Methodological foundations for the study of borderline forms of religiosity in a post-traditional society.

Illarionov Grigorii Andreevich PhD in Philosophy Associate professor, Department of Philosophy, Siberian Federal University 660041, Russia, Krasnoyarsk, Prospekt Svobodnyi 79 bromov1917@yandex.ru Other publications by this author     Gritskov Yurii Viktorivich Doctor of Philosophy Professor, Department of Philosophy, Siberian Federal University 660041, Russia, Krasnoyarsk Territory, Krasnoyarsk, 82 Svobodny Ave., room 428 grickov50@mail.ru Zlobina Svetlana Dmitrievna Postgraduate student, Department of Philosophy, Siberian Federal University 660041, Russia, Krasnoyarsk Territory, Krasnoyarsk, 82 Svobodny Ave., room 428 daluz@yandex.ru

Rakhinskii Dmitrii Vladimirovich Doctor of Philosophy Professor, Department of Public Health and Health Care, Krasnoyarsk State Medical University named after V.F. Voyno-Yasenetsky 660022, Russia, Krasnoyarsk Territory, Krasnoyarsk, Partizan Zheleznyak str., 1, room 354 siridar@mail.ru

Among the concepts that social philosophers characterize the modern world, one of the most popular over the past decades is uncertainty. Uncertainty is an explanatory characteristic in such well-known concepts as "the elusive world" by E. Giddens^[8], "network society" by M. Castells^[12], "fluid modernity" by Z. Bauman^[1]. Uncertainty is the purpose and meaning of poststructuralist exposures of rationalism and modernity in the concepts of "rhizome", "body-without-organs", criticism of logocentrism, as well as numerous critical social theories of gender, race, ethnicity – and the resulting science ideology. Uncertainty becomes the target of criticism of integral traditionalists and conservatives, represented in Russia by such names as A.G. Dugin, V.V. Averyanov, A.A. Prokhanov. The fight against uncertainty is conceptually reflected even at the level of UN political declarations, such as the Sustainable Development Goals.

Among the many uncertainties of our time, we will turn to those related to the social position of religion and its conceptual understanding in social philosophy. The practical side of the uncertainty of religion was the question of the future of religion as a phenomenon in the context of the failure of the secularization hypothesis, conceptualized in the very popular, but never found a clear basis for the discourse of post-secularity. Within the framework of this study, we will be interested in the problem of conceptual uncertainty of the concepts of "religion" and "religiosity" in modern social science.

We will proceed from the fact that the uncertainty of the phenomena of modernity is significantly related to the post-traditional state of society. Posttraditionality is a concept that arose as a result of generalization of a large number of studies of the dynamics of the process of cultural reproduction, in which the understanding of the connection of the social present, past and future is carried out using the concept of tradition. The idea of posttraditionality was the result of attempts to describe how tradition as a form of cultural reproduction is transformed and functions in the modern world. According to this idea, in modern society, traditions have lost their previously inherent role of unchanging, "sacred" attributes that underlie social order. In the course of modern modernization processes, traditions are transformed in an unpredictable way, which forces us to abandon the claims characteristic of the modern era to create the final, only true theoretical model of the social process. As V. Neuser writes, "posttraditional societies can be defined as mobile cultural forms ... in the period of posttraditional society, no explanation is accepted as final." The study of such a social reality saturated with uncertainties needs methodological strategies that allow taking into account and modeling such "mobility of cultural forms". 

The purpose of this study is to propose a methodological approach that allows explicating indefinite (borderline, hidden, implicit) forms of religion and religiosity in a post–traditional society. This goal implies the formation of an appropriate understanding of religion and religiosity, this approach is foundational.

