The role of religious factor in the formation of traditionalist ideologies opposing violent modernization

Abstract

To establish a scientific assessment of the religious factor in the historical formation of antimodernist movements is essential to determine their sociocultural nature. For clarity, all the arguments offered by the author are backed by a brief analysis of specific historical events, in which the religious factor played a pivotal role in forming a new traditionalist ideology. The author focuses on criticism of the simplified positivist approach to the role of the religious factor in the development and formation of antimodernist movements. Such an approach to a certain extent ignores the complexity of the phenomenon under study. By using concrete historical material on the example of the role of religion in the Vendee uprising, the Kristeros movement in Mexico and the formation of the phalangist ideology during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), a more objective approach to the problem under study is proposed. Based on the results of modern historical and religious studies, the author points out that the assumption of a special level of religious fanaticism and mystical exaltation, allegedly characteristic of traditional agrarian societies in the crucial era of the transition to the industrial era, is unjustified. The facts and the comparative analysis conducted suggest that the religious element within antimodernist movements is launched when it is necessary to contrast the ideology of modernization with the traditionalist ideology, which is equally modern in itself. Religion becomes the basis of ideology, simultaneously changing in many respects its former sociocultural significance. In fact, in all cases under consideration, the religious factor turns into ideological, which in itself is a sign of gradual modernization, even of that part of the society which defends conservative values.