‘Re-enchantment’ and religious change in former socialist Europe

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay presents the concept of ‘re-enchantment’ as a useful heuristic tool to identify, analyse, and explain new forms of religious change in contemporary Central-Eastern and Eastern Europe. It seeks to understand new religious and ‘spiritual’ configurations in an area and in a period known as ‘post-socialist’. It also attempts to map out the historical conditions structuring both patterns of religious change and scholarly output on the subject, which continue to be particular and at times unique in this region. In so doing, this essay also raises questions about the persistence of the East/West divide, problematising it and seeking to go beyond this binary. Some of the new religious phenomena studied in this essay as well as in the entire thematic issue seem to emerge independently from the once typical state-church dynamics and seem to be more related to the both specific local and general global trends. We argue that the concept of ‘re-enchantment’ and a typology of the re-enchanted practices it encompasses allows to account for, analyse, and understand these dynamics and transformations.