It should be recognized that religion has always been an object not fully defined, since the fundamental problem of defining religion has always remained unresolved, lying in the field of philosophical antinomies. However, the "elusive", "fluid" modernity has brought this problem out of the field of highly intellectual studies into a completely practical area. The uncertainty of religion in modern society is clearly manifested in the problem of its identification. A huge layer of cultural phenomena that stand on the border of the religious and non-religious was revealed. These are quasi-religious phenomena that contain elements of the religious, but are not identified as a religion for various reasons (for example, the so-called civil religions, which we will discuss in more detail later). These are also para-religious phenomena that are closely related to religions and religiosity, but are separated from it for various reasons (for example, the so-called secularized religiosity, when religious affiliation is understood as part of ethnic or civic identity and does not imply "church membership", as is the case in modern Russia in "political Orthodoxy" and "political Islam"). These are also crypto-religious phenomena in which religiosity is "hidden", hidden behind external forms of non-religious (according to N.A. Berdyaev ^[3] and N.S. Bulgakov ^[4], Russian communism is such a hidden religious doctrine). We will generalize these phenomena by the term "borderline religiosity". By borderline religiosity, we agree to understand such (forms? states?) individual and social consciousness, in which the differences between the sacred and the secular are erased, between ideas and experiences that are traditionally considered religious, and others that are not traditionally considered such.

 The methodological basis of the research will be the synthesis of various approaches within the framework of philosophical hermeneutics, sociology and anthropology of religion, phenomenology of religion, phenomenological sociology. Each of the approaches, the reception of the elements of which we will implement, we will describe in more detail in the main text of the study.

The reasons for the need to form a methodological approach that would allow expanding the possibilities of studying religiosity beyond explicit, explicit, as a rule, institutionalized forms of religion, arise already in the XX century, in connection with the accumulation of research material and the design of a long series of concepts.

The XX century is very rich in manifestations of quasi-religiosity, para-religiosity, crypto-religiosity.  Back in the middle of the XX century, in the era of the rise of the New Age and the emergence of numerous "new religious movements" (hereinafter - NSD), researchers often began to face the problem of identifying a particular socio–cultural phenomenon as religious. Alternative medicine, "personal growth", environmental movements and many other phenomena of religious life that are uncertain in terms of belonging to religion. Actually, syncretism, the uncertainty of the religious and non-religious has become one of the essential features of NSD highlighted by science. The history of scientific and philosophical understanding of NSD serves as proof of the need to work on a methodological rethinking of religiosity, to which our research is also devoted. Despite the fact that NSD can hardly be called a new phenomenon, they have not yet been given a different conceptual status than belonging to a "new" religiosity that does not fit into the classical, traditional forms of religion and religiosity applicable to the study. Religious traits are acquired in many social movements related, for example, to politics, gender issues (as an example of both, one can cite the case of the quasi-religious group "Partizanskaya Pravda Partizan" and its leader A. Menyailov) or, say, the environmentalism movement, characterized by some researchers as religious ^[13].

Another phenomenon that is weakly amenable to comprehension within the framework of classical ideas about religion is the so–called fictional religions. K. Cusack calls fictional religions ^{[20, pp. 237-247]}. According to statistics cited by K. Cusack, more than 400 thousand modern Britons call their religion Jedaism – a fictional religion of the fantastic universe from the TV series "Star Wars". And this is just one of many such popular fictional religions – Tolkienism, Matrixism, the religion of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The latter is considered by the modern religious scholar R.A. Silantyev to be the subject of theological research precisely from the point of view of studying quasi-religiosity ^{[15, pp. 138-146]}. Fictional religions are one of the many proofs of how much the classical understanding of religion needs an addition that provides tools for embedding such phenomena in the scientific and philosophical study of religiosity.

Simultaneously with the rise of NSD and fictional religions, numerous concepts describing mixed, syncretic forms of religion began to appear within the framework of philosophy, sociology, and phenomenology. This is, for example, R. Bella's concept of civil religion, which he borrows from Rousseau, but gives it a new meaning – he describes a special type of American religiosity, within which the object of sacralization and the subject of cult activity is political. The concept of civil religion later gained popularity and was taken out of the context of American culture, expanding to describe the synthesis of religious and political. Civil religion is the sacralization of statehood as the highest value, or national–ethnic providentialism - and other forms of absolutization of the state and political as self–valuable. Like R. Bella, M. Eliade, P. Tillich ^[18], I.Vakh ^[7] wrote about various aspects of the borderline religious, in Russia one can note the works of V.M.Storchak ^[17] and A.P. Zabiyako^[10] and many others.

The uncertainty of the term "religiosity" also creates difficulties in applied expert religious studies (for example, due to the need for clear criteria by which one or another organization can be identified as religious). As a high-profile example in Russian practice, one can cite the examination in civil case No. 2-5387/14, in which expert L.S. Astakhova recognized the Church of Scientology as not carrying out religious activities, on the basis of which in 2016 this organization was deprived of registration as a religious organization. The identification of any socio-cultural phenomenon as religious in modern expert practice is a methodological problem, since no clear tools have been developed, and the results are largely due to the methodological preferences of experts.

