Religion as a structural component of the functioning of Modern society

The subject of the study is the role of religion in determining the meaning of the believers’ life in modern Ukraine. For centuries, religious meanings were dominant in human consciousness and only at the everyday level, and at the philosophical level (definition of the general meanings of existence and society). However, the modernization processes of the 19th and 20th centuries made their corrections, leading to a significant shift from religious to secular meanings. The issue of the current role of religion as a source of transcendent meanings, as a source and keeper of “higher” values and meanings for the population of Ukraine is examined. It is stated that religion has always been a source of meaning in life for its followers. The implementation of such a meaning-making and sense-transmitting function by religion is an important condition for the social significance and influence of religion. In modern societies, the scope of the social role of religion is not obvious and is a subject of debate. For a more precise understanding of the problem of the functionality of religion for modern societies, the inclusion of religion in social processes and the consciousness of the broad masses of the population is analyzed. Based on the analysis, it is concluded that the ability of Orthodoxy to become a real alternative to the secular value complexes dominant in modern societies is significantly limited, since the values transmitted by Orthodoxy do not find a mass response. It is demonstrated that for the majority of believing Ukrainians, religion has largely ceased to be the basis of the semantic structure. This, in turn, along with low church affiliation, weak familiarity with Orthodox dogmatics, readiness to independently form the meanings of one’s religion and to include in these meanings elements from other religions and secular ideologies, extremely limits the orientation to the meanings and values, transmitted by the church. In further research, in connection with such a situation, it is necessary to analyze the status of religion in the meaning fields of modern man more carefully and on concrete empirical material, so as not to put too much hope on religion in terms of its ability to influence the masses and block the path of materialistic spirituality. Keywords: social functions of religion, the significance of religion in society, Orthodoxy, the meaning of life, the spiritual crisis of society, the perception of meanings, values, the role of religion