An Affective Atmosphere of Religiosity: Animated Places, Public Spaces, and the Politics of Attachment in Ukraine and Beyond CATHERINE WANNER History and Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University “Freedom is our Religion!” proclaimed the enormous panels covering the soot and grime of a burned out building in the heart of downtown Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. The slogan was meant to encapsulate the fervently held ideals that spurred a popular uprising in 2013–2014 that forced the pro-Russian oligarchic president of Ukraine to flee in the night. The chains painted on each panel dynamically shatter as they meet, illustrating the release from colonial bondage that a new-found salvation in “our religion” has delivered. Written in English and Ukrainian, the panels were hung by the city administration prior to Kyiv hosting the televised Eurovision song contest in May 2017 (image 1). They remained for over a year until the building was fully renovated. Many that I spoke with explained the expression of the secular value of “freedom” in terms of “our religion” to indicate shared moral convictions. These panels are one of the many ways religion and politics interpenetrate in public space. The solidarity-producing tone of the panels metaphorically uses religion to articulate a collective sense of self. Simultaneously, the panels Acknowledgments: The research for this article was funded by the Center for Governance and Culture, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. I am very grateful for the insightful comments of Joel Robbins, Birgit Meyer, Vlad Naumescu, Tetiana Kalenychenko, Julia Buyskykh, Sonja Luehr- mann, and Jeanne Kormina. I received thoughtful suggestions from the anonymous reviewers for CSSH, which helped to improve this article. I thank Ulrich Schmid for his ongoing support. I owe a particular debt to all the members of the Working Group on Religion in the Black Sea Region and I offer my thanks to audiences at Cambridge University, Humboldt University, the Center for East European and International Studies (ZOiS), Berlin, and the State Research Univer- sity Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg. All interviews were conducted and translated from Ukrainian or Russian by the author. This article is dedicated to the memory of Sonja Luehr- mann, an exceptional scholar who left this world way too soon. Comparative Studies in Society and History 2020;62(1):68–105. 0010-4175/20 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2020 doi:10.1017/S0010417519000410 68 of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417519000410 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 75.75.185.18, on 11 Jan 2020 at 14:50:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms