Questioning the concept of ‘religious activism’ in Russian Orthodoxy from a theological perspective

ABSTRACT

Most analyses of secularisation and desecularisation in Russia focus on the growing political role of institutionalised religion in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), or on informal religious activism and the meaning of religiosity for the people. However, the faith-based activism of Orthodox believers in post-Soviet society is the most serious challenge for the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. The heterogeneity of this activism questions the Church’s self-perception as a unified community balancing a hierarchical authority and a mission to affect worldly reality. Within Russian Orthodox clerical discourse, ‘activism’ has become an instrument to either appropriate activities as official ’Orthodox activism’ or to discredit dissent as ‘political activism’. The analytical frame of ‘religious activism’ thus impacts on the relationship between the hierarchy and the faithful, potentially strengthening the term’s pejorative implications. Based on official statements and media monitoring, this contribution makes a first attempt to analyse how believers, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and theology negotiate the social role of the Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) in the post-Soviet region, specifically in the Russian Federation and Belarus. Exploring the concept of ‘religious activism’ from a theological perspective, the contribution also highlights a necessary interdisciplinary dialogue between anthropology and theology.

KEYWORDS:

• Russian Orthodoxy
• religious activism
• faith-based activism
• ecclesiology

Introduction

When exploring processes of secularisation and desecularisation in Russia, most analyses focus either on the growing political role of institutionalised religion in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), or on informal religious activism and the meaning of religiosity for the people. From a theological perspective, both approaches are inadequate, because studies that deal with either elites or grassroots movements only partially capture the heterogeneity of the church and its inner processes of negotiating interpretative supremacy (Deutungshoheit).

As a concept, religious activism points to the difficulties of addressing religion as a public phenomenon in a world perceived as secular. The notion of a secular or secularised modern society is bound up with an understanding of religion as a private matter (Casanova 1994). Places, moments, and actors of public religion become the object of multidisciplinary observation and research and are described either in terms of religious activism or of political religion. In both cases, public religion is seen as diametrically opposed to the modern paradigm of private religion. At the same time, the perspective of the religions in question – in our case the Orthodox Church – on public religion and religiosity remains obscured. Is the distinction between public and private at all appropriate for the church in its own theological identity? How does this church approach public forms of religiosity and the faith-based activities of its members?

Separating out the different layers of the church is a complex and contested issue for theology. Public religious activities, be they prayers, processions, or demonstrations, are subject to tense negotiations within all Orthodox churches. While Orthodox ecclesiology does make some reference to ‘variety in unity’, the clerical hierarchy as well as observers tend to speak about the leadership or official statements as manifestations of ‘the church’, ignoring the plurality of positions among the faithful. The hierarchy relies on the notion of a monolithic unifying tradition, while the faithful try to strike a balance between obedience, their own conscience, and their social identity.

This is why the faith-based activities of Orthodox believers in post-Soviet society are the most serious challenge for the leadership of the Church. The heterogeneity of these activities calls the institutionalised church’s self-perception as a unified bulwark against modernity into question, and it points to the lack of a clear concept of what the church is and what ‘belonging to the church’ means. Yet, by interpreting every public activity with some reference to religiosity as ‘religious activism’, observers and scholars unintentionally influence the position of the church and the faithful, because, in the context of ecclesial negotiations, ‘activism’ is a highly pejorative term. Against this background, how should scholars deal with the restrictive use of the term ‘activism’ within the Russian Orthodox Church?

The aim of this contribution is twofold. On the one hand, it will analyse from a theological point of view how believers, activists, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and theologians negotiate the social role of the Orthodox Church in the post-Soviet region. It does so with reference to examples from the fields of social work, the social and ecclesial discourse on values, and political protest, relying on analysis of official statements and media monitoring. The choice of examples follows the initial question of how to frame religious activism from an interdisciplinary, theologically informed perspective. Naturally, the cases have to be limited and illustrative as they are not the subject of the research but contribute to the understanding of divergent approaches. The cases are also focused on the Russian Federation and Belarus, where the Moscow Patriarchate is the institution representing the majority religious communities. The place of religion in the public sphere is particularly contested in these countries, with the debates on ‘activism’ within the Church having a specific resonance in society at large. However, in the many countries where the Moscow Patriarchate has ecclesial jurisdiction the relationships between church leadership, believers, and civil society have developed in different directions. It is therefore important for future theological analysis to explore how the findings from these two countries may apply to the other social contexts of the Moscow Patriarchate.

On the other hand, this contribution also aims to shed light on crucial questions at the intersection of theology and cultural anthropology. The concept of ‘religious activism’ is used by social anthropologists interested in the visible activities of religious people and communities in various contexts, for example as part of research on social movements or women’s activism (Elisha 2008; Caldwell 2017; El Haitami 2013; Luehrmann 2019). The engagement with the theologies of those religious communities under scrutiny is often limited. For the context of Western Christianity and non-Christian religions, the anthropology of Christianity has been studied since the 2000s (Robbins 2003, 2020). For the Eastern European sphere, the turn of anthropology to Eastern Christianity starts with the collaboration of social anthropologist Chris Hann and the Lutheran theologian Hermann Goltz and their path-breaking conference in 2005 (Hann and Goltz 2010). Nevertheless, the voices of theologians remain rare in anthropological endeavours and theologians only occasionally use anthropological methods to deepen their understanding of pastoral developments. Thus, deepening the engagement between the two disciplines is a pending desiderata that this contribution aims to further, while exploring the analytical possibilities and limits of the concept of ‘religious activism’ from a theological perspective.

