Психология религии в постсоветской России (1990-е гг.)

Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета. Серия 4: Педагогика. Психология. 2018. Т. 51. С. 114–134.

Dvoinin A.

This article analyses social and historical conditions of disappearance of the Soviet psychology of religion and the emergence of psychology of religion of a new type in the 1990s. Soviet psychology of religion was more affiliated not the official psychology but with the Soviet variety of religious studies, i.e. history and theory of atheism and religion. Its disappearance was due to social and political changes in Russian in the early 1990s. The dialogue between psychologists and religious fugures that began in the 1990s for the most part led to the development of a project alternative as to psychology of religion, namely Christian psychology. This has created difficulty in differentiating between these two branches and led to the formation in the Russian academia of false ideas about the subject, methods and topics of psychology of religion. The author of the article identifies reasons for the absence of academic psychological studies of religion in Russia in 1990s. These were the focus on other scientific tasks; social and economic troubles of science and little financial attractiveness of this field; attitude to religion as a spiritual source for many scholars rather than an object of research. Main publications on this areas during the period in question are listed; first university courses are mentioned as well. The birth of the new, post-Soviet psychology of religion in Russia in the 1990s was mostly due not to the social demand from Russian society that was experiencing a significant rise in religiosity but to the personal interest of researches in psychological problems of religion as well as the cognitive “freshness” of this area of knowledge which was little studied at that time.

Keywords: постсоветская Россия, религия, научные исследования, религиоведение, научные институты, religious studies, religion, scientific research, psychology of religion, психология религии, история психологии, советская психология, history of psychology, scientific atheism, Soviet Psychology, post-Soviet Russia, научный атеизм, Christian psychology, христианская психология, scientific institutions