Re-enchantment
• secularisation
• postsocialism
• Central-Eastern Europe
• religious change
• spirituality
• pluralism
• religion and politics

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the journal editor Michael Stausberg for their useful comments on the first version of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This publication is the outcome of the ERC CZ project ‘ReEnchEu’ (n. LL2006), which was led by Dr. Alessandro Testa between 2020 and 2022 at the Department of Sociological Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, and funded by the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports.

2 This task was also tackled in another recent article: Testa 2023.

3 The question arises as to whether the socialist modernisation project was an example of alternative modernity, or not. Post-socialist scholars have long argued for this idea, undermining the ethnocentrism and universality of Western social theory and the way it renders the relationship between modernity and religion separate (Hann 2011; 2012; Ładykowska 2019; 2022).

4 We are fully aware of the problematicity of the notion of the West, and of the different connotations this notion acquires in different disciplinary and epistemological traditions. In this article, we use the term as a descriptive term to indicate the Atlantic geopolitical space that stood against the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War and into which many former socialist countries have been integrated – or are being integrated, also painfully, as in the case of Ukraine – after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

5 Despite this kind of criticism, the sacred remains a fundamental category in the scientific study of religion. As such, it has never ceased to inspire new avenues of research (see Stausberg 2023). Indeed, one of the articles in this issue attempts to analyse the late modern experience of the sacred as a specific modality of re-enchantment (see Rejowska 2023).

6 The question of the usefulness of the secularisation theory for explaining various phenomena studied quantitatively and/or qualitatively has been a matter of contention among a number of scholars (see Gauthier 2020b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Agata Ładykowska

Agata Ładykowska is a researcher at the Institute of Sociological Studies at Charles University in Prague. Her main foci of interest are anthropology of religion and atheism, historical anthropology, anthropological theory, political anthropology, economic anthropology, anthropology of postsocialism/social change, and post-humanist and relational social sciences.

Viola Teisenhoffer

Viola Teisenhoffer is a researcher at the Institute of Sociological Studies at Charles University in Prague. Her research interests include ceremonial devices, ritual experiences, and identity constructions in Neopaganism and in contemporary spiritualities in general.

Alessandro Testa

Alessandro Testa is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. He is interested in a variety of themes in Religious Studies and in the Historical and Cultural Anthropology of European societies.