The church as the social form of religion

From a Christian theological point of view, Christian religion comes to life with and in the church. The Christian faith and religiosity are fundamentally linked to the church in the ‘people of God’, the communion of God with the faithful in both a mystical and a secular sense. Thus, Christian religiosity is not possible outside of the church, as the church is the social reality of the religion. The complex and ambiguous concept of the church as both a mystical and real communion of the people of God has been the subject of major theological discussions and long-lasting splits throughout the history of Christianity. The question of the holiness of the church as an earthly and fallible institution – and of the power of the ordained male hierarchy within it – presents a challenge to both theologians and the faithful, especially in the context of the modern discourse of individuality and fundamental human rights.

This theological confrontation has arisen in different churches at different historical moments. The Protestant churches are rooted in the ecclesiological debates of the sixteenth century. The Roman Catholic Church had its ecclesiological moment with the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which focused on a new understanding of the church as a learning and serving institution rather than a teaching and ruling one. For both Western Christian traditions, the contested questions of power, worldly structures, and the relationship between the faithful and clergy have been identified, but they remain unresolved.

Orthodox theologians only began to ponder the question of the nature and structures of the church in this modern world during the twentieth century. This is the moment when most local Orthodox churches found themselves, for the first time, in a secular state and society. Most Orthodox churches have lived in close relation to the state since the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Byzantine Empire in the fourth century, which resulted in the widely unquestioned authority of the church’s worldview and a sentiment of self-evidence of this established relationship. Similar to some other European churches in different contexts, confronted with the end of this self-evidence of being the church of the Russian Empire in the twentieth century, the Russian Orthodox Church had to find new ways of communicating with the people rather than the state. In this context, Christian theology had to come to terms with the place of the church on Earth and in the public sphere.

In his concise introduction to Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology, Andrew Louth points out that the biblical and patristic foundations of a systematic ecclesiology are rather shaky. This has given rise to the idea that ‘the church partakes in some way of the divinity of Christ, whose body she is; she is older than creation. It is this aspect of the church that is most obviously celebrated in the services and liturgical poetry of the church’ (Louth 2018, 188f).

Louth continues with the definition of the church in its most symbolic text, the Creed: ‘The four notes of the church, as confessed in the Creed – that she is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic – mediate in some way between the divine reality of the church and her earthly – often, all too earthly – expression’ (Louth 2018, 189). The first comprehensive attempts to develop an Orthodox ecclesiology on this basis were by the religious philosopher Aleksei Khomiakov at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Russian émigré theologians like Nikolai Afanasiev, Vladimir Lossky, and Georges Florovsky expanded on the teachings of Khomiakov and others in the twentieth century. Yet their aim was mainly to understand the nature of the church in its sacramental and mystic existence in the world. The ‘earthly’ existence of the church – structures, ways of acting and partaking in earthly matters, the relationship between different actors within the church – remained unexplored territory. Nevertheless, the concept of Eucharistic Ecclesiology developed by Afanasiev and others – an understanding of the church as evolving from joint participation in the Eucharist – did set the focus on the real, local parish.

In the late 1980s, in the context of perestroika, the Russian priest Alexander Men’ analysed the detachment of the church from worldly matters in the religious discourses of nineteenth-century Russia:

For educated society at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this other-worldly Christianity was identified with Orthodoxy itself. And what is more, Orthodox circles themselves easily slipped into the same identification. That is why almost all initiative was left to the secular world. Social justice, the structure of society, agonising problems such as serfdom – all were left to the sphere of the state and were disregarded by the church. These matters seemed to be of no concern to Christians (Men’ 1989).

In contrast to this ‘other-worldly Christianity’ and based on their experience of the new informal life within the Church in the late 1970s and 1980s, Men’ and others developed an idea of the church that derived from a biblical notion of freedom and communion. They could refer to the legacy of the pre-revolutionary currents within the Russian church, which strived for concrete social justice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Hedda 2008). Similar to such theologians as Fedor Bukharev or Sergii Bulgakov, Men’ reached out for more than social activism but for an ecclesial confidence of actively shaping the world according to Christian ethics. Without reducing the mystical dimension of the church, as a pastoral worker Men’ nevertheless focused on the communion of the faithful in a concrete parish, and in this sense encouraged grassroots activities by the faithful in close contact with the world. Yet shortly before his death in 1990, Men’ himself concluded that this vision of the church was contested by the hierarchy and those parts of Russian society that favoured protectionism and conservatism (Men’ 1990).

In 2000, the Jubilee Bishops Council of the Moscow Patriarchate approved and published a document that claimed to address the role and position of the Russian Orthodox Church in the modern world, the Foundations of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church (Osnovy Sotsiialnoi kontseptsii Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi, henceforth Osnovy) (Agadjanian 2003; Kyrlezhev 2014).¹ By no means an ecclesiological text, this document contains only a few genuinely theological positions on the activities of the church in the world. Thus, there are no efforts to conceptualise the faith-based activities of the faithful as actions of the church. It also reflects the view that the church’s means of exerting an influence on worldly developments are limited to negotiating with state organs and educating people’s souls. Several subsequent documents on different spheres of society (like alcoholism, the social activities of the faithful, ecology, or human rights) do not appeal to civil society as an autonomous sphere between state and individual (Elsner 2020).

