Neither public nor private religion: the Russian Orthodox Church in the public sphere of contemporary Russia

Abstract

Cross-country comparative studies of religion (e.g. the Religion Monitor) do not cover some important issues regarding the religious situation in Russia. The problem of contemporary Russian religiosity is beyond individual religiosity or religiosity as a spiritual phenomenon. In Russia—one of the countries which experienced Communism as a period of enforced secularization, there are very few people who have had any religious socialization or who have the experience of belonging to the Christian Church or to any religion. The main point of this article is that what is happening with religion in post-Soviet Russia cannot be adequately explained by the concept of ‘public religion’ and the dichotomy of public vs. private religion, due to the practices of private religion manifesting at a very low level among the Russian population, despite the fact that a large number of Russians consider themselves to be Orthodox Christians. However, the representation of the Church in the public sphere has little to do with what concerns Russians who are in some way involved in parishes. As an alternative tool we propose to describe the religiosity of Russians through the methods of network analysis. Results of a content analysis of contemporary Russian and Soviet media, survey data of the Russian population, and data obtained in a network analysis of parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church are used for substantiating this conclusion.

Keywords:

• Public religion
• private religion
• deprivatization of religion
• Orthodox Christianity in Russia
• social network analysis
• religious revival in Russia
• religiosity measurement

Acknowledgements

This article was prepared within the framework of the project “Rethinking Secularism in the Post-Soviet and Western Context”, with the support of the Ss. Cyril and Methodius School of Post-Graduate and Doctoral Studies and the John Templeton Foundation. We have used the results of the research project “The Russian Orthodox Church in the Public Sphere: Deprivatization of Religion in Contemporary Russia”, which was supported by a grant from the Institute for Public Planning (INOP) in 2014.

Notes

1. For instance, in the summary of his article “The Moscow Patriarchate and the Right to Conscientious Objection”, Fleming Hansen writes the following: “This study discusses the role of the Moscow Patriarchate—an influential norm entrepreneur—in this process. It shows how the Patriarchate has actively supported some of the more conservative forces—including the Russian Ministry of Defense—in their shaping of a restrictive law designed to make conscientious objection an unattractive alternative to regular military service. […] In return for its support the Russian Orthodox Church now enjoys a position of visibility and influence within the armed forces that is unrivalled by any other religious group in the country.” (Hansen 2009, 403). This statement gives the reader a sense of the great power of the Russian Orthodox Church in the country. This text suggests that the Russian Orthodox Church is a huge monster that has spread its networks all over the country. Yet, the situation is not so obvious. If we consider another aspect of the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ministry of Defense, the Agreement on Chaplaincy, we can get a completely different picture. In spite of the agreement between the two organizations, there is now one chaplain per almost 10,000 soldiers in the Russian Federation (93 chaplains for 1,000,000 soldiers) (Lukichov 2013). For comparison, “A general military/religious personnel ratio cannot be given since this ratio considerably varies between the different denominations. For example, one Orthodox chaplain, on average, provides pastoral care to 250 members of his denomination, whereas a Roman Catholic chaplain ministers to approximately 800 Catholics. At present, the Roman Catholic military chaplain service for all three Services totals 680 full-time and 978 part-time chaplains. There is, however, always one chaplain at battalion level.” (Bock 1998, 192–193)

2. In fact, what authors from political science have in mind when writing about the ‘Russian Orthodox Church’ is not the Church, but the ‘Patriarchy’ as the principal managerial structure of the Church. For Russians, the terms ‘Russian Orthodox Church’ and ‘Russian Orthodox Christianity’ are synonyms. In the context of Casanova’s book (Casanova 1994), there is in fact no equivalent in Russia to the Polish Catholic Church and/or Catholicism in Poland, where the activities of the Church’s managerial structures could be seen as a result of the people’s support of the Church.

3. Here, our point is to emphasize the gap in the theoretical understanding of religiosity in post-Soviet countries (countries that have undergone enforced secularization). We are not trying to stress the difference between the authors who write on private religiosity; we focus on the differences between two discourses: (hypothesis 1) Russian Orthodox Christianity on the level of Church–State relations and (hypothesis 2) Russian Orthodox Christianity on the level of personal religiosity. These are two different discourses, although both use the same term (Russian Orthodox) for different aspects of the phenomenon.

4. We refer to Stefan Huber and Volkhard Krech because their text is based on one of the main comparative studies on religiosity, ‘Religion Monitor’.

5. As Yandex N.V. and Medialogia Ltd. are private companies and as Yandex.News and Medialogia work as archives of news from a wide range of media, we assume that they are independent of both Church and State.

6. See Yandex.News database description at https://news.yandex.ru/smi/index.html, accessed 21 October 2017.

7. See Medialogia database description at http://enmlgru/solutions/pr/monitoring/, accessed 21 October 2017

8. The main characteristics of Pravda’s circulation are: 1) 1912–1914, 1917: the number of copies was approximately 40–90,000. Although the newspaper was banned several times, it restarted publication under a different title which was also circulated abroad. 2) 1918–1991: the number of copies rose to 10.5 million in 1975, as the top newspaper in the USSR. Publication was halted by order of President B. Yeltsin in 1991. 3) 1991–1997: the number of copies drastically dropped to 100,000. The newspaper was published privately. 4) 1997–present: the number of copies has remained at 100,000. The newspaper is the official printed organ of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

9. The Levada Center is an independent, non-governmental polling and sociological research organization in Russia. The Association of Regional Sociological Centers “Group 7/89” released the results of the fifth wave of the annual study “Top Research Companies 2015”, in which the Levada Center took second place.

10. As applied by John Rawls in the discussion of “comprehensive doctrines” (Rawls 1997, 776).

11. In European countries, the public sphere is very closely connected to public opinion (public sphere—public opinion; Öffentlichkeit—öffentliche Meinung).

12. For example, non-Church sources might employ such terms as ‘charity’, ‘civil society’, and ‘solidarity’, while ecclesiastical sources are more likely to refer to ‘diaconate’, ‘caritas’, ‘mercy’, ‘ecclesia’ or sobornost (collectivity).

13. The Survey “Organization of Social Work in Parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Early Twenty-First Century: A Sociological Analysis” consisted of a series of in-depth interviews in 15 parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Moscow Region, Kaluga Region, Yaroslavl Region, Samara Region, Irkutsk Region, Altai Krai, Krasnoyarsk Krai, and Khabarovsk Krai (the total number of interviews was 153). A series of questions concerning participation in various social activities of the parish were asked during the interview. The whole network of the parish was reconstructed by encoding the interview data in the GEPHI software which is designed for network analysis.

14. Parishioners are people who attend services at this particular parish regularly and—even more importantly—participate in the sacraments of confession and communion in the parish.

15. This story is an example of how, under the banner of the separation of Church and State, local authorities are trying to close a unique project for orphans, ‘Children’s Village’, built by a parish and a parish priest in Zabaykalsky Krai (see http://zabtv.zabmedia.ru/news/obshchestvo/chinovniki-khotyat-otobrat-u-svyashchennika-detskuyu-derevnyu/, accessed 12 November 2015).