Religious activism in Eastern Europe and beyond

ABSTRACT

This collection of contributions addresses the theme of religiously motivated and religiously framed civic activism by bringing together anthropology and theology. The main goal is to put forward a concept of religious activism as local, non-elitist responses challenging dominant discourses and regulation of the religious in authoritarian and more democratic societies. Highlighting complex entanglements of religion, civic engagement, and political participation over the last decade, the authors explore the ways faith-based claims, acts, and initiatives from below are evolving in public spaces, mostly in post-Soviet societies. The contributors to this collection shed light on a variety of faith-based claims arising around religious materiality, governance questions, and unequal access to resources in Russia, Georgia, Eastern Germany, and in the USA. The contributions also identify the means of mediating acts of religious activism, those chosen forms of public expression that make the voices of religious activists more visible and mobilise individual and collective actions in public spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• religious activism
• public space
• agency
• social mobilisation

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine tremendously affects social, political, and religious life in Eastern Europe, underlining new configurations of conflicts and solidarities. Today, the issues of religious freedom and understanding of religious activism are even more relevant in view of the political mobilisation of the sacred and contested religious diversity in Eastern Europe. The full-scale war in Ukraine has evoked grassroots volunteer initiatives among diverse social groups and individuals, and many religious communities in different countries have become part of this development. Highlighting the complex entanglements of religion, civic engagement, and political participation over the last decade, our collection brings together anthropology and theology to explore the ways faith-based claims and initiatives from below are evolving in public spaces. It is an initial step towards a comprehensive view of religious activism and its growing visibility as local and non-elitist responses to existing religious structures and political challenges.

In approaching religious activism, the collection covers different territories and religious congregations not only in Eastern Europe, including the former socialist GDR (Brandenburg), but also a Russian Orthodox (Old Believers) community in the USA. By examining faith-based claims in Russia, Georgia, Germany, and the USA, we aim to show the multiplicity of religiously motivated public claims and to take into account the ways they can be understood through the lens of civic engagement. By civic engagement, we mean individual and collective actions initiated by believers and citizens who are motivated by increasing awareness of social and economic inequality in their societies and by human rights discourses, and who relate to the sacred as an ‘object of contestation’ (Jacobsson 2015; Van Dijk, Kirsch, and Duarte Dos Santos 2019; Darieva and Neugebauer 2020). The notion of ‘Eastern Europe’ is contested, and for the purposes of this collection we use it as a political concept to refer to European countries with a socialist past, encompassing Russia, the Caucasus, and East Germany. We do not attempt to cover the whole range and repertoire of faith-based activisms in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. It would be beyond the scope of the introduction to this collection to discuss in detail the variety of historical formations of religious institutions and their relations with the state. What we want to highlight is the ways religious symbols and a sense of morality can be promoted or instrumentalised by religious activists from below, and how support can be mobilised and mediated in secularised public spaces.

Religious activism around the world is affected by the deterioration and uneven development of religious freedom. We observe increasing dissatisfaction with the uncertainties and existing policies in Russia and Georgia, where regulation of religion by the state was, over two decades, re-defined for the benefit of one religious institution. After long-lasting anti-religious campaigns during socialism, followed by 30 post-Soviet years of religious emancipation, Eastern Europe offers dynamic arenas for the study of the aspirations and challenges believers and non-believers face in those domains where religion is viewed as national heritage and a source of power, and as a threat. Although post-Soviet states have upheld or introduced laws protecting freedom of religion that became enshrined in their constitutions, regulatory interventions such as restrictive registration provisions are widely used to control religious minorities and new religious communities and to limit religious activities in public domains (Pelkmans 2014; Shterin 2016; Darieva, Mühlfried, and Tuite 2018; Modood and Sealy 2022).

To serve particular purposes, the sacred in Eastern Europe became part of public manifestations and contestations that can be mobilised and mediated in a variety of ways, often merging with social and political discourses and actions. We agree with the definition of religious activism suggested recently by anthropologists working in Africa, ‘as a discursive and social practice that is an enacted form of societal agency’ (Van Dijk, Kirsch, and Duarte Dos Santos 2019, 238). In accordance with these authors, we see activism as ‘articulated with a view to communal imaginaries, visions and aspirations towards a better life and/or opposed to some (perceived) injustice, domination, or adverse social development’ (Van Dijk, Kirsch, and Duarte Dos Santos 2019, 238). But we want to stress that religious activism can also take the form of individual as well as collective actions and that activists’ agendas may be neither ‘progressive’ nor ‘liberal’ in content. As Melissa Caldwell rightly noted in her study of ‘faith-based assistance organisations’ in Moscow, these organisations can ‘promote an alternative form of civil society and state-citizens relations’ (Caldwell 2012, 264).