Following the Pan-Orthodox Council in 2016 and the highly contested establishment of the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019 – both of which unsettled the ecclesiological self-consciousness of the Orthodox Church in its institutional global network – the theologian Cyril Hovorun published two fundamental books on ecclesiology: Meta-Ecclesiology, Chronicles on Church Awareness (Hovorun 2015) and Scaffolds of the Church (Hovorun 2017). Departing from the controversy over global church structures, Hovorun links the two dimensions of ecclesiology – structure and nature – and tries to describe their relationship. He concludes that structures can act against the nature of the church and turn toxic for the body of the church. Moreover, hierarchical structures are not essential to the church: the transformation in the ethos of ministry from servant duty to privilege was an indirect effect of the growth of the church:

The church, with its stratified clergy and laity, turned into a pyramid. The top of this pyramid claimed exclusive rights to be associated with the church proper, thereby contributing to the secularisation of the bottom part: laypeople, told for centuries that they were not quite the church, one day decided to accept this idea and dissociate themselves from the church. The church, in result, was left to those people at the top who had appropriated the ecclesial identity for themselves (Hovorun 2017, 8f).

This gap between ‘the church’ and the laity, between ‘the church’ and the world, solidified over time and was strengthened by the ideal of an ascetic lifestyle. From this bipolar perspective, it would be pointless to expect the church to play a social role, since the hierarchy is perceived as sacred and only ‘in the world’ in quite an abstract sense. At the same time, the laity and its participation in worldly matters are not seen as part of the church.

As Hovorun and others emphasise, Christian religious activity was originally a matter of charismata, of the plurality of gifts, talents, and activities the faithful brought with them to the church – or discovered while living in the church. Later as the church grew, the charismata were organised, concentrated, and connected with offices/presbyters in a ‘routinization of charisms’ (Hovorun 2017, 148). Accordingly, the activities of the faithful in the world became secularised and therefore secondary to the actions of the hierarchy. The dichotomy between world and church grew, and the more the hierarchy became essential to the church, the more the involvement of the faithful in the world became something incidental. Since this worldliness (Verweltlichung) was increasingly perceived as a threat to ‘the church’, any activity of the church in the world had to be authorised by the hierarchy.

A research team from St Tikhon’s Orthodox University of the Humanities in Moscow recently conducted one of the first sociological studies of the relationship between church and society since the end of the Soviet Union. It evaluated the social role of the church by analysing the number of individual communications between a parish priest and a layperson in the form of confession (Emelianov 2019). This approach once again illustrates the understanding of ecclesial activities as being fundamentally dependent on the priest. The social role of the church is limited to the (sacramental) action of the priest through the individual lay believer, who acts in the world in accordance with the teachings of ‘the church’.

Finally, in 2020, the major Orthodox document For the Life of the World. Towards a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church, published by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, dedicated a chapter to ‘The Church in the Public Sphere’ (§§8–14).² Despite its unprecedented openness and reflectiveness on matters pertaining to democratic society, the document does not depart from the abstract idea of ‘the church’ and offers no framework for faith-based activities in the public sphere. Although the document only applies to a limited extent to the Russian Orthodox Church, the underlying idea of the church as public actor is the same in the different social contexts. There is little differentiation between actors within the church (other than ‘clergy’ and ‘laity’) and no reflection on the different kinds of public activities in which these different actors are engaged. Accordingly, ‘the church’ is perceived as the plenitude of all the faithful in unity with the bishops, and an activity in the public sphere is only deemed a legitimate form of religious activity if it is performed by this plenitude.

Channelling public religious activities

The end of the self-evident authority of interpretation (Deutungshoheit) of the church in the wake of secularisation posed a challenge to the established stratification between laity and clergy. For post-Soviet societies like Russia, the challenge was compounded by the fact that it was the first time that there had ever been a legally protected separation of state and church and a genuine civil society. This opened a new space for religious public activities beyond liturgy in a socially meaningful sense. In response to this challenge, hierarchy and laity started to negotiate this space, and their relationship with each other.

In the late 1980s the Russian Orthodox Church returned to the public sphere after decades of forced privatisation. Since then, the public activities of this church as an institution and of the faithful have become increasingly diverse and visible. They range from public prayers, processions, pilgrimages, blessings, and social work to partaking in public debates via organised groups, Orthodox politicians, online media, and social networks. Various actors – the patriarch, patriarchal commissions, bishops, priests, and lay initiatives – claim to act as ‘the church’ in the public sphere.

In response to the multitude of faith-based activities that arose during the 1990s, the leadership of the Church tried to gain control over this plurality. In the Osnovy (Foundations of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church), any activity in the political sphere – political struggle, parties, election campaigns – was either forbidden (to clerics) or had to be coordinated with the church authorities (in the case of Orthodox organisations). In addition, (lay) actors were advised to act ‘without identifying their political work with the position of the Church Plenitude or any of the canonical church institutions or speaking for them’ (V.4).³ In ecclesiological terms, the Osnovy thus confirms the narrow definition of church as the church authority – the activities of the laity are welcomed where appropriate, yet are not recognised as church activities.

While the Osnovy is quite clear about activities in the sphere of state politics, its position on political society and civil society activities (Casanova 1994) remains vague. The need to separate church activities from politics was compelling in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, but it became increasingly important for the Church to structure social activities during the 2000s – in particular in the context of Vladimir Putin’s rule since 1999 and Patriarch Kirill’s leadership since 2009. In 2011, the Church adopted a document on the ‘Social activities of Orthodox Christians’.⁴ In it, the church leadership acknowledges the opportunities afforded by a free society to the faithful to ‘witness one’s faith by actions’ and take part in civil activities ‘in all their plurality’. The document sets the following conditions for any organised or individual activity: ‘It should not directly or indirectly harm society or individuals, provoke violence, lead to the degradation and disintegration of social relations, or to the death of the state’. It underlines the huge responsibility of organisations that call themselves ‘Orthodox’ and stipulates that all their activities should be coordinated with the church leadership. The blessing given to social activities by a local bishop – something that the Osnovy prohibited in the case of political activities – is highlighted as an example that large organisations with a ‘special responsibility to embody Christian ideals in their work’ should follow.

