Russia's Orthodox Awakening
The Fraying of Russia's Church-State Alliance
When the Russian Orthodox Church is in the news, which has been
quite often of late, the
image that comes to mind is of an army of archbishops and
abbots, commanded by Patriarch Kirill I, operating in conspiracy with the
country’s authoritarian rulers in the Kremlin. This is not without reason. The
church’s conservative clerics have, in fact, given their support to the
government’s most polarizing recent laws, including the jailing of three
members of Pussy Riot for offending believers’ religious sensibilities,
legislation proscribing “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” and the
institution of a limit of three legal marriages per Russian, to discourage
divorce.
But to conclude that the Russian Orthodox Church is nothing more
than a bastion of extreme conservatives is to miss the many ways that change is
being forced upon it. In some sense, the church’s ultraconservatism is on the
wane -- for confirmation, one need only look to what’s happening among the
laity, rather than to the very top of the church’s hierarchy. Devout Orthodox
Christian journalists, academics, and political scientists -- as well as
free-thinking priests -- are becoming increasingly assertive as alternative
spokespeople for their faith. This burgeoning Orthodox intelligentsia is
already posing a challenge to the conservative church hierarchy and, by
extension, to Vladimir Putin’s regime.
This is not the first time that the church has produced
prominent dissident intellectuals. Early in the twentieth century, Father
Georgii Gapon was one of the Russian Empire’s most prominent liberal critics,
leading an unsuccessful workers' demonstration in 1905 that came to be known as
Bloody Sunday. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Russian public was captivated by
charismatic priests such as Father Alexander Men and the dissident Father Gleb
Yakunin. In 1992, Yakunin co-chaired a parliamentary investigative committee
that exposed a vast network of collaborators among clerics, particularly at the
highest levels.
But the current crop of dissidents is different: although they
are devout, they are not all members of the clergy. The most influential (and
liveliest) discussions about the church’s future as a political actor were
initiated instead by a group of Orthodox journalists and activists in the
aftermath of the disputed December 2012 presidential primary vote. This group
includes journalist Konstantin Eggert; Aleksei Ulyanov, the deputy director of
the Moscow Administration’s Department of Science, Business, and Enterprise who
was formerly with the socially liberal Yabloko party; and Andrei Zolotov, the
founding editor of Russia Profile magazine. Since then, the
ten-member group has broadcast its bimonthly meetings on national television. In
doing so, it has brought to bring to light the deep discontent among some
Orthodox laity about the church hierarchy’s alliance with the state.
It’s significant that the young Orthodox professionals gaining
influence in the church are as likely to be female as male: they are
introducing increasingly diverse voices in church publications. Women now
dominate the rapidly growing field of religious media, which ranges from glossy
mass-market magazines to religious bookstores and publishing houses, blogs, and
social networks, as well as television and movie production studios. Among the
most prominent women in this sector include Anna Danilova, the editor-in-chief
of the leading Orthodox Web
site; Marina Zhurinskaia, the editor-in-chief of the theological journal Alpha
and Omega; journalists Xenia Loutchenko and Maria Sveshnikova; and
Natalia Rodomanova, the documentary filmmaker.
Orthodox academics have also been contributing to the
insurrection against the church hierarchy. In the Soviet period, scholarship
had to be couched in crudely Marxist terms, and the Orthodox Church was mostly
excluded from any scrutiny. But since 1990, sophisticated scholarship on
contemporary religiosity has been a growth industry. Conferences on, and
studies of, religion abound. And, as with the religious mass media, the
striking thing is the Orthodox academia’s refusal to commit to the party line.
A growing number of scholarly publications emphasize the diversity among
Russian spiritual beliefs -- what the religious life of believers actually
looks like (many Russians claim spiritual rewards from buying organic produce
from Orthodox farmers), as opposed to what sociologists or clerics think they
ought to look like (say, praying or going to church). Sociologist Nikolai
Mitrokhin, who has studied the contemporary Orthodox Church in the greatest
detail, goes furthest in criticizing the church-state alliance -- including
what he calls the “gay mafia” in the church hierarchy. But even those scholars
who do not support an explicit political agenda have helped to undermine the
church’s claims about a single “true” Orthodoxy.
It's not just laypeople who have adopted a critical approach to
contemporary Russian Orthodox Christianity. Priests have joined the
conversation, too. Archpriest Georgii Mitrofanov, a church historian and film
critic, has sparked controversy by suggesting that Russians should show more
nuance in their understanding of World War II, rather than celebrating it as an
unqualified victory deserving of a “holy flame.” This attempt to desacralize
World War II is especially important because both the church hierarchy and
Putin have explicitly encouraged that war's spiritual and political
significance to bolster their popular standing. Mitrofanov has been
publicly accused of both heresy and blasphemy, simply for acknowledging the
difficult choices faced during the war by Russians who had just undergone the
worst decade of Stalin's terror. Despite pressure from the hierarchy, he has
managed to keep his job in the church.
Sergei Chapnin, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of
the Moscow Patriarchate, the main publication put out by the Russian
Orthodox Church, has challenged the symbiosis of church and state most
directly. His recent book, The Church in Post-Soviet Russia: Dialogue
with Society, Subjective Thoughts on the Present and the Future,argues that
the church’s relationship to society has become dangerously distorted. In the
two decades after communism, the church could claim that it was the leading
civic institution in Russia. But now, Chapnin argues, particularly after the
protests connected to the elections and persecution of opposition leaders,
“Society has once again begun to pose sharp and painful questions to the Church
with ever greater and unheard-of persistence.” These questions include how to
pursue a “common good” and a system of law that has the well-being of citizens
as its top priority.
If the church shuns dialogue with the rest of society in favor
of maintaining a close relationship with the state, Chapnin warns, “this will
be a serious blow to its authority.” The church, Chapnin thinks, should move
away from the radical right fringe, and to create church structures that would
expressly support lay participation, by acknowledging, for example, that
laypeople have canonical rights as well as responsibilities.
Most of the church hierarchy is likely to resist this newly
emergent civic orthodoxy. It still believes that the church’s radical right
wing commands respect and admiration, both among clerics and the public. It is
no accident that the chief spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, Vsevolod
Chaplin, delights in scabrous sound bites on everything from an “Orthodox dress
code” to hailing the transfer of power from Dmitry Medvedev to Vladimir Putin
as a model of “friendliness and dignity.” But as Eggert has noted, this is
hardly a sustainable strategy. The church’s apparently automatic support for
all of the Kremlin’s initiative -- whether it is blessing rockets at a military
parade or Putin at his inaugurations -- is demoralizing would-be believers.
They continue to tolerate the church-state alliance, but they have reduced their
participation in official religious and political institution to a minimum. And
that makes them liable to jump ship the next time a capable alternative --
whether political or religious -- arises.
Indeed, the church’s main problem is that its support among the
faithful is being outpaced by discontent about its ultraconservatism. Kirill
himself seems to have recognized this: he has recently taken a far more guarded
stance recently when speaking about the church’s role in politics. But it could
be too little, too late. If change from within is to occur, it will likely come
from Russia's new voices
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