We present a very incomplete list of reasons for revising the approach to the study of religion. There are many more political-ideological, cultural and other aspects of the relevance of the development of synthetic methodology. Our task in this case is only to demonstrate the validity of such attempts.

The key hypothesis that we propose to substantiate in this paper is the assumption that religiosity as a function is primary in relation to religion as an institution. By the word function, we mean the role that religiosity plays in relation to all other components of human existence. We believe that the function of religiosity is to develop and maintain the connection of the individual with the ultimate foundations of his being (we will reveal this idea in more detail below). This means a shift from the emphasis on the demarcation of the religious and non-religious to the emphasis on highlighting the function of religiosity in social phenomena and institutions. At the same time, it seems extremely important to understand how the function of religiosity is realized in cases when we do not detect an explicit institutionalized religiosity, but we find structures similar to it.

We propose to explicate and justify this approach through the disclosure of its methodological prerequisites and provisions.

1.                 By religiosity we will understand the orientation of the personality to the cumulative experience of internal existential experiences, the essential property of which is the feeling of the presence of strict imperatives in its being. These imperatives can be experienced by a person as divine revelations, commandments, or higher ideals and meanings. The religious feeling based on such experiences is primary in relation to any external social practices, myths, doctrines and doctrinal manifestations.

This understanding, as it seems to us, will not cause objections either from representatives of classical theology or from representatives of the phenomenology of religion. However, unlike them, we believe that the phenomenon of religiosity is not directly related to the metaphysical experience of transcendence. Our statement about the primacy of the internal anthropological basis of religiosity is consonant with the understanding of the representative of the phenomenology of religion of the "new style" Zh. Waardenburg, who proposes to consider religiosity in the discourse of the intentionality of its subject, man. Religiosity is interpreted here as an expression of human intentions (intentions, aspirations, ideals, dreams, inspirations, etc.). ^[6].

The history of secularization has shown us that religion as an institution has no inherent functions if we consider it exclusively as a social subsystem. Sacralization, legitimization, integration – all these functions can also be performed by political institutions, as the history of, for example, the Soviet Union has shown us, where political ideology has fully assumed the functions that were previously performed by religious institutions ^[17]. Therefore, we believe that the initial foundations of religiosity should be sought precisely in the phenomena of internal, subjective reality, and in social reality only epiphenomena, forms of external expression of religiosity, can be found.

However, by itself, our attribution of the grounds of religiosity to the sphere of a person's inner experience does not solve the problem of identification of religiosity and its definition. As a result, we have to ask ourselves – what essential function, peculiar to it, in relation to human subjectivity is carried by religiosity. This brings us to the second thesis.

2. Religiosity connects a person with the ultimate (basic, initial) phenomena of his existential world. Obviously, it is not enough to call religiosity the intention of a person – a person has a great many intentions, and only some of them are related to religiosity. R. Bella's understanding of religion led us to the idea of the essential quality of religiosity as an intention.  He defined religion as "a set of symbolic forms and actions that correlate a person with the final conditions of his existence" ^{[16, p. 37]}. A similar idea is found in N. Luhmann, for whom religion represents the world in the form of "ciphers" or symbols that represent inaccessible reality in sensually perceived objects, words or metaphors ^{[14, pp. 101-111]}.

It is important to explain what we mean by the basic foundations of human existence. In this case, we are not talking about the ontological foundations of human existence, but about the fact that in a person's perception of the world it acts as the beginning that bases (explicitly or covertly, consciously or unconsciously) all the other contents and meanings of his individual and collective life. Such a beginning, generating the experience of one's own "I" as a unique entity separated from the rest of the world, we will express through the concept of self. The self is a program of the unconscious that produces an existential self–image (the "I" of a person). Having once discovered itself, the "I" becomes the starting point, the "cornerstone" of his subjective world. The "I" projected by the self is perceived by itself as a wholeness that has its own being and creates this being. The "I" is always at the center of his world, feeling himself both the subject and the object of everything that happens to him.

