The “invisibility of faith” and the stigmatization of “apostates”: the paradoxes of labeling in law, ethnography and sociology

The 19th century became a period in history when, for the first time, according to the materials of the linguistic academic resource “National Corpus of the Russian Language”, hundreds of texts with the lexemes “sectarians”, “sectarianism”, “sectarian” and their derivatives appear in the history of Russian literature. In such social conditions, attempts to “invisible faith” begin in a number of confessional communities that do not want to become objects of discrimination and stigmatization by the authorities and researchers who study and describe the markers of such “apostates” (“schismatics”, etc.). Along with the “accusatory” direction of research by a number of authors who worked in line with the so-called the “protective” trend in politics of the second third of this century, a search for agreement between the court, legal, journalistic, ecclesiastical and scientific elites is underway in order to form an academic tradition of an objective description of confessional, ethnic, ethno-confessional and religious communities in the country, while new religious names with special denotations and connotations were constructed, for example, “one faith”, “the pious Greek Orthodox Church”, etc., The article sets out the position of social philosophy with a focus on the approaches of modern philosophical religious studies.