The official documents of the Russian Orthodox Church show how the church leadership tries to structure and channel its public manifestations in the context of the growing pluralisation within the Church. The documents aim to reconcile the centralised hierarchical structure of the Church with the various efforts of the faithful to shape society and culture. The lack of a systematised ecclesiology that would allow for organic cooperation and communication between the different parts of the Church gives rise to occasional conflicts around the public appearance of religiosity.

We will now turn to case studies to analyse the contestation over the public sphere by church actors. Following Casanova’s (2009) division of the public sphere into three areas – civil society, political society, and the state – the case studies are selected in order to illustrate each of these areas. The cases have to be limited and illustrative as they are not the subject of the research itself but contribute to our understanding of divergent approaches of theology and anthropology. Charitable activities are the most frequent topic of anthropological research when looking at faith-based activities (Caldwell 2017; Elisha 2008; Knorre 2018) and are tackled in the first part. Civic religious activism and the question of social movements comes as a second field of inquiry and is illustrated by the much discussed contestation over so-called traditional values. Finally, faith-based political activism is the third issue of interest, and the most contested at least from the theological point of view.

Faith-based activities and ecclesial mechanisms of exclusion

Social work

From the point of view of Christian theology, diaconia⁵ is an indispensable expression of the church community with its source in the Eucharistic and liturgical life of the church. Thanks to the economic opportunities of the monasteries, charitable activities were an aspect of monastic life for a long time in both East and West. Since industrialisation, however, the western churches developed social ministry as an organisational and professional part of the church, which was partly financed through state social insurance and, sometimes, through a special system of church taxes. In most of the Eastern European Orthodox churches, such an organised system of social work was not possible under the given political systems. Instead, depending on the existing charismata within a parish and the social problems in the respective locality, parishes, brother- or sisterhoods, and monasteries developed particular programmes of social care as part of their ministry (Elsner 2009; Knorre 2018).

Post-Soviet society has had to deal with a great many social problems, ranging from poverty and insufficient healthcare and care for the elderly and people with disabilities to social orphans, manifold addictions, xenophobia, and discrimination against minorities. During the 1990s, foreign religious communities with huge financial and professional resources flocked to Russia and engaged in social work as part of their missionary activities before the eyes of a rather helpless Orthodox Church (Stricker 1998; Elsner 2009). Thirty years later, the Russian Orthodox Church is one of the wealthiest organisations in Russia and foreign communities are restricted in their activities by various laws (Sibireva 2022). Yet the social problems remain, and some of them have become systemic.

In line with Orthodox tradition and Soviet experience, post-Soviet Orthodox social engagement evolved as grassroots activity in the parishes and some monasteries in accordance with local needs and talents. Mainly, these were charity canteens (stolovaia), rehabilitation centres for drug and alcohol addicts, homes for orphans or elderly, and the so-called sisterhoods visiting the sick and disabled at home or in hospital (Burgess 2017; 91ff.; Caldwell 2010; Mitrokhin 2004; 282ff.; Zigon 2011). Over the last ten years, the Charity and Social Service Department of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was founded in 1991, has tried to connect and centralise the existing social initiatives at parish level.⁶ It established a structure in every eparchy as well as providing training, financing projects, and facilitating state financing of charitable projects. Notably, the department and its local structures played a key role in providing fast material support and organising voluntary help for families and hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic.⁷ The existence of such an official structure allows donations to be distributed more evenly, as well as ensuring a certain degree of systematisation and professionalism, and greater visibility of ecclesial engagement in social matters. It is in this context that the term ‘activism’ is most used on the official website of the Moscow Patriarchate, describing the social activity of ‘Orthodox activists’ mainly from youth organisations and when speaking about humanitarian help (see for example Kirill 2021), thus embracing activism as part of the officially structured engagement of the institution.

In some cases, however, this institutionalised structure leads to a homogenisation of local activities, which otherwise may not conform to the official strategy for the social role of the church. Some of the big initiatives for charitable help in Russia are not part of official church structures, although they clearly position themselves as Orthodox or regularly draw attention to faith-based social activities. The most prominent examples are the web portal Pravoslavie i Mir (Orthodoxy and the World),⁸ the foundation Predanie (Tradition),⁹ and the platform Takie dela (These Things).¹⁰ They raise a remarkable amount of money for charity via crowdfunding and are important independent journalistic hubs as well as points of reference for Orthodox volunteers. At the same time, they have potential for conflict with the official church hierarchy. Pravoslavie i Mir published an open letter of protest by Orthodox priests against detentions and unfair court decisions after the public protests in the summer of 2019. Another open letter by Orthodox priests and laity to the Christians of Belarus, which voiced solidarity with the faithful in the light of continuing state repression in Belarus, was published in November 2020. The web portal also covers a wide range of opinions and experiences on the topic of domestic violence and the ambivalent attitude of church officials to the problem and to local Orthodox shelters for victims.¹¹ Official structures mention these social issues only from the perspective of individual righteousness or political temptation, if at all. In the summer of 2019, the spiritual leader of the portal withdrew his participation and his blessing, accusing the editors of ‘unorthodox political positions’, and an official spokesperson of the Patriarchate forbade the portal from describing itself as ‘Orthodox’ (Il’iashenko 2019).

