The Correlation between Legal Consciousness and Religious Values in History and Present Times

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to find out how religious values influenced the legal consciousness in different historical epochs and what role they play in the legal consciousness of modern people. Historical examples show that from ancient times until modern times, the sense of justice was closely connected with religion. The separation of religious values from law took place during the bourgeois revolutions and in connection with the liberation from colonial dependence. The secularization of the state and law was accompanied by the development of a positivist legal concept, the main value of which was proclaimed to be the state, and law was interpreted as a creation of power. Along with the process of «cleansing» the law from its religious shell, there was an identification and justification of values that began to be called universal. In the modern world, while maintaining the differentiation of religious and secular values, the assessment of the former as predominantly spiritual, and the latter as predominantly material, remains unchanged. The presence of a material and spiritual principle in a person has always made it necessary to correlate legal consciousness with an orientation to the temporal, earthly or eternal, heavenly.