Religious revival

Religious revival isn’t only a fact on the level of private piety, which we can observe in many societies in CEE. Under revival in this subarea we can understand new forms of piety and institutions. The Pentecostal or charismatic movements have two kinds in the second part of 20th century. The first phase is a new kind of movements within big religious traditions and churches. The second is a presence of independent religious institutions mostly with strong Christian faith and behaviour. Pentecostal movements are similar to them in strength and forms of activities to non-Christian religious or pseudo-religious movements like New Age and other spiritualities. In a correct sociological point of view it must be discussed: is revival one aspect of de-secularisation and de-privatisation of modern religiosity?

Contemporary European religion challenges scholars to broaden the range of experience being studied. Grace Davie and Daniele Hervieu-Léger, for instance, have put forward a “mobile model” of religiosity that stresses social relations and the emotional highpoints of spiritual activities such as pilgrimages, in contrast to static approaches, which emphasize regular church practices and familiarity with religious dogmas. In the proposed paper I shall argue that Eastern European societies provide an interesting context for examining the relationship between institutionalized Church practices and religious traditions beyond Church walls. Although the historical church might be tolerant and even supportive of weakly-institutionalized religious activities taking place outside their own domain, still, seventy years of Soviet marginalization of religion have led to the emergence of non-Churched forms of religiosity as well, and the dichotomy between “static” and “mobile” models may be of limited use in the region today.

András Máté-Tóth (SZTE)

Bertalan Pusztai (SZTE)

Szabolcs Illyés (SZTE)

Inna Naletova (UV)

Dénes Kiss (MWF)