Study of students' attitude to religion

One of the most important characteristics of the contemporary religious situation in the Russian society is religiosity of the population. The scientific community argues about theoretical and empirical interpretation of this phenomenon of human life. Firstly, there is no unified approach to the definition of religiosity indicators. This study uses a notion “attitude to religion” instead of “religiosity” and considers it as a combination of the following indicators: assessment of the role of religion in the life of every person, religious identification, institutional religiosity, respondents' assessment of the function of religion in modern society. The study object is full-time students of five departments of Murmansk State Humanities University (MSHU). The sampling is 591 respondents, with the universe being 2041 people. The method is a questionnaire indicating the respondents' attitudes to religion, religious practices and religious organizations. The survey results generally confirm the general trend of such studies: on the one hand, dominance of the Orthodox identification of the respondents, on the other hand, a low level of the so-called institutional religiosity, fragmentation and selectivity of religious behavior; prevalence of confessional identity over religious that demonstrates certain stereotypes in the identification of “Russianness” and Orthodoxy but not true faith. The distinctive feature is a low level of Orthodox identity among the MSHU students - 45.9 % of the total number of respondents. According to the results of similar studies conducted among students of different regions, this indicator is 85%. This aspect confirms that people in the Murmansk Oblast are not very religious. The respondents are not enough aware of the activity of religious organizations in Murmansk. The conclusion is that religion does not take an important place in the life of modern students; the attitude to religion can be characterized as passive and indifferent, in general.