Religious freedom in the third Rome
Posted by Chris T. on Thursday, April 24th, 2008
The New York Times is running a long article detailing the campaign against non-Orthodox churches throughout Russia. Things have been difficult for Protestants and Catholics in Russia for some time, but recently they've gotten much, much worse:
Here in Stary Oskol, 300 miles south of Moscow, the police evicted a Seventh-day Adventist congregation from its meeting hall, forcing it to hold services in a ramshackle home next to a construction site. Evangelical Baptists were barred from renting a theater for a Christian music festival, and were not even allowed to hand out toys at an orphanage. A Lutheran minister said he moved away for a few years because he feared for his life. He has returned, but keeps a low profile.
On local television last month, the city’s chief Russian Orthodox priest, who is a confidant of the region’s most powerful politicians, gave a sermon that was repeated every few hours. His theme: Protestant heretics.
“We deplore those who are led astray — those Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baptists, evangelicals, Pentecostals and many others who cut Christ’s robes like bandits, who are like the soldiers who crucified Christ, who ripped apart Christ’s holy coat,” declared the priest, the Rev. Aleksei D. Zorin.
Such language is familiar to Protestants in Stary Oskol, who number about 2,000 in a city of 225,000.
It's never been uncommon to hear non-Orthodox called еретики (heretics) in Russia, but the language of "Christ-killers" and "American spies" is not something I ever heard when I was in Russia in 2001. I knew quite a few Protestants, mostly Baptists, when I was there seven years ago, and they were able to worship fairly freely, even in a strongly nationalist region headed by a governor who made no secret of his hatred for immigrants or his love for Kossack nationalism.
What is most troubling is that church attendance in Russia is extremely low and stagnant or falling, even as more Russians join in the repression of non-Orthodox. This is the flip side of the "dictatorship of relativism" coin — where religion is seen as mere private preference, it is difficult for Christianity to meaningfully influence public life, but where a state religion is pushed at the expense of religious freedom, the particular kind of Christianity that influences the state bears little resemblance to the Way of Jesus Christ.
Following the changing fate of Orthodoxy in Russia has been difficult for me. Encountering Russian Orthodoxy and the Armenian Apostolic Church in Russia was a real turning point in my faith life — it was really the first example I'd ever seen of a liturgical faith, deeply connected to tradition, that pervaded the everyday realities of its adherents. The rich, almost sensual experience of worship in those traditions suggested to me when my faith was at its lowest point that there was something still calling me to Christianity. I'm enormously grateful for those experiences.
But this abuse of government power to protect Russian Orthodoxy will not make it healthy. Ultimately, it will foster resentment of that church among non-Orthodox in Russia and it does nothing to address the millions upon millions of Russians who claim to be Orthodox but practice that faith in only the most superficial and cultural ways. The Patriarchate and its leaders would do better to focus on catechising the huge percentage of Russians who already claim to be Orthodox than to stamp out newer but still vibrant expressions of Christian faith in Russia. That is not only kinder and more Christian, but ultimately better for the long-term health of the Russian Orthodox faith.
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7 Responses to “Religious freedom in the third Rome”
I normally don’t like Huntington’s clash theory, especially when it is used to promote conflict among the various civilzations, but it is interesting to note that he does define Christian Orthodoxy as a separate “civilization” from the West. And the Russian Church had a very different experience of the whole Reformation/Renaissance/Enlightenment trajectory that the West went through. And even the secular government went from the Tsar, to the Communists, to whatever you want to call the Russian system now while not really having a lot of experience with democracy. So all in all, the current attitude towards religious freedom doesn’t seem supersurprising.
Much of that is true, though it’s relevant that all of the intelligentsia were formed under Marxism, which while not democratic drastically changed the mores and philosophical orientation of Russian people. Those changes are not all in the same direction — certainly it was not a huge turn toward the West — but I think the post-Soviet world is more informed by enlightenment values filtered through Marxist Leninism than it is by Orthodoxy.
