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From Choosing What to Believe in to Cooperation and Initiative: the Under-Explored Path

Olena Bogdanova

I still remember quite vividly how, as a Soviet child, trying to make choices in troublesome situations, I would ask myself, “What would Lenin do in this case?” And this would help me to discover the answer. A Christian could ask, “What would Jesus want me to do?”; a Muslim might wonder what Prophet Mohammad would do; examples could be continued for as long as we turn to various moral reference systems, including secular ones. Ukraine, similarly to other former Soviet Republics, witnessed the collapse of what several generations firmly believed in and thus quite a few of us acquired the realization how illusory our worldview might be in the absence of competing information. It was not only the political regime and the associated economy that collapsed but it was also the morale reference system that rapidly shattered.

A rather unique situation emerged: on the one hand, all of a sudden, we lacked a reference system in our morality and practices, on the other - it opened us to new sets of beliefs to a much larger extent than many other people on the globe might experience. In 1990, only 30% of Ukrainians could identify themselves with a particular religion, by mid-1990s this figure reached 70% and the most recent survey of fall 2008 reports 86.4% of those who hold a particular religious faith. The number of religions and religious organizations has grown rapidly. Moreover, it has not been exceptional that people change from one denomination to another. How do we choose what to believe in? If there is competing information, is it still mainly social pressure that defines our choice? And how do the chosen beliefs channel social action? Do they make one passive or active when grievances are encountered? Cooperative or not? Civically engaged or withdrawn? I tried to uncover at least some of the answers to these questions through two studies that seemed independent first but eventually proved to be related: models of changing one’s religious identity and factors of civic passivity (whether individual or collective action is required).

Choosing one’s faith implies choosing particular ideas, lifestyle and networks. I have attempted to build models how people in Ukraine choose their faith and what impact it makes on their lives. This has been done on the basis of in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted since 2006 and amounting to nearly 70 cases that include conversion to various Christian denominations, Bahai, Krishnaism, Ridna Vira denominations, and also cases of taking decision to become a priest or a monk.

In 2003-2004, before the Orange Revolution, when the belief into the so called “passive mentality” of Ukrainians was quite widespread, I initiated a project exploring factors behind civil passivity. The methods employed in this study included in-depth semi-structured interviews, focus-groups and a postal survey (at the stage of exploring availability of civic information, there was also an experimental part and documentation analysis). The factors discovered ranged from discouraging myths (e.g. the belief that it will be checked how one voted and consequently one would lose his or her job if voted “incorrectly”) to the lack of practical information and positive examples. The lack of practical information was the predominant reason despite. The information was not readily available and there was not enough impetus to go through the ordeal of finding it. Ukrainians do not seem to believe that God expects them to make an impact on social reality, which is quite in contrast with the Social Gospel tradition in the US that propelled to a certain degree the Progressive Movement by introducing the notion that sin is not limited to refraining yourself from amoral deeds but also expands to being indifferent to injustice. This leaves us only with secular motives to be active. But how powerful could those secular motives be for a significant number of people?

These are the studies that I would hope to put into a larger context, relating Ukraine’s data and respective models to the existing social theory as well as data from other societies. At the turn of the XX and XXI centuries, many sociologists who used to be proponents of the secularization theory, including such a prominent scholar as Peter Berger, noted that the world is no less religious than it used to be. We need to explore the link between spirituality in its contemporary forms and people’s readiness to be subjects, not objects of history. Despite the multitude of democratization studies, the issues of civic activism and capacity for collective action (not necessarily a protest against injustice; could also be a non-protest initiative aimed at community development) seem to remain under-explored although they lie at the basis of society’s development.