Takie dela regularly covers conflicts within local Orthodox communities and the little known charity work of priests and parishes in the regions as well as offering critical evaluations of some of the church’s official projects. The title of a report about Orthodox rehabilitation centres for drug addicts – ‘The invisible church’¹² – highlights the fact that neither church critics nor church supporters are aware of the activities of priests and parishes at local level. As a result, this work is not recognised in discussions about the activities of the church. A similar phenomenon has been observed in the context of voluntary help for the flood victims in Krymsk in 2012 (Knorre-Dmitrieva 2018).

The selective approach the church leadership takes to the different layers of ecclesial social engagement becomes clear in the words of Vladimir Legoida, the head of the press service of the patriarch:

After the floods in the Far East in 2013, many organisations and people responded to the call for help. […] And then a public debate began: how much did the church contribute? If we look at the figures, we can see that the church loses in terms of the amount of money it raised. […] Many journalists used to count funds gathered by the Synodal Department on Charity. But this is not everything. Who were those people who gave money in response to Channel One’s appeal? Were there no Orthodox Christians among them? Or among those who gave money with the help of the Public Council? And there were also Orthodox believers among the politicians and businessmen who made large donations (Legoida 2018, 8).

The Russian Orthodox Church is able to embrace a wide variety of social commitment, but aims to centralise these activities in order to maintain control and present a coherent concept of diaconia. Through exclusion from public representation, and thus from structured financial support, the Church displaces those faith-based activities in the social field that it does not approve of. Yet, in terms of public awareness, evident through the crowdfunding response and the wide media coverage, the independent faith-based social activities of believers generate their own support, not at least because of transparency, independence, and professionalism. Even if the religious basis for social action in both the official and informal spheres is not always obvious, for scholarly analysis, the distinction between activities in the official sphere and in the informal sphere has to acknowledge the ecclesial consciousness of the actors. They position their work and initiatives as connected with the church or even as ‘being the church’, even if the institutionalised church does not perceive them as such.

Contested ‘traditional values’

A second field of contestation between Orthodox activists and the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church is the issue of values. Values, or more specifically ‘traditional values’, are a mainstay of the Church’s embeddedness in the sociopolitical landscape of post-Soviet Russia. The concept of ‘traditional values’ is integral to its strategy to be a major player in the quest for identity in Russia (Agadjanian 2017; Elsner 2019b). It encompasses above all the idea of the large family, heterosexuality, traditional family/gender roles, but also patriotism, militarism, and a patriarchal concept of state and society. These issues belong in the sphere of ‘political society’, where the Church participates in public discourse about socially relevant decisions with the same rights as other civil actors.

Religious activities in this field take place on various, often conflicting levels, and it is a major challenge for the church leadership to keep the different sides together while also remaining the leading public voice. The official teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church on traditional values have become part of official state doctrine, for example, in documents like the Russian National Security Strategy,¹³ education plans, and, more recently, in the new text of the Russian Constitution (Stoeckl 2020). Nevertheless, grassroots religious activities on the ground reflect a plurality of ideas about what ‘traditional values’ mean.

Various conflicts and scandals over the last decade illustrate the struggle over who has the right to define the Orthodox public position. To take a prominent example, Pussy Riot acted in the context of religious commitment when they held their punk prayer in the country’s main church (Stoeckl and Uzlaner 2019). In the form this protest took and in their statements in court and from detention, they described their action as religious protest against the perversion of true religious values by church officials. Interestingly, Orthodox protest against the actions of Pussy Riot and their supporters used the same instrument – public prayer – but in an officially approved way, in the form of processions and the so-called molitvennoe stoianie (’staying in prayer’). The activities of Pussy Riot were labelled as hooliganism, vandalism, blasphemous actions, and a violation of the feelings of believers (Legoida 2012). Thus, the church leadership not only uses its power to define ‘true values’, but dismisses a discourse with dissenting interpretations of these values by defining true and false modes of religious public activities.

As a second example, the attitudes of the faithful and church officials to art, theatre, and cinema illustrate the contestation over values. Numerous artistic presentations in the last decade have been subject to aggressive attacks, both physical and verbal, by individuals and groups who legitimised their activities with reference to their Orthodox faith and the defence of traditional values. In the cases of the art exhibition ‘Ostorozhno, religiia!’ (Beware: religion!) in Moscow (2003), the play Tannhäuser in Novosibirsk (2015), the music festival ‘Serebryannyi dozhd’ (Silver Rain) in 2015, and most famously the popular film Mathilda in 2017, the church hierarchy often published official statements only after radical groups had violently attacked the events. In spite of distancing the church generally from physical violence, aggression in words and deeds appears to the church hierarchy a reasonable option when fighting those values perceived as threat to the church’s vision.

A third example is the discussion about domestic violence, where the responsible patriarchal commission has framed the very concept of domestic violence as ‘anti-family’ (Patriarshaia komissiia po voprosam sem’i 2018). At an informal level, however, different and competing activities with a faith-based motivation continue to take place. Local shelters for women and children in need try to offer a safe space for victims of domestic violence (e.g. ‘Kitezh’);¹⁴ and Orthodox women are participating in discussions about new laws against domestic violence (Sadikova 2021; Zenkevich 2020), while at the same time Orthodox movements are collecting signatures and holding prayers and processions against such a law.¹⁵

In the context of these and other public and partly violent and radical activities, a discussion about the concept of ‘Orthodox activism’ (pravoslavnyi aktivizm) (Pravmir 2012) occurred. Asked about his perspective on aggressive Orthodox participation in worldly matters, Patriarch Kirill labelled Orthodox activists as ‘energetic’ (energichnye), ‘passionate’ (passionarnye), and as displaying ‘jealousy beyond reason’ (revnost’ ne po razumu) (Kirill 2012). He recognises their energy as beneficial for the church as long as they remain under the blessing of the hierarchy. Rather than condemning violence, militant zealots are equated with faithful active in the field of charitable work by labelling both ‘Orthodox activists’. Both are subject to the structural regulatory of getting the blessing of a priest, which means that aggression against values not in accordance with the official church position may be legitimised by a blessing.