Also, while some theory of Orthodoxy or pan-Slavism or whatever being a separate culture might explain the attitudes of Iosif Six-Pack, much of this hatred of Protestants is being pushed from the top, by bureaucrats who seem to have been sincere atheists during the Soviet period. The NYT article throws some weight behind that idea, too. Those same bureaucrats could have sought to move Russia toward a more pluralistic society, but that wouldn’t have served their secular political purposes. This is really about power, with the ROC playing along to stay influential, than it is about religion.
At least, that’s my sense. My academic background is in the culture of the FSU, and I’ve tried to stay current, but I also haven’t lived there in some time — not since 2001.
although my impression (woefully amateur as it is) is that the persecution was Christian-specific. At least….several years ago when I first read about religious persecution in post-Soviet Russia, there were several official religions Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. and the Russian Orthodox Church.
That’s not been my experience. Certainly the anti-Semitism that pervaded both tsarist Russia and the Soviet period is still around, though it’s less powerful simply because there are fewer targets with the bulk of Russian Jews having emigrated. But Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together (Двести лет вместе) stands as a troubling example of that tradition to me, as it largely whitewashes the huge failures of Russia with respect to its Jewish population.
Muslims are looked on with a great deal of suspicion for a variety of reasons, largely exacerbated by the war in Chechnya and the war in Afghanistan several decades ago. A cultural touchstone of this is the brilliant film The Muslim (Мусульманин), which shows the story of a soldier who was kidnapped while fighting in Afghanistan in the 80s who converted to Islam and then returned to his village in Russia after the war.
The question of Buddhism and some other religions is more difficult. There has been a great deal of violence against immigrants from a variety of religious backgrounds, Buddhism included, but I think that’s mostly motivated by immigration, not religious issues. Buddhism has enjoyed a certain vogue there as it has in the West, with a number of prominent novelists (Ilya Stogoff, Viktor Pelevin) using Buddhist ideas in their novels.
But in the case of Judaism and Islam, I wouldn’t call Russia a friendly environment. I suspect there has been less overt government suppression of those religions, but there’s less need for it if the goal is keeping Orthodoxy central to Russian national self-understanding — there’s already tremendous negative feelings toward them in the wider culture.
maybe i was totally unclear… what I had read a while back was that these religions were possibly going to have some official standing in a legal sense. Perhaps it was just a proposed piece of legislation which never got passed. But I was talking about something different from just social acceptance.
Abdul-halim’s comments might have answered a question I’ve had, though you seem to disagree, Chris. I regularly view Forum 18, a feed that tracks Right to Worship issues. I’ve found since I started getting their feed that issues with religious suppression involve former Soviet territories and Christian sects, from Jehovah Witness to Baptists, almost exclusively. My understanding of these issues isn’t deep but the trend seems clear enough if you look back through months of archives. http://www.forum18.org/
Teresa –
Thanks for your comment. If you look at the Forum 18 website right now, the top story is that the chief rabbi in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, is being thrown out of the country. So right-to-worship issues are still very pressing for Jews in the FSU.
However, I would say that outside predominantly Muslim territories of the FSU, anti-Semitism of the type I was describing is largely cultural, not legal. So while I was never aware of synagogues being shut down in Russia while I was there, there were certainly numerous barriers to being an observant Jew there. I have a close friend who was Orthodox when he went to Russia — he was advised not to wear a kippah because there was a risk he would be targeted with violence. (Skinheads are extremely prevalent there — I was stopped by one in Krasnodar who asked me excitedly about skinheads in the United States.
)
So it doesn’t surprise me that most of the legal issues in Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, and other predominantly Orthodox countries in the FSU are with Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. But there are extra-legal concerns that make life very difficult for Jews, Muslims (in some places), and others. These are wrapped up in a lot of things — religion, immigration, racial concerns, etc.