Over the last two decades, postsocialist societies in the centre and in peripheries have experienced multiple political protests on different scales ranging from large movements in cities to small-scale initiatives expressed by ordinary people to transform the environment, public memory, and existing social order. Political activism and protest movements are becoming prominent and can take different forms, from urban struggles against socioeconomic inequality caused by neoliberal developments to the global rise of human rights discourses including gender and environmental activism. This challenges the assumption that civic disengagement is an important feature of this area and that there is little room for expressions of local and alternative religious ideas in postsocialist societies (Mason 2016; Zhelnina 2020; Fröhlich 2020). The roles of religion and civil society in the United States and Germany differ significantly from those in post-Soviet societies and from each other, and these two cases help us see the extent to which social and political contexts define the forms religious activism takes and the agencies it helps to develop.

Based on analysis of our field data, we argue that religious activism can be present in unexpected places and covers different domains including civic, social, and political activism. For instance, public engagement to improve religious infrastructure for minorities is often framed in terms of civic activism and ‘lived’ citizenship (Darieva, this collection), whereas in other contexts ethnic activism can be framed as religious claims (Shtyrkov, this collection). Instead of elaborating on distinctive types of religious activism, we witness blurred and overlapping boundaries between religion, politics, and civic engagement.

What is religious activism?

Our understanding of religious activism is informed by two sources: our own ethnographic fieldwork and the research of our colleagues who have studied the social outreach of religious groups, such as volunteering activities and other cases of faith-inspired civic engagement in public spaces. From ethnographic fieldwork in postsocialist settings, we know that the concept ‘religious activism’ usually refers to events organised by religious people in (secular) public space. In these cultural contexts, the expression ‘religious activist’ is used by some liberal journalists critical of the interventions of religious actors in public space or by religious authorities unhappy about lay activism which potentially or actually challenges the authority of their religious institution. This differs from western social and academic discourses in which bottom-up activism appears to have predominantly positive connotations.

In other words, religious activism in these settings tends to be about demarcation of the strong yet invisible border between the sacred and the secular, on the one hand, and between religious elites and lay believers on the other. Remarkably, both mainstream journalists, state-sponsored elites, and religious authorities in Russia tend to imply negative connotations to the notion of religious activism, though for different reasons. Similarly, Regina Elsner (this collection) identifies in her theological study that ‘in the context of ecclesial negotiations, “activism” is a highly pejorative term’, because it challenges the authority of priests over lay people and of the church leadership in general.

This collection goes back to a workshop which took place at Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in March 2020. In preparing our workshop and then this collection, we were inspired by the work of anthropologists who studied faith-based activism, that is ‘a field of social engagement associated with religious charities, social service organisations, and congregations’ (Elisha 2008, 155). The authors discuss issues such as compassion and accountability, which frame religious charity in different ethnographic contexts – conservative evangelicals in America, Muslim charity in the context of the Arab Spring in Egypt, or Catholic volunteers in the Lombardy region of Italy (Elisha 2008; Mittermeier 2019; Muehlbach 2013). Yet, religious activism as we understand it deals not only and not necessarily with morally-oriented doings aiming at making society a better place and a religious actor herself a better person with a more mature self. Instead, the initiatives of religious activists are often focused on the representation and promotion of religious symbols, logics, and subjectivities in the common public space.

Another important issue which contributors to this publication deal with is the agency of religious activists. A religious activist is a person who carries out her ‘culturally constituted projects in the world’ (Ortner 2006, 141) aimed at changing the world and who does it publicly. In a recent publication, Roman Lunkin suggests a religious activist in Russia is a person who supports the participation of religion in secular spheres, such as business, politics, and society. Accordingly, there are three categories of religious activist, namely ‘activist-obshchestvennik’ (see below), ‘activist-businessman’, and ‘activist-politician’, depending on the nonreligious sphere where the unexpected presence of religion is registered (Lunkin 2021). This understanding of activism is different from ours, and from what we observed in our field sites, as it does not take the agency of religious activists into consideration. Moreover, contributions to this collection show that the faith-based activism of Orthodox believers in post-Soviet society can be treated as an unwelcome challenge to the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate by this very leadership (see Elsner and Kormina in this collection).

In the Russian-speaking context, the very concept of activism – as it has appeared in mass and social media – is influenced by its Soviet genealogy. In the communist era, activists (aktiv) were the zealots of the Soviet system who were delegated by their collective to become its voice. In other words, an activist had the right and obligation to participate in public space only as a representative of a particular collective, ‘regime activists or militants meant to represent “orthodox” public opinion’ (Roth-Ey and Zakharova 2015, 3; see Kormina in this collection). Obshchestvennik, a synonym for ‘activist’ which was broadly used in socialist times, highlights this meaning of an individual inseparable from society: obshchestvo means ‘society’ and obshchestvennik means a rank-and-file person who becomes a voice from below. One can see some resemblance between the Soviet understanding of activists and the idea of an appropriate version of faith-based activism in post-Soviet reality. As Boris Knorre wrote in his work on the social ministry of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), ‘many Church actors still interpret volunteering […] not as individual voluntary action, but as a duty or obligation to be fulfilled not arbitrarily’ (Knorre 2018, 47).