In social reality, along with individual selves, there are collective selves - real or virtual communities with which certain individual selves identify themselves. The self-identification of an individual as belonging to a collective community implies experiencing a sense of identity, inseparability with other "I" belonging to this community. Let's agree to call such communities "we are the selves". The we-self of a sociocultural community is characterized by a more or less unified system of values, which bases the meanings of the existence of this community, as well as the basic principles of both internal interaction of its members and their relations with external counterparties. ^[9].

As we concluded earlier, religiosity is a form of a person's connection with the ultimate/initial foundations of his being given to him in his inner experience. In other words, religiosity is the domain of the last, ultimate meanings that are born in the "meeting place" of the irrational and rational, conscious and unconscious in human existence. These meanings explain and legitimize everything that happens in the human world.

 The religiosity of the collective we-self performs the function of the highest sense-setting for the entire socio-cultural community. In social reality, it arises as a result of the coordination of individual internal "experiences of ultimate meaning-setting", and religion itself arises as an institution that performs the function of producing and reproducing religiosity as a form of expression of the collective self –that is, the ultimate foundations common to a given community of people.

The production and reproduction of the collective self as a historical integrity is carried out within the framework of a socio-cultural tradition that provides both a link between contemporaries and a link between successive generations.

Let us illustrate our position with the metaphor of the historical path. People understand their path, its purpose, direction, speed, and the circumstances in which they are in different ways. Communities on the way break up and new ones arise. In this situation, we will call religiosity that absolutely unverified (neither empirically nor theoretically) understanding of the origins and goals of the path by people, which nevertheless serves as the basis for practical efforts to advance towards these hypothetical goals.

People try to look for the ultimate foundations of their path in natural objects and phenomena, in mystical revelations, in theological, philosophical and socio-political doctrines. These doctrines may be primitive or complex, mystically oriented or maximally rationalized, but they all arise after their authors have found themselves on this path. In other words, all religious doctrines are secondary to the historical path that their creators are already following. Isn't this the circumstance that G.V.F. Hegel had in mind in the famous maxim "Minerva's owl flies out at dusk"?

We emphasize that the status of the highest authority, which bases all other aspects of the presence of people in historical reality, does not mean at all that religious ideas about objective and subjective realities are true. They are neither true nor false, since logically they can neither be proved nor refuted. Religious ideas are the last meanings available to man, defining the horizons of his world, defining his idea of his own being. The social institution of religion in this context can be understood as a means of producing ultimate meanings embodied in tradition, explaining and legitimizing the movement of individual and collective selves along their historical path.

Another example illustrating the limit of the grounds with which a person is bound by religiosity. Let's say we ask ourselves the question: "why is it necessary to develop a new methodological approach to the study of religion? The answer may be, for example, "to know the truth," or "to raise your prestige." Let's ask the question again: "why do we need to know the truth, why do we want prestige? We will ask questions until we reach an answer that we can no longer justify except through our conviction of its truth. Then our questioning will not be able to continue, it will either go into recursion, or stop because of our inability to give new answers. This will be the ultimate, ultimate meaning, justifying all other meanings available to our self. Such ultimate meanings always precede any cognitive activity of the subject, are its source, driving and target cause.

Returning to the metaphor of the path, we repeat: the life of a human individual is always included in the path along which his socio-cultural community is moving. Man is not given directly either the beginning of this path or its end. The foundations of anthropogenesis, the foundations of history, the foundations of tradition, the place of an individual in them – all this is beyond the horizon of the human life world. We have to either believe in the ultimate answers to our questions, or perceive them as self-evident. One can still doubt the legitimacy of the "last questions" themselves and embark on the path of agnosticism. 

So, the ultimate meanings are those "last answers to the last questions" about their being, which are accepted by a person who is on a certain segment of the historical path. The meanings that shape the horizons of his world. Meanings beyond which his subjective experience does not extend. The meanings on which his cognitive activity stops. We emphasize that we are not talking about an absolute ontological limit, but about the limit "here and now".