The case of religious activities in the context of the discourse on traditional values points to the mechanisms by which the church leadership dismisses activities as ‘not belonging to the church’ by marking them as ‘political activism’. At the same time, activities – even violent ones – that are deemed to be in accordance with the traditional values as defined by the hierarchy are accepted as ‘Orthodox activism’, although they happen in the same discursive field. The hierarchy thus avoids entering into a theological debate about the understanding of tradition and values. The benchmark for being within or outside the church is defined by the political strategy of the hierarchy. Given the fact that traditional values are an element of Russian identity politics, hosting critical voices within the church could cause serious problems for the state-church relationship.

‘Political’ activities

In the case of both social work and the discourse on values, religious activities transcend the demarcation lines between the three spheres defined by Casanova. In the context of increasingly authoritarian rule and the modern pluralisation of social spheres, the definition of political and non-political activities has become more complex. While the church leadership’s claim to be unpolitical is a key element in its efforts to demonstrate loyalty to the state (Vasilevich 2020), faith-based activities around sociopolitical issues grow out of a Christian consciousness. As a result, the realm of politics continually expands in the perception of the church leadership.

The following examples are illustrative of this growing tension in recent years. In March 2020, just before the beginning of Lent, some Orthodox believers took part in a picket in front of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, the same church where Pussy Riot filmed parts of their punk prayer eight years before. The protesters chose a less radical way of challenging the official political line of the hierarchy, yet their message was similar: they, too, claimed to be a voice of the church, which the hierarchy and the public sphere needs to see, hear, and accept as a legitimate part of the church. The independent newspaper Novaia Gazeta published their statements:

I am an Orthodox Christian, and my Christian conscience cannot come to terms with the falsehood that is being done on our behalf, in the name of Russian citizens, in the courts, when the innocent are persecuted. And we want today, on Forgiveness Sunday, to remind people about the duty of mercy to all guilty people and especially to those who suffer although they are innocent. And to say that without truth and justice the people will not be able to cope, and the punishments of God will fall on them.

It might seem like it’s just a handful of church liberals that came here today. But that’s not the case. There are many people in the church who think that direct participation in political activities is not for them, but they visit prisoners, collect goods for them, support the families of the convicts, and transfer money and prayers by agreement. There are many Orthodox people who aren’t visible on Facebook or in the marches, but that doesn’t mean they creep away, and they don’t care (Pikety 2020).

Along the same lines, about 200 priests from different localities of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) signed an open letter in support of political prisoners in September 2019 (Otkrytoe Pis’mo 2019). In the letter, no direct dissent with the official line of the Church was mentioned. Nevertheless, both the letter and the picket in March 2020 point to the fact that the official position rules out some possible Christian options and thus silences a significant part of the Church. The leadership of the Church dismissed these protests as the kind of ‘political activism’ in which true Orthodox believers should not get involved (Kipshidze 2019).

Another case of contested public religious activities is the diverse reactions of Orthodox Christians to the protests in Belarus since the summer of 2020 (Elsner 2022). The faithful voiced their protest against election fraud and state violence in various public forms, including public prayer, homilies, processions, and open letters. They thus challenged the official, emphatically neutral position of the church’s leadership, which, conversely, distanced itself from these actions, describing them as individual ‘emotional’ responses by self-proclaimed ‘Christian activists’ (Sinodal’nyi otdel 2020). While the leadership continued its cooperation with the state, the clergy and laypeople became involved in the work of the Coordination Council in the context of the Christian Vision working group.¹⁶ Some of the most visible clergy within the protest, such as Bishop Artemy from Hrodno, priest Alexandr Kukhta, and the Coordinator and Head of the Association of Charity Sisterhoods of Belarusian Orthodox Church Elena Zenkevich, have been dismissed from their official positions in the Church.¹⁷

Finally, Russia’s war against Ukraine and the support of it by the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church evoked public protest by priests and believers of the Russian Orthodox Church against the war. In the Russian Federation as well as in Belarus, this protest was immediately sanctioned by state and church authorities (Loutchenko 2022; Christian Vision 2023). Those involved in humanitarian activities within the official structures are labelled ‘volunteers’,¹⁸ while the use of the term ‘activism’ has disappeared from official publications almost completely.¹⁹ The leadership of the Church simultaneously claims a position outside of politics and underlines prayer as the only legitimate action of the church in a situation of war (Kipshidze 2022). Clergy supporting the war are therefore the only publicly available representation of the Church, as they frame it as spiritual support of the soldiers in defence of the Fatherland.

All these examples illustrate the contestation over the public representation of the church and the demarcation between the church and the political sphere. Without going deeper into the question of political theology in general (see Bodrov and Garret 2020), the discussion about ‘political activism’ in the church demonstrates the arbitrariness with which the term is used to discredit concurrent public religious voices. Efforts of the church leadership to stigmatise faith-based activism in political contexts within the church as ‘political activism’ are unconvincing, because the activists argue on an entirely theological and biblical basis. The reaction of the hierarchy thus demonstrates the lack of theological concepts to make sense of diversity and dissent within the church.

