Rethinking Religiosity

The Reflexive Dimension of Spirituality in Post-Secular Czech Society

Abstract

In international comparison, Czech society emerges as strongly secularized. While we can discuss whether this could be the result of a too narrow conception of measuring religiosity, it can also be taken as a fact that we intend to use positively. This article presents new tools for the detection of religiosity focused on spiritual and transcendental dimensions. Therefore, it is an advantage to verify them on a population in which a significant part declares secularized attitudes, without, however, an empirically-based finding that its needs of spirituality or some transcendental overlap have been lost.

Czech society was led to brutal atheism in the time of the totalitarian system. For a part of society this concept works as a simple label or short-cut. In the post-secular era, however, in addition to traditional religiosity, growth in various areas of civil spirituality or transcendence, which we conditionally refer to as "lived", plays an important role. Their measurement is the focus of our article, which brings a number of positive experiences from the pilot verification of the new instrument on a representative sample of the Czech public (N=811). The constituted scales show very good consistency and reliability. Extending the measurement of religiosity to other dimensions offers the possibility of a more subtle typology, which leaves the original one-dimensional axis of "religion – atheism" as obsolete and opens the way to a more differentiated approach to religion as a multidimensional continuum, which is more fittingly indicative of the post-secular religious practice in society. Although it is primarily an exploratory and methodologically oriented research, the content consistency of the typology is also confirmed by the correlations with other indicators of relevant values and attitudes.