Note also that those meanings that are outside of one religiosity can be accessed within another religiosity. Thus, for the philosopher and theologian, the ultimate foundations in his inner experience are set ontologically, and for the layman they can be purely orthopractical, ritual in nature. An ordinary Jew observes the Covenant from a practical point of view, and its theological grounds may well be beyond him, just as for an ordinary environmentalist, the ultimate grounds may be limited by the practice of certain actions to protect the environment, without referring to the deep grounds of such. Of course, this means that the ultimate foundations as an attribute of inner experience are in the process of continuous becoming as much as the human self as a whole is in becoming. But this does not mean at all that the transformations of the internal, subjective foundations of religiosity are identical to the transformations of their external expression, institutionalized in religion. Religiosity is the first source, the first beginning of religion, but the construction of religion takes place not only on the basis of ultimate subjective grounds, but also on the basis of intersubjective interactions within the framework of the collective self that arises in the interaction of people, each of whom has its own ultimate grounds.

The idea of religiosity as a way of connecting a person with the ultimate foundations of his existence leads us to the following theses.

3. The constancy of religiosity as an attribute of humanity.

In this thesis, we to some extent associate ourselves with such phenomenologists of religion as M. Eliade and E.A. Torchinov. As E.A. Torchinov formulated this idea, "religion appears together with homo sapiens and always exists with him. Does it not follow from this that religious experience and religious feeling are immanent in the very nature of man" ^{[19, p. 108]}. However, we look at the constancy of religion from a different angle. The phenomenologists of religion believe that the constancy of religion and religiosity is a consequence of the constancy of human interaction with the sacred, and the sacred is not sociologically, but ontologically – in the spirit of the ideas of R. Otto. It is assumed that reality itself dictates universal religiosity to a person when a person is confronted with the fullness of its greatness and horror, through such categories beyond the control of empirical experience as mortality and immortality, eternity and finiteness, etc.

We believe that in the ontological formulation of the question, the "low" types of manifestations of religiosity are lost sight of.  This is, for example, "a savage religion that is not so much invented as it is danced out" ^{[21, p. 15]}, as R. Marrett disparagingly put it, pointing to the phenomena of religiosity originating from the objectification of emotional states, and in which it is difficult not to see similarities with the common statement of modernity, when people declare that the ultimate meaning their lives are "new impressions", "vivid emotions". These are fan cults obsessively erecting an altar for their idol – singer, actor or athlete. This is also fetishism, which is equally characteristic of both deeply archaic and modern cults.

Our idea is that the constancy of religiosity lies not in its ontological conditioning, but in its anthropological conditioning. In order to know oneself, and thereby gain one's identity, the Self-observing Self needs to find its own ultimate foundations, without which any version turns out to be doubtful, any goal-setting, any choice, any activity is unreasonable. Due to the fact that the goals and foundations of a person's existence are not given to him in experience, and the speculative idea of a priori knowledge is itself an object of faith, his self feels the uncertainty of its position in the world, it is in dire need of undoubted meanings as a ground in the face of the groundlessness of its existence. Striving (consciously or unconsciously) to comprehend what is happening to the world and with it, a person inevitably takes something for the ultimate, ultimate foundations that serve as a frame, a frame of all his other activity as a subject.

Such a judgment places us to some extent in the existentialist discourse of the absurdity and meaninglessness of human existence. But we are not saying that human existence is devoid of any meaning. We only state that all the doctrines that claim to know the true meaning of human existence are, in fact, myths that arise and live within the limits of subjective reality, in which the last (accepted by their adherents as final) answers to the question of the self about itself are uttered. These answers are not purely rational constructions, they arise as a result of the interconnection of cognitive programs of the unconscious and rational thinking. These answers carry the ultimate meanings that allow you to build a stable, holistic picture of the world, in the center of which is the "I" of a person.

Note that since our "I" is absolutely inaccessible to being in which it is not present in any way, to the extent that it is forced to find (or invent) confirmations of its presence in all corners of the universe, in everything that happens in the world. It constructs such meanings that create confidence, or at least hope for its virtual presence and beyond its own limits (in the form of an immortal soul, reincarnation, memory of descendants, etc.). These meanings provide a person with the opportunity to act as if he were immortal.

         The paradoxical nature of the phenomenon of religiosity lies in the fact that conscious human activity needs goals and motives that go beyond the limits of empiricism, as a result of which our "I" have to justify rationally unfounded meanings (to represent the inaccessible, as N. Luhmann believes). Therefore, the ultimate meanings produced by the self, which provide it with the opportunity to navigate and position itself in its own being, are unverifiable for truth. The "truth" of these meanings is ensured precisely by their fundamental unfalsifiability. In this discourse, mystical-theological, idealistic, materialistic, naturalistic, and any other ontological versions of the foundations of human existence perform the function of religiosity.