‘The Church’ between divergent claims

Visible faith-based activities are a reaction to the narrowing of the official church position. The more a certain model of the church is presented as the only true model, the more uncomfortable the faithful with another point of view feel when identifying or being identified with this church in public. Yet instead of leaving the church, these believers publicly claim to be the church as well, in a strategy that contradicts Hovorun’s observation that ‘laypeople, told for centuries that they were not quite the church, one day decided to accept this idea and dissociate themselves from the church’ (Hovorun 2017, 8).

The space between the individual believer and the ecclesial and political elites – i.e. (civil) society – is the place where laity and hierarchy have to negotiate their relationship beyond liturgy. While the roles of the ordained and the laity are fixed and accepted by all in liturgy, they are questioned in the common secular environment, which calls for faith-based yet rational participation in social matters rather than a hierarchical approach. This problematic state of affairs stems from and is reinforced by the lack of a comprehensive social ethics in Orthodox theology (Elsner 2019a). While social scientists suggest important analytical frames for this discursive field (such as Soroka and Rhodes 2020 tripart typology of Christian positioning in social roles), church and theology so far lack theological efforts to think through these complex relationships.

It becomes obvious that, for the hierarchy, the only way of defending the social significance of the church is to safeguard the support of the state by sanctioning and excluding dissenters from the public image of the church. Accordingly, the church leadership has to face the consequence that only those believers who identify with the political mainstream support the social significance of the church. Ironically, with these processes of demarcation, unity as the key to the Orthodox ecclesial self-perception centres less around faith than on political ideas.

As long as the Russian Orthodox Church remains an institution centred on the power of hierarchy, the lack of a theological approach to Orthodox faith-based activities will persist and the distance between the hierarchy and parishes (laity and independent priests) will grow. Yet instead of dissociating themselves from the church, as Hovorun has suggested, the faithful may increasingly come to see the hierarchy as incidental to the nature of the church. This could give rise to an alternative concept of the church somewhat similar to the dissident communities during late Soviet times or to the liberation theology movement in the Catholic Church.

‘Religious activism’ – a helpful concept?

While examining different types of public faith-based activities, the concept of ‘religious activism’ did not play a crucial role. Within the church and theological approaches, ‘activism’ is mostly used as ‘Orthodox activism’ describing believers with an active (‘passionate’) position in regard to sociopolitical questions. ‘Political activism’, meanwhile, is used to dismiss faith-based activities that contradict the political line of the church hierarchy. While in the first case ‘activism’ characterises passionate, mostly young, Orthodox zealots, in the second case ‘activism’ serves as a pejorative label for people who allegedly use Orthodoxy to conceal their political aims. The dividing line runs along the question of politicisation and along the question of permission through blessing. However, in case of ‘Orthodox activism’, the blessing comes as a pedagogical element, while in the second case blessing is per se out of the question even if the actors are priests themselves. The blessing becomes a functional instrument of demarcation and exclusion from the public image of the church, while a theological discourse about the arguments and religious motivation for becoming publicly active is missing.

Furthermore, the concept of ‘religious activism’ could be related to ‘Orthodox activism’ as a denominational concretisation. Yet, ‘Orthodox activism’ appears to be bonded to institutional affiliation rather than to religious paradigms. In discussions about ‘Orthodox activism’ since 2012, public religious activities such as prayer are directly detached from activism, described as ‘demonstration’ (Pravmir 2012). Thus, the differentiation between religious and Orthodox activism is important as ‘Orthodox’ is not only a denominational addition but transports a particular idea of power relations and the stratification between laity and clergy.

Yet, even beyond the internal church debates, religious activism is not a clear-cut concept. One of the few definitions of ‘faith-based activism’, by Omri Elisha, refers to social activities: ‘“faith-based activism”, [is] a field of social engagement associated with religious charities, social service organisations, and congregations, whose concerns for the common good ostensibly transcend sectarian interests and, in the eyes of the faithful, exceed the capacities of federal welfare’ (Elisha 2008). This definition captures only the organised part of charitable work, and, since it is focused on evangelical groups in the USA, misses the distinct Orthodox aspects of ecclesiology, hierarchy, blessings, and obedience. Melissa Caldwell applies this idea to the Russian charity context (Caldwell 2010, 2017), yet with a focus on a Protestant community and without assessing the problematic stratification between hierarchy and laity in Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, Caldwell aptly points to the ambiguous understanding of ‘religious’ for the Russian context (Caldwell 2010, 346), thus addressing the complex relation of religiosity, belief, ritual, theology, tradition, cultural, and national notions when using ‘religious activism’ as conceptual frame.

This problem is also illustrated when ‘religious activism’ applies to pilgrimages, processions, or public prayer. From a theological point of view, these activities are regular religious practices, and every prayer or liturgy aims to have an impact on social life. Notably, not every public expression of religious praxis is labelled as ‘activism’, only those that occur in the context of social challenges and protests. Remarkably, in such a charged context the faithful often deliberately opt for an incontestably religious praxis such as prayer in the public sphere in order to be seen as part of the church and thus avoid being accused of activism, as is the case in Belarus. In this situation, academic categorisation as activism may give rise to ethical questions.