Mediating religious activism

We assume that religious activism may produce both conservative and innovative ways of forging personal identity, forms of human rights solidarity, and concepts of what it means to be successful in contemporary societies. Religious activists may use different means of communication and networks beyond traditional prayer houses and church systems. As contributions to this collection by Dominic Martin and Sergei Shtyrkov show, contemporary religious activists use social media extensively and skilfully as a way of communicating with their co-believers and maintaining in-group identity, but also as a means of doing things – evoking particular emotions in their interlocutors, creating reputation, or inviting people to participate in collective actions in real life outside the Internet. In their use of the Internet, religious activists are not much different from other actors who use various social media platforms to organise and manage political mobilisation for protests or other public activities (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Hirschkind 2011). What makes them different, however, is the repertoire of performative forms they use to mediate their messages to wider society. The variety of these forms is broader than those of political activists, as it ranges from religious actions to purely secular. The former extends institutional religions beyond the walls of their premises and includes such public events as Orthodox processions of the Cross in support of traditional values or a public prayer service (moleben in Russian) in support of excluding abortions from state-sponsored medical services. The latter can be illustrated by pickets, flash mobs, and other typically activist events, where secular forms of mediating social or political claims are filled up with religious content or just performed by participants who identify and represent themselves as believers.

There are also cases when the secular and religious forms of public performance are mixed. One of the many examples of this interference is a prayer meeting (molytovne viche in Ukrainian, molitvennoe veche in Russian) organised in 2014 on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv by several of the country’s Protestant churches. The prayer was initiated by the senior bishop of the Ukrainian Pentecostal Church, Mikhaylo Panochko, who compared the prayer with political events which had taken place on the same site just before this (the Maidan Revolution): ‘In connection with the situation in Ukraine, God put it in our hearts to set up a molitvennoe veche. There were veches of all sorts – organisational, revolutionary. And we want to have a praying Maidan because at the moment people need to become closer to God.’ ¹ By this act of performative citizenship, thousands of participants who came to Maidan Nezalezhnosti for the collective prayer conveyed a message about their double loyalty – to the nation and to God. They were a group of citizens who care about the common good but do this in their own way, by performing their collective ‘pious labour’ (Bielo 2020) of prayer in a politically powerful location. In other words, Pentecostal Protestants wanted to be better citizens by becoming closer to God.

Religious buildings and urban materiality are another form of mediation between a religious group and broader society. Churches, monasteries, mosques, and other houses of prayer, in different states of their materiality (as ruins, construction projects, or shining objects of state-protected cultural heritage) often become places where religious activists come to fight for the right of their group to be present in public space (Darieva, this collection); or/and to openly discuss the role of religion in their society (Halemba, this collection; also Kormina 2021). When discussing the aesthetic forms a religious building has to have, or more pragmatic questions such as who pays for the construction work or utilities, religious activists raise questions of religious freedom, constitutional rights, and, often, of demarcation of the boundary between religious and secular domains of life – where these lines have to be drawn and who is delegated to guard them.

Contributions to the collection

This collection brings together work on religiously motivated and religiously framed civic activism by considering one challenge – to elaborate a definition of religious activism and its application and differentiation between a form of enacted religiosity and civic engagement with a political agenda. Contributions to the collection discuss a broad variety of cases, ranging from a female political activist with a conservative agenda and an Old Believers’ background in the United States, the struggle for access to a city space by a marginalised religious group in Georgia, and post-GDR debates on the reconstruction of a totally destroyed church in a city with very low church attendance. Religion is present in a variety of ways in secularised public spaces. It can be present in the form of a religious building even if it does not fulfill its religious function at the moment, or as a sacred grove which does not belong to any institutional religion, or as a reference point in public debate. Religion can also be strategically hidden from public space, as demonstrated by Martin’s research on ‘Freedom Believers’, a political movement in Oregon, USA formed in 2019 by female anti-vaccination activists coming from an Old Believers’ community. This contribution takes issue with José Casanova’s and Jürgen Habermas’ thesis about religions coming to the public sphere in the process of secularisation as political actors who use their own language and authentic argumentation. Oregonian Old Believers ‘do not want to assert their values and religious ideas in the public sphere; on the contrary, they very much want to keep those to themselves’. They are happy to keep religion as a private matter. To be accepted into American political life, they do cultural translations of their religious knowledge and ritual life into ‘a political language about civil rights and choices’ which they master as representatives of a minority group.

