The author comments on Leonardo Ambasciano's book An Unnatural History of Religions: Academia, Post-truth and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge (2019) and develops the line of its argument that a fideistic, sui generis, confessional History of Religions tradition continues due to the tacit support from scholars, institutions and organisations. Gnosticism is presented as a case study, showing how it exemplifies core critiques of HoR, and is supported by the same scholars and institutions, particularly the IAHR. The author then considers the recent British Academy report into Theology and Religious Studies in the UK to argue that the HoR tradition in contemporary Religious Studies is not a "problem to be solved", but rather something at the very basis of the discipline. The argument is therefore made that there cannot be a truly scientific academic study of religion while RS exists.
In the article we present the results of our research on the spirituality of Slavic Neopagans in Poland. Spirituality is understood here according to the concept of mysticism described by R. W. Hood Jr. (1975). As the second main theoretical tool, we use the concept of religious maturity put forward by R. L. Dudley and R. J. Cruise (1990). A questionnaire survey, conducted online on a sample of Slavic Neopagans and Catholics, showed statistically significant differences between the groups in three out of the eight subscales of mysticism (Unifying Quality, Inner Subjective Quality and Religious Quality), while at the same time showing a lack of significant differences with respect to religious maturity. Further analysis by means of binary logistic regression made it possible to determine predictors of belonging to the group of Slavic Neopagans (75.8% of the cases). In the regression model, the separate treatment of mysticism and religious maturity turned out to be insignificant, whereas gender, age, and the interaction between religious maturity and mysticism significantly differentiated the investigated groups.