Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 4 – In his “Letter
to Soviet Leaders,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn said they should be aware that in
the event of a war with China, only a tiny fraction of the Soviet population
would be willing to die on behalf of the idea that the sacred truth in Lenin’s
writings was on one page rather than another.
“Only the very first will die for that,” he warned.
Much the same thing is true now
regarding Orthodox religious obscurantism in Russia, Kseniya Kirillova writes. No
more than four percent of even active members of the Russian Orthodox Church
support religious radicals, although most don’t protest because of the usual Russian
assumption that this is the way things are (svoboda.org/content/article/27262704.html).
In an essay taking on the all-too-easy
assumption of some Western writers that recent outbursts of Orthodox
fundamentalism that have enjoyed at least the passive support of the Russian
government point to the emergence of a new “dark ages” in Russia “hardly less
than that of ‘the Islamic state.’”
A major reason for that conclusion,
Kirillova says, is that the attitudes of various groups within the Russian
Orthodox Church, however much some in the Moscow Patriarchate or in the Kremlin
might like them to be otherwise, are hardly inclined in the direction of “Orthodox
fundamentalism.”
First of all, there is within the
Russian Orthodox Church a large stratum of “’intellectuals,’ people who came to
the faith consciously, most often in Soviet years during repression or at the start
of the free 1990s. The majority of them are part of the liberal intelligentsia
of perestroika times.”
They know about church doctrine,
typically are well-educated and thus appalled by the current Kremlin ideology
which although it cites religion frequently is anything but informed by
Christianity. Such people are to be
found not only in the population at large, Kirillova points out, but also “among
the clergy.”
Second, there is another group of “’sincerely
believing people,’” those who may not have significant education secular or
religious but who are quite involved with church life in acts of mercy and
providing assistance to those in need as church doctrine requires. Such people typically avoid any contact with the
state.
And third, and in fact the majority
consists of those “who go to church only on holidays, do not know the basic
features of Christian teaching, and do not intend to change their lives to
bring them into line with Orthodox doctrine. “For such people,” Kirillova says,
“the official church plays approximately the same role today that the CPSU
played” in Brezhnev’s times.
Such people and they are very much
part of the Putin majority do not take seriously the declarations of the
hierarchs. They are loyal to the Russian Orthodox Church “when it, in their understanding,
‘defends Russian identity from the aggression of the spiritless West,’” and “they
are really proud” when Church leaders talk about how exceptional Russia is.
But that doesn’t mean that such people
accept the ideas of Church radicals on gender roles or personal behavior. And
their apparent support of the acts of vandalism by the radicals is not about
shared “’religious feelings’” but “only because ‘this is how it must be,’” that
is, that is how the state wants things to proceed.
At the same time, Kirillova suggests
that Aleksandr Rubtsov was correct when he observed that “now, the conflict of
fundamentalism with the contemporary world has become a sign of the times,” and
that Russia “is beginning to reproduce this conflict within itself” in often
disturbing ways (novayagazeta.ru/comments/69948.html).
The point here, of course, is that there is a real
conflict in Russia as elsewhere, Kirillova says, adding that Moscow has an
additional reason for not supporting Orthodox religious radicals. By doing so, she says, it would be opening “a
Pandora’s box” given the presence of other faiths and thus creating a disaster
from which Russia would hardly be able to escape.
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