4.                 Constructivism and Synchronism of religiosity

All of the above about religiosity as a function will not make sense outside of the two properties of religiosity as a function – its synchronicity with other functions of the inner experience of man, and outside of the characteristics of religiosity as having the nature of a construct.

So far we have been talking about the function of religiosity from the existential positions of inner experience. But this in itself is methodologically insufficient, because in order to investigate religiosity in concrete phenomena of social reality, it is necessary to show how the existential ultimate foundations, whose home is the inner world of a person, are externalized, turning into the intersubjective life world of a person. In other words, it is necessary to understand how the inner of a person turns into the external, social. It is necessary to understand how concrete historical forms of religion and religiosity arise. We propose to do this by referring to the phenomenological sociology of constructivism, namely, to the concept of social construction of reality by P. Berger and T. Lukman ^[2]. The central idea of Berger and Lukman's constructivism is the primacy of the everyday life world, where social institutions arise as a result of people's interactions, which later appear to them objective and independent of them. The motives, interests and intentions of people in their direct or indirect interaction generate, through habitualization, signification, institutionalization and legitimization generate a social reality perceived by a person as an external structure in relation to him, into which he is included through socialization.

Why do we turn to social constructivism? Neither Christianity, nor Hinduism, nor NSD, nor civil religion – do not follow from religiosity itself. They are the result of a continuous process of constructing a social reality, where religiosity as a person's connection with the ultimate foundations of his existence is in sync with all other functions that form the integrity of a person's social existence. In other words, the ultimate grounds have no meaning if there is no limit to what they set – religiosity has no meaning outside of people's communication, their knowledge, economic activity and all other internal and external activities of a person as a subject. Subjective ultimate grounds are impossible outside of intersubjective grounds, religiosity is impossible outside of connection with artistic, scientific, philosophical, legal collective practices. The highest authority serving as the ultimate "in the name of what?" in the self of the individual and in the self of the community, it has no power outside of the activity carried out within the framework of symbolic and ritual structures.

Religiosity as an internal function of a person is not free from all other functions either in its genesis or in its symbolic and practical realization. The genesis of the ultimate foundations of human existence occurs within the socio-cultural tradition, which sets the horizon of human interpretations of phenomena, signs and relationships. Returning to the metaphor of history as a path, let's say: a person always finds himself on a path that was not started by him, and the boundaries of how he can see the goals and meaning of the path (i.e., the boundaries of religiosity), as well as the boundaries of cognitive and social practices, are determined by the conditions prevailing at the time of his appearance on the path. His personal limits are limited by the socio-cultural tradition, and even going beyond it, even denying it and struggling with it, he is still connected with it and correlates himself with it. The tradition combines archetypal and fixed concrete-historically socio-cultural imperatives. Religious tradition institutionalizes historically established ways of interaction in the social reality of individual religiosities of a sociocultural community. Accordingly, the forms of religious activity of a person in the present are limited by the totality of material, communicative, ethical and legal aspects.

Here a well-known contradiction arises, expressed in the question: if the way of realizing the function of a person's religiosity in society is determined by the socio-cultural tradition, then why do we, following such giants as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, P. Berger, do not look for answers about religiosity in the social, but relate it to the sphere of subjective inner experience of a person? To answer this question, we will turn to the concept of habitus, which we mentioned earlier when we said that habitualization is one of the stages of the social construction of reality.

The concept of habitualization, derived from the concept of habitus (Latin habitus), is interpreted in the theory of social construction of reality by P. Berger and T. Lukman as habituation - any action that is often repeated becomes a model ^{[2, p. 37]}. Habitualization serves as the first stage in the consolidation of those forms of everyday interaction that will later become an institutionalized "objective" social reality, in our case, the institution of religion. However, within the framework of their research, the most interesting part of the connection between habitualization and inner experience was not touched upon, so we will supplement the understanding of habitus by referring to another social theorist, P. Bourdieu. 

P. Bourdieu aimed to create a concept that would reflect the unity of the objective and subjective in social existence. He defined habitus as "systems of stable and transferable dispositions, schemes of perception, thinking, action and evaluation" ^{[5, p. 44]}. This definition hides the desire to overcome antinomy: on the one hand, human existence is determined by the totality of objective structures of reality (natural, cultural, economic, communicative, symbolic); on the other hand, objective structures cannot exist and realize themselves without the internal activity of the subject, which actualizes and deactualizes these structures. In our case, this means that the ultimate foundations of human existence, manifested in his religiosity, fundate and determine human activity through symbolic and psychic structures, but do not exist and are not realized by themselves, without internal and external human activity.

