“Welcome to the fairytale world…”: Belief, Play, and Semantic Shifts in Contemporary Religious Culture

Abstract

Researchers of contemporary culture still discuss the significance of the gap between “historical” and “fictional” (or “invented”) religions, “serious” and “playful” emotions felt by their followers, and the very understanding of reality informing respective ontologies. It is important, however, that every newly appeared religious community have to either employ existing models of social and ritual relations or create them anew or borrow them from other — sometimes very distant — contexts. From this perspective, history of post-Soviet religious culture can provide us with certain insights into social and moral expectations and anxieties characteristic to the citizens of the former USSR in the time of collapse of Soviet “symbolic universe.” The article deals with certain concepts of social and moral imagination borrowed from the late Soviet culture and being especially important for the Last Testament Church, a post-Soviet religious movement. Such borrowings imply more or less significant semantic shifts, but at the same time retain partly erased “trains” of previous meanings. This allows reconstructing with certain precision cultural and social needs that inform “invention” of new religions. The analysis presented in the article demonstrates that social utopia of the Last Testament Church proceeds from concepts and images of late Soviet childhood where literary and cinematographic fairy tales and pedagogic ethics were easily connected to the image of nuclear apocalypse and survival in the world burnt and poisoned by radiation.