In Sergei Shtyrkov’s text, religion appears as a powerful concept which helps people in the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania of the Russian Federation to formulate their anti-colonial sentiments. Whereas ‘overt political activism not sanctioned by the Russian ruling elite remains virtually forbidden’ in the republic and throughout Russia, ethnic traditions represented as the native religion of the local people remain a safe space for debate on political issues. As a result, ethnic activists advocating the preservation of old ways of life, in ritual behaviour at least, mask themselves on the public scene as religious activists, keepers, and defenders of an old pre-Christian and pre-Islamic religion. Remarkably in this case, most actions, often charged with strong emotions, take place in the virtual public space of Facebook and Instagram rather than in physical reality.

Agnieszka Halemba focuses her analysis on one official event which took place in a former GDR area: the City Council meeting of the city of Potsdam with the participation of a broad public involved in debates about the reconstruction of the totally destroyed Garrison Church. Similar to Shtyrkov, she focuses on the religious argumentation and motivation of civic activism, though of a different sort, not ethnic and anti-colonial, but historical and heritage-oriented. Halemba insists that ‘activism focused on objects that are socially recognised as religious should itself be called religious, regardless of the (non)religious convictions of the activists themselves’. Consequently, she proposes ‘a more comprehensive view of religious activism’, which encompasses both faith-based activism and nonreligious activism.

Tsypylma Darieva, in her work, discusses the religious activism of a group which promotes the building of a new mosque in Batumi as a strategy of ‘lived citizenship’, where ‘spatial expressions of a community may gain a sense of agency, enhancing a sense of full membership in wider society’. Through their strong support for the construction of this religious facility in a conventionally Christian country with a distinct European orientation, Georgian Muslims struggle for their equal participation in the city community and for society’s acknowledgement of this form of belonging to their nation as legitimate.

Through the lens of theology, Regina Elsner studies the very concept of religious activism as it is represented in the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) and in the texts of its official speakers. She argues, in accordance with other contributors, that ‘as a concept, religious activism points to the difficulties of addressing religion as a public phenomenon in a world perceived as secular’ where religion is typically understood as a private matter and all public functions of religions are delegated to religious professionals. Jeanne Kormina in her ethnography develops these observations by referring to the concept of obedience central for the Orthodox pedagogy of self. She studies the agency of a female Orthodox activist who finds her way of being an Orthodox believer and an active citizen of her city, very visible in the public space, physical as well as virtual. In her analysis, Kormina argues that Orthodox activists in a contemporary secularised Russia resemble what Nancy Frazer has called ‘counterpublics’ – groups that stand in opposition to a dominant public. Kormina argues that Orthodox publics behave as subaltern publics in Russia’s secular public space and provide their own understanding of how a public sphere should function.

As a collection, these six contributions represent separate case studies and identify the role of faith-based engagement and the emerging role of religious activists ‘from below’, whose voices go beyond institutional boundaries in both authoritarian and democratic societies. In this way, they challenge the common perception of religiously motivated engagement associated with charity culture or radicalism and violence only. The collection offers a more nuanced understanding of entanglements between religion, politics, and grassroots claims and may contribute to strengthening the study of civil society and social change in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to the editorial team of Religion, State & Society for their enormous help in our work on this collection. We are thankful to Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and The Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) for their support of the workshop on religious activism from which this collection has developed.

Additional information

Funding

The research and the collection were supported by the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS), Germany. The research was supported by a grant from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research #19-59-22006.

Notes on contributors

Tsypylma Darieva

Tsypylma Darieva is senior researcher, head of the research cluster ‘Migration and Diversity’ at the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin (ZOiS). She is also teaching anthropology and Central Eurasian Studies at Humboldt University Berlin. Her recent publications concern issues of the governance of religious diversity, and religious minorities’ key challenges in South Caucasian cities. She is the author of the forthcoming Making a Homeland. Roots and Routes of Transnational Armenian Engagement (Transcript 2023) and a co-editor of Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces. Religious Pluralism in the post-Soviet Caucasus (Berghahn 2018).

Jeanne Kormina

Jeanne Kormina used to work as a Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at the Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg, Russia. She now works at École Pratique des Hautes Études, Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités, Paris, France. She has published extensively in Russian and English on Orthodox pilgrimages, veneration of saints, and other topics addressing the post-secular situation in Russia and beyond. Her recent monograph is Pilgrims. Anthropology of Orthodox Nomadism [in Russian] (Moscow, HSE, 2019).

Notes

1. https://www.protestant.ru/news/politics/inrussia/article/435481; see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sepeDjLHjgk.