Religiosity: fomation of the concept and first research in the late 19th — beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

This article attempts to fill a gap in currently available literature on the history of the study of religiosity fitting it into a more general context of the formation of a scientific approach to the study of religion. This is the first review covering the second half of the 19th and the first two decades of the 20th century. The first part of the article explores the term “religiosity”. The issue was brought up at the initial stage of the history of Religious Studies. Nevertheless, the term wasn't immediately accepted by the scientific community. Its meaning was clarified as opposed to the term “religion”. This opposition is rooted in the German philosophy of the 18–19th centuries and was manifested in the 1860-1870s debates about religiosity as a distinctive feature of a human being in anthropology and, since the late 19th century, in psychology. An understanding of religiosity as a subjective side of religion became dominant in 1910s and provided a basis for later typologies and classifications of religiosity. The second part aims to describe some early studies on religiosity. Attendance to worship services was measured through statistical surveys. Conversion studies focused on various religious practices and beliefs, as well as factors that made people convert. Teachers and priests organized surveys among students in the United States trying to respond to a religious crisis and low level of interest in religion among children and adolescents at the turn of the century. Some studies grouped believers based on the frequency of religious practices, thus creating the first typologies of religiosity. The author analyzes the works of Russian researchers, too. He concludes that the theoretical understanding of religiosity went hand in hand with international science, although the term itself was used less. The lack of empirical studies of religiosity in Russia in the studied period was due to the state policy and the attention of theorists to other issues in relation to projects for the future Russia.