The article discusses the peculiarities of the formation of religious identity in the dynamics of geopolitical processes in Ukraine, which depend on historical conditions, features of the economic and socio-political structure, democratic and cultural traditions of society, the level of legal and moral development of its members and the ambitions of its leaders. It is proved that religion is a decisive factor in the ethnic life of Ukrainians, and the controversial role of Christianity in ethno-identification and ethno-consolidation processes is noted.
The modern world-wide political, economic and spiritual crisis imposes its imprint on Ukraine as well. As one of the transitional countries of the post-socialist space, our state has not yet found a single-minded vector of its own development, in particular, the ecclesiastical. Ukraine is only on the verge of forming a united national idea and crystallizing its own self-identification on the religious marker.
Religion is the basic semantic-forming component of a unified national identity. Today, religious and ethnic identities are closely intertwined. Therefore, the problem of the ethnorelain factor always attracts significant attention of leading scholars, statesmen and church hierarchs. In Ukraine, a significant number of religious groups completely coincide with the boundaries of a separate ethnic group. The lack of civic consensus on the country's foreign policy, cultural identity, separate sovereign positions of the Ukrainian state, the diverse views of the past and the future at the present makes it impossible to formulate unanimous interests, which negatively affects external and internal policies.
Compared with the Soviet period, religious identity today is a relatively new category. On opposition to the state-civilian benchmark for many Ukrainians, religion is on the forefront. Undeniably, Orthodoxy played a very important role in the formation of the Ukrainian nation and our religious identity. However, today, multiconfessional diversity and inability or reluctance to negotiate, to be tolerant, break Ukraine into several regions. The negative tendency of loss of awareness of Ukrainians of the unity of religion, nation, common spirit is traced.
The formation of religious identity is a long process of formation of society as a whole, and is a consequence of the historical formation of Ukraine as a nation. Religious identification is the reproduction of accumulated social and religious experience in all spheres. World and domestic scholars are unequivocal in the conclusions that the central place in the formation of national identity belongs to religiousness. Religious beliefs that have an indelible imprint of an ethnic group living on a particular territory are precisely the center of the formation of a new national-religious identity of Ukrainian society.
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