Churches in the 2020 elections and political protests in Belarus: raising voices at the time of uncertainties and turmoil

ABSTRACT

In 2020, the religious factor turned out to gain importance to both protest mobilizations and to government repression in Belarus, where the initiatives of religious groups had fostered collective action in the state system that was punitive against any dissent. This happened for the first time in the country, which had been affected by the legacies of Soviet anti-religious policies. The forms of protest that churches could suggest fitted neatly into the non-democratic settings of Belarus, providing a necessary opportunity structure for otherwise forbidden mobilizations. Analyzing the attitudes of the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Churches toward the events of 2020 in Belarus, this research note discusses why their social contract with the authoritarian regime was broken. We argue that the churches’ stance and the role they played at a time of political turmoil confirmed their status as influential non-state actors who are capable of having their say in the rough circumstances of an authoritarian and repressive political regime. At the same time, it has also confirmed the limits of the authoritarian state to influence religious institutions and the growing opportunities for clergy and laypeople from these institutions to have a common say on important issues of moral and ethical dimensions, inspired by Christian principles and values.

KEYWORDS:

• Belarus
• Orthodox Church
• Catholic Church
• Protestant churches
• Lukashenka
• elections

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 BRSM stands for Belorusskiy Respublikanskiy Soyuz Molodezhi (Belarusian Republican Youth Union), an official youth union.

2 Priest Sergiy Timoshenkov, then head of the missionary department of the BOC, wrote in his Facebook post on 14 September 2020 that the Church should be neutral toward politics, toward the “stupidity of propaganda and official deeds”, but there could not be neutrality toward beatings and torture. Later, on 3 November, he directed some criticism toward Metropolitan Veniamin, speaking about the ‘divisions’ which had been brought into society by (at least as seen on the official TV), “joyful loyalty and positive attitudes of the head of the Belarusian Orthodox Church toward A. G. Lukashenko” (Timoshenkov 2020, authors’ translation from Russian).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by “The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies” (Östersjöstiftelsen) through the research project “Religion in Post-Soviet Nation-building: Official Mediations and Grassroots’ Accounts in Belarus” (grant number 61/2017).

Notes on contributors

Aliaksei Lastouski

Aliaksei Lastouski was an Associate Professor at Polotsk State University in Minsk, Belarus, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Political Studies, “Political Sphere”, in Lithuania. He is now affiliated with the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania, and with IRES (Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies) at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is one of the organizers of international congresses of Belarusian Studies (held annually since 2011) and has published a number of articles on cultural and collective memory, national identity, and cultural geography.

Sergei A. Mudrov

Sergei A. Mudrov is an independent scholar, working on the issues of religion, politics, and society in Eastern Europe/former USSR. His research for this paper was conducted at an educational institution in Belarus. He has worked in the print media and academia and for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Belarus. He is the author of four books, including Christian Churches in European Integration (2016) and The Orthodox Church in Europe: From Reykjavik to Tallinn (2018, in Russian), and over 50 articles.

Nikolay Zakharov

Nikolay Zakharov is Associate Professor in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden. The main focus of his research is global racism and anti-racism, religion, and nationalism in Eastern Europe. He is the (co-)author of Attaining Whiteness (2013), Race and Racism in Russia (2015), Post-Soviet Racisms (2017, with Ian Law), and Futures of Anti-Racism (2023, with Shirley Ann Tate, Ian Law, and Joaze Bernardino-Costa) as well as articles, the most recent of which published in Nationalities Papers, Journal of Religion in Europe, and Communist and Post-Communist Studies.