Finally, ‘religious activism’ is used to describe informal activities with a claim to religious motivation linked to the contestation of traditional values. In the Russian Orthodox context, various groups and persons who destroyed or disrupted art exhibitions, theatre performances, cinema screenings, concerts, or LGBTI+ parades are frequently called ‘Orthodox activists’. As mentioned above, by using this label observers aim to emphasise that the church hierarchy has not authorised these actions and that they go beyond the usual forms of public religiosity, yet their claim to be Orthodox is accepted. Within the church, a comprehensive debate on the legitimacy of using Orthodoxy as a label for discrimination, violence, and hooliganism is missing, and the term ‘Orthodox activism’ is used to incorporate these radical activities. Therefore, the analytical framing of such activities as activism runs the risk of reinforcing the division between officially approved and structured activities on the one hand and informal engagement on the other.

In terms of interdisciplinary dialogue, the concept of ‘religious activism’ thus has risks and advantages, mainly due to the lack of a clear definition. The use of the concept in the social sciences and cultural anthropology reveals a certain ignorance of the theological complexity of what ‘the church’ means and how the faithful may identify with the church in their social activities. At the same time, Orthodox theology lacks any sufficient ecclesiological approach for the social activities of the faithful in the modern world. Together with Robbins and Hann, Timothy Snyder rightly argues for greater exchange between ethnology and theology: ‘The result is an exploration of the practices that enable otherness to have a “place to appear”’ (Snyder 2020, 286). Ethnological studies of ‘religious activism’ in the context of Russian Orthodoxy (and beyond) are a most valuable indication of the plurality of the church, which is usually underestimated by the hierarchy, and also by theology and the social sciences. The focus on the official level of church representation in the public sphere reproduces the stratification within the church that is often actively encouraged by the church leadership. A more nuanced analysis of these circumstances in a dialogue between theology and social anthropology could lead to a better understanding of faith-based activities.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Regina Elsner

Regina Elsner is a theologian and, since September 2017, a researcher at ZOiS, where she is investigating the dynamics of Orthodox social ethics in Eastern Europe since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. She studied Catholic Theology in Berlin and Muenster, and worked as a project coordinator for Caritas Russia in St Petersburg. Elsner has published, among others, a monograph on the relationship of the Russian Orthodox Church and Modernity (ibidem 2021) and various articles about Orthodoxy in Russia’s war against Ukraine, Orthodoxy and gender discourse, and Orthodox peace ethics.

Notes

1. Osnovy Sotsiialnoi kontseptsii Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi [The Foundations of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church], Archiereiskii Sobor 2000, http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/419128.html.

2. For the Life of the World. Towards a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church. Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, March 2020, https://www.goarch.org/social-ethos.

3. Osnovy Sotsiialnoi kontseptsii Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi, Archiereiskii Sobor 2000, http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/419128.html.

4. Obshchestvennaia deiatel’nost’ pravoslavnykh khristian [The Public Activities of Orthodox Christians], adopted by the Arkhiereiskii Sobor 2011, http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/1400931.html; translation by the author.

5. The Greek terms leiturgia, martyria, and diaconia express the theological understanding of the basic activities of the church as liturgy, witness, and charity.

6. Sinodal’nyi otdel po tserkovnoi blagotvoritel’nosti i sotsialnomu sluzheniiu Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi: www.diaconia.ru.

7. See the reports of the Synodal Department for Charity and Social Service for 2020: http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/5743610.html; and 2021: http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/5877344.html; as well as the special website https://cerkpom.miloserdie.ru/#.

8. https://pravmir.ru.

9. https://fond.predanie.ru/about/.

10. https://takiedela.ru/.

11. https://www.pravmir.ru/priyutyi-dlya-zhertv-est-a-slova-nasilie-net-pochemu-tserkov-molchit-kogda-v-semyah-byut-i-unizhayut/.

12. https://takiedela.ru/2017/07/nevidimaya-cerkov/.

13. See the National Security Strategy for 2015 and 2021 ‘Ukaz Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii ot 31.12.2015 g N° 683 “o Strategii Natsional’noi Bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii”’. Official Website of The Kremlin, 31 December 2015. http://Kremlin.Ru/Acts/Bank/40391; ‘Ukaz Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii ot 02.07.2021 N° 400 “o Strategii Natsional’noi Bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii”’. Official Website of The Kremlin, 2 July 2021. http://Actual.Pravo.Gov.Ru/Text.Html#Pnum=0001202107030001.

14. https://kitezh-center.ru/.

15. “Za veru, tsaria i domashnee nasilie!“(For Faith, Tsar and domestic violence!) Meduza.io, 30 January 2020, https://meduza.io/feature/2020/01/30/za-veru-tsarya-i-domashnee-nasilie.

16. ‘The Mission of the Christian Vision Group in the Current Political Crisis in Belarus’, 26 January 2022, Tsarkva i palitychny kryzis u Belarusi. https://belarus2020.churchby.info/the-mission-of-the-christian-vision-group-in-the-current-political-crisis-in-belarus/.

17. See ‘A Monitoring of the Persecution in Belarus of People on Religious Grounds During the Political Crisis’, no date, Tsarkva i palitychny kryzis u Belarusi. https://belarus2020.churchby.info/monitoring/.

18. See the reports of the Synodal Department for Charity and Social Service about their help for refugees (for example http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/5996581.html), where only volunteers are mentioned.

19. There is one interesting exception in the sermon of Patriarch Kirill on 26 June 2022, where he mentioned ‘parish activists’ (prikhodskie activisty), describing those who built a new church and preserve the true faith. See “Patriarshaia propoved’ posle Liturgii v Andreevskom kafedral’nom sobore g. Gelendzhika”. Official site of the Moscow Patriarchate. http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/5940126.html.