RELIGION AND SECULARISM IN MODERN BULGARIA

In recent decades, the classical theory of secularization has been criticized because it does not make it possible to provide an adequate analysis of the religious situation in the world at the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st centuries. New theoretical approaches that take into account activization of religions in recent decades and conversion of forms of religiosity are emerging. However, criticism of the secularization theory does not mean that all of its conclusions were erroneous. According to this theory, the most important aspect of secularization was the process of separating religion from other social institutions, in particular, from the state. As a result of the secularization process in Western societies, a secular state was formed, and religion turned into a private matter of an individual, that was reflected in the concepts of the privatization of religion, the invisible religion, etc. The result of secularization was the dominance of secularism as a form of world outlook and the appearance of a way of social life that implies not only separation of religion from the state and other social institutions, but dominance of secular values, ideas and norms in the public and worldview sphere. In the modern globalizing world, the spreading of secularism is a part of the global spreading of Western values. However, outside Western European societies, secularism can take forms which are different from the Western model historically based on the rethinking of the Catholic and Protestant heritage. This article examines the specific form of secularism that developed in Bulgaria and was called by K. Ghodsee "symphonic secularism." It is based on the idea inherited from Orthodoxy about interrelation between religion and politics, church and state, allowing even in modern conditions state intervention in regulation of religious issues. This form of secularism does not exclude religious pluralism and does not imply a deep personal religiousity. Religion appears as not so much as the doctrine of an individual salvation, but rather as the basis of cultural, ethnic and political identity. Specific forms of secularism and understanding of religion affect the religious situation in modern Bulgaria.

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