Methodological Strategies for Religious Studies

The scientific novelty of this article is based on the application of the methods of socio-historical epistemology to the processes of institutionalization of religious studies as a scientific object. Religious studies has reached a high, mature level of institutional, theoretical, methodological, sociocultural, and existential development which is expressed in the competition of different methodological strategies or a variety of methodological means which allow us to form a scientific approach towards religious phenomena. In particular, this article covers several aspects which testify to the “maturity” of religious studies as a socio-humanitarian science, namely: a) competition among three research strategies – objectivist, interpretative, and preformistic ones; b) competition between the naturalistic and the anti-naturalistic programs; c) a dispute among faculties and communities (scientific disciplines as leaders and outsiders); d)a struggle for legitimacy among the paradigms of secularization, desecularization, and postsecularization. The author has come to the conclusion that religious studies, being a part of a general project for the development of the social / social sciences, enters a post-secular stage which opens new theoretical and methodological possibilities for researching the sphere of the religious, the sacred, the numinous. One of the important steps for further methodological progress is the deconstruction of the paradigms of secularism and “de-secularism”, the process of building a more flexible and systematic methodological strategy for studying the field of religious phenomena.