Scientific atheism in the post-secular context of Perestroika

Abstract

The focus of this publication is on the historical fate of scientific atheism at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. An attempt is made to look at this specific phenomenon of Soviet reality in the context of the theory of the post-secular turn in the late 1970s and 1980s. Historiography has established the opinion that scientific atheism as a whole shared the fate of the entire Soviet system and became a thing of the past in the early 1990s. The researchers propose various approaches to determining the historical conditions and forms of completion of scientific atheism as an ideological project. The minimal attention to the scientific and atheistic discourse of the late 1980s is characteristic. Scientific atheism is considered either as a utopian ideological project of denying religion, or as an artificial administrative and ideological tool, or as an ideologized field of scientific knowledge.The article shows that as a historical phenomenon, scientific atheism was not limited to an ideological project. An appeal to archival sources reflecting internal discussions among atheist ideologists, as well as to publications in scientific atheist publications of the late 1980s, shows that scientific atheism during this period went through a stage of active self-reflection and adaptation to the loss of ideological monopoly and the return of religion to the public space. From this point of view, it has transformed into a specific form of postsecular self-reflexive secularism. The theorists of scientific atheism have managed not only to change the general paradigm of attitudes towards religion – from criticism and denial to its reception and representation for secular society as a universal non-religious ideological platform and expert methodology, but also to identify a gap with bureaucratic and dogmatic administration by the state system.