The book argues that religion is a system of significant meanings that have an impact on other systems and spheres of social life, including cultural memory.

The editors call for a postsecular turn in memory studies which would provide a more reflective and meaningful approach to the constant interplay between the religious and the secular. This opens up new perspectives on the intersection of memory and religion and helps memory scholars become more aware of the religious roots of the language they are using in their studies of memory. By drawing on examples from different parts of the world, the contributors to this volume explain how the interactions between the religious and the secular produce new memory forms and content in the heterogenous societies of the present-day world. These analyzed cases demonstrate that religion has a significant impact on cultural memory, family memory and the contemporary politics of history in secularized societies. At the same time, politics, grassroots movements and different secular agents and processes have so much influence on the formation of memory by religious actors that even religious, ecclesiastic and confessional memories are affected by the secular.

Många forskare skriver om en »conservative turn» – ett konservativt skifte – som den viktigaste förändringen i Rysslands inrikes- och utrikespolitik sedan 2000. Detta skifte karakteriseras av en negativ inställning mot utländskt inflytande och en strategi inriktad på att bevara den egna identiteten som betraktas som en motsats till andra länder, särskilt i västvärlden. En av de främsta aktörerna i detta konservativa skifte är den ryska ortodoxa kyrkan, som inte bara försöker öka den ortodoxa kyrkans ställning som en viktig del av den »ryska» identiteten i Ryssland utan också sprider sina konservativa värderingar under benämningen »ryska värderingar» utanför Ryssland, särskilt i de länder där den ortodoxa tron är starkast. I detta sammanhang är den kristna ortodoxa tron en viktig del som skiljer de ryska värderingar man propagerar för från övriga värderingar. Konservativa värderingar som sprids av den ryska ortodoxa kyrkan påverkar för övrigt lagstiftningen vad beträffar handlingar som kan kränka »troendes känslor». Till följd av det formas dagens ryska kulturpolitik i stor utsträckning av inflytandet från de konservativa värderingar som stöds av både kyrkan och staten

This chapter analyses how the memory of the war-time nationalist movement represented by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its military arm the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was used in the Ukraine during the most turbulent moments of its recent history, the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Euromaidan in 2013/2014. It shows how in 2004 the memory of the OUN and UPA was used with propaganda intent in the election campaign which resulted in fraud, and consequently led to mass protests. During the Euromaidan, the memory of these organizations was used primarily as a symbol of radicalism and revolution. Furthermore, it is argued that constant insecurity about the end of the ‘struggle for independence,’ i.e. fear that independence can be lost again, strengthened adherence to the heroic memory of OUN and UPA for both the political right and the political center. In this way, the heroic memory of the OUN and UPA presented a means to existential security. In this usage, this memory is full of ‘factual’ drawbacks as it neglects, ignores, and circumvents historical evidence about the atrocities committed by the OUN and UPA.

In religious studies there is a rich discussion on how social memory can be used for understanding social dimension of religion, how religious communities are constructed through memory, how religions remember, so to say (Hervieu-Leger 2000; Assmann 2006). In my presentation, I want to discuss how religion can be used for better understanding of how social remembrance functions.

Based on the analysis of interviews, participant observations, and published sources I want to see how different religious groups – Jewish, Christian (Orthodox and Catholic), Protestant – work for establishing the remembrance of the Holocaust in Ukraine. I want to see what it means for each of the group to engage in the memory work, what this participation brings for shaping the memory as well as for self-understanding and functioning of the group. My empirical material shows that religion opens the ways for building trans- and inter-national memory networks. These networks actively engage in local contexts and through a process of negotiations and adjustments create memory projects that reflect both global and local features. More concretely, I was tracing the work of Jewish memory actors from the USA and Protestant memory actors from Germany who worked on the projects of Holocaust remembrance in Ukraine. In these concrete cases, I was also looking into how local Jewish, Christian and Protestant communities were engaged in this work.

After the Euromaidan, some of the most visible changes in Ukraine took place in the areas of history and memory politics. As result of decommunisation laws, over 50,000 places have been renamed. This exemplifies the continued tendency in Ukraine to treat the past as a matter of national security.

There are parallels in discussions about monuments in Ukraine and the USA. The reminder of the Soviet past (or in the American context, of the Confederacy) is an abject that is difficult to assimilate. On the one hand, the abject is our unwillingness to see the past and accept it; on the other hand, for those who associate themselves with this past, this is the threat of castration because through the negation of a given past a certain group is cast out from the space of representation. That is why it is questionable whether a monument can be inclusive at all. Which memory does the monument recall? Which past is castrated when a new monument is built? Which groups are fighting for recognition and representation? Which groups lose this right? These questions confront researchers and memory workers and are discussed in this essay.