This is the third article in a series of publications devoted to the history of the study of religiosity from the late 19th to the first half of the 20th century. Analysing the publications of the 1930s on the theoretical understanding of religion and empirical research, the author compares approaches in the study of religiosity, highlighting trends, changes and factors that led to them. In the 1930s, religiosity was considered as individual and changeable characteristic, and this dichotomy fuelled methodological debates about the possibility and nature of empirical studies of religiosity. The dominance of quantitative methods can be considered as a common feature in the research into religiosity in different countries. Furthermore, there was mainly applied research conducted at the time, largely driven by attempts to identify the reasons behind the crisis of faith in the West after WWI and to demonstrate the disappearance of “religious prejudice” in the USSR, which had an impact on the vocabulary employed by Soviet authors, as well as the classifications of religiosity they developed.

Keywords: religiosity, ethnography, psychology of religion, sociology of religion, religious studies, methods, history of religious studies.

 

Funding. The work was completed under state assignment FWRZ-2021-0006.

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Accepted: 02.10.2025

Article is published: 15.12.2025