This article deals with Ivan Franko’s views on religion and religiosity in the historical context of secularization which is called religious. One of the questions that interested him during his life was the question of the essence of religion and its role in a life of a human being. In the Soviet times, Ivan Franko was represented as the atheist. However, if we analyse the works by Ivan Franko where he writes about religion, we discover that for him, religion is a sphere of moral and feelings, and not dogmas, institutes or ceremonies. The objective of this article is to show that Ivan Franko’s views on religion and religiosity belong to the general process of secularization of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. This secularization had two ways. The first way is a way of enlightened secularization based on the conviction that religion is an out-of-date form of human life which should disappear soon. The second way is the way of religion transforming itself which overcomes the limits of theological and church interpretation. The author of this article claims that Franko’s thoughts belong to the second type of secularization and thus, to the well-known trend of thinking developed by such thinkers as Kierkegaard, Feuerbach who reinterpreted the nature and the goals of religion, the nature of God and its relation to a human being. In the article, the author tries to explain the essence of Franko’s religiosity and show that it is a kind of “new religiosity” which arised only in the end of the 20th c. and includes such features as separateness from traditional religiosity, importance of the personal religious experience, and personal relation to an impersonal God or the Divine.
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