So, in the process of familiarization, the contradiction between the external imperatives dictated by the concrete historical situation here and now and the internal imperatives of the subject dictated by his religiosity is resolved. As a result of familiarization, a concrete historical configuration of the mutual conditionality of external and internal determinants of the subject's social activity is formed and sanctified by tradition, which P. Bourdieu calls habitus, and which he proposes to consider an atomic fact of social reality.

The practical realization of religiosity as a source of motives, goals, intentions and aspirations of a person occurs in a collision with all circumstances external to him, both objectively relevant and presented to him as such, both created by contemporaries and inherited from previous generations. For example, the motives of an anchorite going into the desert are determined by his religiosity (an inner intention that connects with the ultimate basis of his existence, with the personally understood divine). However, the anchorite's habitus was constructed when his intentions collided with the material conditions of life in the desert, with social relations and with the socio-cultural tradition of the anchorite's native society, and in communities of ascetics like him, etc. Thus, we can study and understand the social phenomenon of religion formed during the collision of external conditions for a person and his internal intentions only through habituses.

According to Berger and Lukman, in the course of the social construction of reality, signification is important, in addition to habitualization: "A special and very important case of objectification is the process of designation (signification), i.e. human consciousness of signs." ^{[2, c. 26]}. For us, it is all the more important in the context of considering the function of religiosity.

So far, we have talked about religiosity exclusively in the context of its function to serve as a source of the ultimate foundation of the inner experience of human existence. In the outside world, anything can become the subject of a religious attitude, but this "anything" is neither random nor chaotic. The object of religiosity appears semiotically "anything", in the sense that any object, event, or word can perform the role of a sign in social reality, referring a person to his ultimate foundations (to sacred meanings) and indicating his belonging to a particular religious community. The signs fixed in the religious tradition, be it a sign of the cross, a bell ringing, a mandala or a star of David, are leveled forms of expression of religiosity as an internal function and at the same time markers of belonging to a social institution of religion.

One more important note. Speaking about archetypes, we refer not so much specifically to the concepts of C.G. Jung, as to the concept of the archetype popularized by him. We call archetypes the universal structures of the collective unconscious that manifest themselves in the public consciousness as invariants (patterns, algorithms, patterns, patterns) of understanding the phenomena and processes of socio-cultural reality. We use this term as ontologically neutral: archetypes can be understood as biological programs of behavior, and economic factors, according to historical materialism "primary in relation to the superstructure", and "ideal types" by M. Weber, and linguistic structures (as they are understood by structuralists or representatives of analytical philosophy), and mystical-religious imperatives, and so on. Archetypes are implicit (accessible to our consciousness only indirectly, through signs and symbols present in socio-cultural reality, referring to the sacred meanings they represent), they manifest themselves in concrete historical sign systems - archetypal images linking phenomena and events of subjective reality (given to us in experiences, feelings, intentions) with phenomena and events of reality objective (given to us in sensations).

When we say that the object of religious feeling can be "anything", we mean that any object or phenomenon of objective reality can be used by archetypal structures as a symbol that activates a certain sacred experience or action. That is, the same archetypal program can be implemented in social reality with the help of different sets of signs, symbols, rituals. In our opinion, the whole variety of social forms of religiosity can be understood as the result of the work of the same archetypes dictating invariant intentions and meanings. Differences in the objective conditions of externalization of these intentions and meanings cause differences in the social construction (in habitualization and signification) of various institutionalized forms of religion. In accordance with this, the borderline forms of religiosity, the consideration of which prompted us to formulate this approach, should be understood as new habits and new sign systems that perform the universal function of religiosity as an algorithm for correlating what is happening here and now with the ultimate grounds-meanings and developing equally universal intentions.

So, we systematize the methodological propositions of the proposed approach theses:

1. Religiosity is a constant function of a person's connection with the subjective finite, ultimate foundations of his existence.

