ELBAKYAN EKATERINA S.

The religious system is considered in the work as an element of a more complex structure: socio-political (public) and political-legal (state). The authors identify the features of these systems and determine the principles of their interaction, contradictions and set tasks to ensure the revision of industry thesaurus and rethink the conceptual and categorical apparatus. It is necessary to identify the conceptual certainty of the religious sphere of civil-political relations in the interests of national security, taking into account the threats of internal order. Against the background of global and regional challenges, the potential of sectoral approaches to the definition of religion is characterized. The article proposes a new approach in which religion is defined as alienation. It is described as a complex, multifunctional object: a model of being with world order invariants. This is a world order, the principle of which corresponds to the type of ontology and explicates in social functions and axiology. Worldview system (ideological system having level specification) with the invariants of causal relations (praxeology). Taking into account the peculiarities of the phenomenon of ‘alienation’ as a fundamental function (to discover, to ensure the manifestation of universals and categories, the basic of which are the following binomials: ‘being-nothing’, ‘sacred-profane’, ‘spiritual-thing’, ‘ideal-material’, ‘God/absolute-man’, ‘transcendent-transcendental/immanent’, ‘power-right/duty’, ‘single/whole-concrete/individual’, ‘general - private’, etc.), the authors draw attention to the similarities between religion and power in the sense that it is the phenomenon of ‘alienation’ that determines the processes of sacralization, clericalization of power, the religization of politics and ideologization, the politicization of religion.