In Montenegro, but also in the world, there are more and more believers, but also fewer and fewer of those who are truly in the faith. This global paradox was best illustrated by Pope Benedict XVI, who in his speech before Catholic Christmas condemned the commercialization of that great Christian holiday.
The head of the Roman Catholic Church appealed to the faithful to "ignore the artificial shine and discover the true values in the child in the stable in Bethlehem", as well as to concentrate on the story of the birth of Jesus because it is the essence and "true joy and light".
"Today, Christmas is a commercial party whose lights hide the humility of God who calls us to contrition and simplicity," said the head of the Roman Catholic Church.
Anthropologist Lidija Vujačić also agrees with the point of view that religion has become a product in consumer society.
"We can say that the celebration in the context of everyday life, but also of some festive moments that are behind us and that will follow us, have therefore become commercialized, and the religious component in them, so to speak, has lost its primary meaning.
But what is interesting is that they have turned into a bare estimate of how much something is worth and how much something costs and have become very measurable, measurable through money. Now you have a completely new, naked dimension of simple consumption, the consumption of mass products. They have become just like anything else in mass culture. A product without any particular essence," says Lidija Vujačić.
Fewer true believers
When we talk about religiosity from a global level through what is happening in Montenegro, we notice that religion is seen here as something that necessarily contains a national or ethnic sign or label, says art historian and Cetinje native Aleksandar Čilikov.
"There are, in my opinion, two types of religious beliefs in Montenegro. One is absolutely related to ethnicity - as a good Orthodox, as a good Serb or Montenegrin, a good Catholic, a good Croat, a good Muslim, a good Bosniak. However, there is a percentage smaller part of the people who are absolutely in their faith and who, respecting religious customs, show themselves to be true believers," believes Aleksandar Čilikov.
Huge impact of politics
It is so evident that there are far fewer truly believing people in Montenegro than those who formally perceive themselves as believers. Art historian Aleksandar Čilikov illustrates this with the following example:
"When I talk to my students, some of whom are believers, I concluded that they have absolutely no information about Christianity. They don't know how many apostles there are, they don't know what happened with Jesus. I'm talking about those who are in the Christian faith . They wear crosses and appear as people who are in some Orthodoxy and the like. So, they are manipulated in a certain way so that politics has an awful lot of influence there."
And the official data that speak of thousands of believers in Montenegro are only an appearance for the essence that religion in Montenegro is closely related to politics and not to the essence of religion.
"You just need to enter a temple. Here I am, who deals with sacred art, and I have been in these buildings often for the last 10 years. I am constantly moving around the temples and there is no one there," says Chilikov.
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