The Interrelation of Status (In)Consistency with Religious Knowledge Among Residents of Ukraine: Pre-War and Wartime Context

Abstract

The article examines the interrelation between status (in)consistency and religious knowledge among residents of Ukraine within pre-war and wartime contexts. The relevance of the study is determined by the large-scale social transformations taking place in Ukrainian society under the influence of post-Soviet changes, market reforms, and the hybrid as well as full-scale war waged by the Russian Federation against Ukraine. Under conditions of existential threat, religion increasingly functions not only as a form of identity but also as a mechanism of symbolic support, moral orientation, and interpretation of social reality. Particular attention is devoted to the phenomenon of status inconsistency, understood as a mismatch between the levels of education and material well-being, which may shape specific social attitudes, perceptions of injustice, and compensatory strategies associated with religiosity. The purpose of the article is to identify common and distinctive features of religious knowledge among different status-consistent and status-inconsistent categories of the Ukrainian population, as well as to analyze the impact of crisis-driven social processes on citizens’ religious and political perceptions. The theoretical framework of the study is grounded in the concepts of status consistency developed by P. Sorokin, G. Lenski, and their followers, alongside approaches to the analysis of religiosity, secularization, and postmodernization proposed by R. Inglehart, J. Casanova, C. Taylor, and other scholars. The empirical basis of the study consists of data from the World Values Survey Association collected in 1996, 2006, 2011, and 2020. Five combined status categories were constructed for the analysis: low, middle, and high status-consistent groups, as well as education-income inconsistency and income-education inconsistency groups. Religious knowledge was operationalized through attitudes toward the role of religious leaders in interpreting laws, perceptions of the relationship between science and faith, and evaluations of the acceptability of physical violence within marriage as an issue indirectly connected to religious beliefs. The Monte Carlo method was employed to test the statistical significance of differences. The findings reveal statistically significant differences among various status categories across all examined dimensions of religious knowledge. The study demonstrates that in 2006 Ukrainian society displayed relative unanimity in supporting the secular separation of religion and law. However, by 2011, and especially by 2020, a growing internal polarization became evident, particularly among respondents with high status consistency and representatives of income-education inconsistency. The authors conclude that under conditions of war, the COVID-19 pandemic, and declining trust in state and expert institutions, religion has increasingly been perceived as a source of moral authority and social stability even among the most educated and materially privileged groups. Special attention is devoted to attitudes toward the relationship between science and faith. The study demonstrates that under crisis conditions both the most resource-rich and the most resource-deprived status groups were more likely to support faith as an important source of emotional support and interpretation of reality, whereas individuals characterized by «advantageous» status inconsistency displayed a stronger orientation toward science. The study also identifies an increase in tolerance toward domestic violence in 2020, which the authors associate with growing social tension, a crisis of existential security, and a return to more rigid social norms under crisis conditions. In conclusion, the authors argue that status (in)consistency significantly affects the cognitive dimension of religiosity. The study demonstrates that religious knowledge in contemporary Ukraine is shaped by the multidimensionality of the social structure, wartime and crisis-related processes, as well as broader social uncertainty. The findings open up prospects for further research into religiosity, social resilience, and the transformation of value orientations within Ukrainian society under conditions of prolonged crisis challenges.