2. Religiosity as a function serves as the foundation of a person's sense-setting and goal-setting, conditioning his self in those components of it that are connected with reality inaccessible to experience and reason.  Religiosity is the ultimate "why?", "why?", "in the name of what?", which determines the intentions, motives and interests of all other human activity.

3. Religiosity, expressed externally by a person, collides with the totality of objective and objectified structures of reality, and the intentions of other people. The interaction of specific living conditions of people and their intentions generated by religiosity lead to the construction of practices that, through their habitualization, signification and institutionalization, generate religion as a social institution.

Implementation of the approach and the limits of its application

Turning from the presentation of the theoretical foundations of the proposed approach to the characteristics of its practical application, we note once again that it is closest to the phenomenology of religion of the "new style". Sociological rigor is impossible in it, since it is realized through the hermeneutics of human intentions and the phenomenological structural analysis of social phenomena in order to identify the components of the religious component in them. In addition, our approach is not universal, and has boundaries in which its application will be useful.

So, how, and in what cases, armed with the above judgments, can we apply them in the study of religious phenomena?

First of all, it will be necessary to specify the boundaries of the application of the proposed method. It is obvious that our view of religion and religiosity can bring little to the research of explicit, explicit forms of religiosity – at best, it can be used to study particular phenomena of borderline religiosity within already established religions – for example, in cases where religiosity is only a "mask" - an outer shell behind which social and cultural values are hidden.political, ethno-political, legal – in Russia, the most common example of this in expert practice is the discourse of the study of religious extremism ^{[11, pp.105-113]}. The main scope of the proposed approach is the identification of implicit religiosity or its components in those processes, phenomena, institutions that are not usually considered religious.  Anticipating the obvious criticism, we will stipulate at once that we do not mean religious reductionism, i.e. the reduction of the entire array of social phenomena to religious ones. Of course, political and geopolitical, economic, socio-cultural, media and many other phenomena of social reality have specifics that cannot be reduced to the phenomenon of religiosity. We proceed from the fact that all these phenomena are interdependent, inextricably linked with each other, they are all parts of a single whole – social reality. 

The key methodological techniques in the context of the above will be:

1. Phenomenological hermeneutics of intentions, habitus and sign systems. Understanding religiosity as a connection with the subjective ultimate, ultimate foundations of human existence requires us to immerse ourselves in the empirically inaccessible world of intentions, aspirations and experiences of other people. This presupposes the interpretation of the three elements we have identified – phenomenologically comprehended internal intentions, sociologically and historically comprehended habitus and semiotically comprehended sign systems. This forms a kind of hermeneutic circle, or the principle of the recursive loop of E. Morin's complex thinking, according to which the subjective, social and iconic become a context for each other in their interpretation. The disclosure of religiosity as an intention is possible only in the context of externalization in habitus and signs, but both habitus and signs can be interpreted only by being associated with phenomenologically comprehended intentions.

2. Structural analysis. We speak of it as an attempt to identify unified structures hidden behind a multitude of particular phenomena and their interpretations obtained in the course of hermeneutical analysis. In the context of our approach, this means that the purpose of such a structural analysis will be to identify the universal structure of ultimate goal-setting, which is the essence of religiosity, and the habitus and sign systems constructed on its basis. In this sense, structural analysis can be considered the identification of the archetype as a universal scheme implemented in various symbolic and institutionalized forms.

3.                 Comparative and genetic analysis serves primarily to fund the revealed phenomenologically and structurally-analytically content. One of the weak points of phenomenological and hermeneutic concepts is their empirical non-verifiability, as a result of which the conclusions obtained with their help have to be argued by correlating them with the religious phenomena and institutions described in detail. In the context of the task of studying borderline, syncretic, hidden forms of religiosity, almost the only way of funding is a comparison and genetic analysis, similar to that carried out in the previously mentioned classical works of N.A. Berdyaev and N.S. Bulgakov on the hidden religiosity of Russian communism and in V.M. Storchak's study on the Soviet civil religion. 

The approach we propose can be represented by a project of "cartography" of infinitely diverse phenomena of the religious life of modernity in its hidden, shadowy forms, where the religious is implicit, doubtful, borderline, but at the same time functional from the point of view of ultimate goal-setting. Of course, such an intention has little weight without ascending from the abstract to the concrete, and therefore we consider this article as a methodological basis for further research, in which specific phenomena of religiosity and religion will be considered from the standpoint of the method described.

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