Religion through the eyes of Russian students

The article presents a generalized description of the semantic content of the concept “religion”, characterizing the everyday consciousness of students in the Russian regions. It is compared by a number of main features with similar indicators of reflection of religion of the youth of the Russian regions, obtained by the authors a year earlier. A set of previously tested and new indicators of assessment / interpretation by students of the religious “domain” of social reality is analyzed. The cognitive characteristics of the attitude towards religion, its emotional and evaluative parameters, as well as indicators of the respondent's involvement / distancing in / from religious life are presented. Based on the results of a quantitative analysis of student survey data (quota-nested sample, N=578, 2024), conclusions are made about the dominance of neutral-positive evaluative contexts of religion over negative ones in the consciousness of student youth; on the prevalence of transcendental and meaningfullife interpretations of religion by students with parity of “secularist” and “desecular” contexts of its assessment; on a significant (more than half) degree of students' involvement in various modalities of the religious “field”. The article specifies the empirical interpretation of a number of basic concepts and defines the directions of substantive development of the program-instrumental complex of research.