The Identity of Fate and the Identity of Choice: Between the Routine of Continuation and the Ordinariness of Rejection

Abstract

Culture and religion still interrelate with one another. The presence of religious values in social life depends, above all, on the processes of constructing cultural identities in the course of socialization and education, which warrant the experience of the ontological realness of the social world. In the encyclical Veritatis splendor, John Paul II highlights the issue of culture, whose essence is “the moral sense, and which is in turn rooted and fulfilled in the religious sense.”1 However, in the contemporary culture, there are strong tendencies to separate truth from freedom and faith from morality. As a result, “the moral sense” becomes dissociated from “the religious sense.” In this article, I introduce the category of fate which emphasizes reproducibility, the inter-generational reproduction of patterns of religious stances and practices, confessional affiliations on the level of obviousness of the profiles of social personality, and the natural character of the structures of the social world in which Christianity is “like the air” we breathe, indispensable to preserve our existence. In opposition to the culture of fate there is the culture of choice, described with the category of prefiguration which sets our imagination free from the obligatory character of the cultural and religious model of the past. The problem hinted at in the title of this article, is illustrated by the results of sociological research, which demonstrates attitudes of selective acceptance/rejection of the Decalogue and which becomes “the inverse Decalogue”,as such fitting into the liquid reality. Its sign is the imperative of choice which contributes to the deconstruction of the axiological invariants which are the basis of Christian civilization.