Russian Church in the Digital Era

Mediatization of Orthodoxy

Hanna Stähle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000420944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Russian Orthodox Church, the largest and most powerful religious institution in Russia, has become one of the central pillars of Vladimir Putin's authoritarianism. While church attendance remains low, the religiously inspired rhetoric of traditionalism has come to dominate the mainstream political and media discourse. Has Russia abandoned its atheist past and embraced Orthodox Christianity as its new moral guide? The reality is more complex and contradictory. Digital sources provide evidence of rising domestic criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church and its leadership. This book offers a nuanced understanding of contemporary Russian Orthodoxy and its changing role in the digital era.

Topics covered within this book include:

• Mediatization theory;

• Church reforms under Patriarch Kirill;

• Church–state relations since 2009;

• The Russian Orthodox Church's media policy;

• Anticlericalism vs. Church criticism; and

• Religious, secular, and atheist critiques of the Church in digital media.

Using contemporary case studies such as Pussy Riot's Punk Prayer, this book is a gripping read for those with an interest in media studies, digital criticism of religion, religion in the media, the role of religion in society, and the Russian Orthodox Church.

1
Post-Soviet religious revival: Belonging without believing?

Over the last three decades, the Russian Orthodox Church has managed to overcome its marginal social status from Soviet times and substantially increased its political, economic, and social influence and public presence. Russian Orthodoxy, or Eastern Christianity, is one of the four established religions in Russia, along with Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism (Dunlop 1999: 33). The majority of the Russian population self-identify as Orthodox, and the Moscow Patriarchate enjoys wide-ranging political and financial privileges. Orthodox Christianity, which claims approximately 260 million adherents, is the third-largest branch of Christianity after Catholicism and Protestantism in the world (Diamant 2017). While there are more Protestant adherents in total, Orthodox Christians outnumber any Protestant traditions such as Anglican, Baptist, etc. (Kenworthy and Agadjanian 2021: 4). Most Orthodox Christians (77%) live in Europe. Russia has the world’s largest Orthodox population with an estimated 101 million (Diamant 2017).

The 1988 millennial anniversary of the Christianization of Kievan Rus’, marking a thousand years since Grand Prince Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity on the banks of the Dnipro River, was celebrated across the Soviet Union and signified a historical turning point in the relationship between religion, state, and society. The celebrations were accompanied by a Local Council that, for the first time in Soviet history since 1918, gathered to discuss internal Church issues and not to elect a new Patriarch as in previous councils. These were times of radical change, unleashed by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, a comprehensive program of economic, political, and social reforms that opened Soviet public life to a wide range of voices and opinions. After seven decades of relentless religious persecution and state control, the millennium had a major symbolic relevance for the restoration of Russian Orthodoxy in Soviet and, eventually, post-Soviet society.¹ It was a vivid rupture with Soviet atheist ideology² and the beginning of a new epoch that continues until today. In contrast to what is suggested by the secularization thesis, religion did not fade away with increasing urbanization and modernization of society but celebrated a widely unexpected, triumphalist return to the public domain (Casanova 1994; Berger 1999; Davie 2007; Habermas 2008). The Russian Orthodox Church has re-emerged as a powerful symbol of Russia’s great past and a standard-bearer of national unity.

This chapter examines the large-scale transition of Russian Orthodoxy from a marginal, oppressed social phenomenon into what sociologist of religion José Casanova calls “public religion” (Casanova 1994). The re-emergence of Russian Orthodoxy in the public domain during Gorbachev’s reforms was not unique: it coincided with a global religious resurgence and a growing public interest in religion in the 1980s that did not become irrelevant, but assumed new roles and public visibility.

In the 1980s, religion throughout the world was in the forefront of various forms of public collective action, agonic as well as discursive, often on both sides of every contested issue, itself being both the subject and the object of contestation and debate.

(Casanova 1994: 66)

Referring to the continuing relevance of religious experiences and narratives in today’s media-saturated world, Titus Hjelm pointed out that “[p]eople who were completely indifferent to religion are now engaging in heated debates about its role in modern society—something unimaginable barely fifteen years ago” (Hjelm 2015: 1). In Russia, there is growing public interest in the role religion plays in politics, morality, and cultural identity.

“Second baptism” of Russia

The millennial year 1988 and the years to follow brought the Russian Orthodox Church back from the margins of society to the center of political and social life. Broadcast on national television and with high-ranking officials participating in the festivities organized by the Russian Orthodox Church, the millennium was not merely a religious event but a state event with major international repercussions (Behrens 2002: 78). As many scholars have pointed out, the grounds for supporting the celebrations were rather pragmatic. Gorbachev expected to gain international recognition for his reform program and hoped to receive support for his domestic politics from Soviet believers who constituted a considerable part of the population, despite state-enforced atheism and the closure of churches and religious institutions during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras (Davis 1995: XV, 60; Behrens 2002: 75; Shterin 2000: 227). Followed by loosening state control over religious practices and a general relaxation of Soviet religious policy, the Orthodox Millennium strengthened the Russian Orthodox Church’s role in society and marked a new phase in Church-state relations that unfolded in the post-Soviet years. The post-atheist religious revival is commonly referred to as “the second baptism of Rus’” (Aleksii II, 2005; Kirill 2010). The Metropolitan of Volokolamsk Ilarion described the 1988 jubilee as a watershed moment in Church’s contemporary history, for “exactly from that [date] the ‘Second baptism of Rus’ spans—the enormous, unprecedented in its scale renaissance of our Church that, in my view, has no parallels in history” (Ilarion 2016).

After years of repression and marginalization under the communist regime, Russian Orthodoxy experienced a remarkable spiritual revival and became central to national identity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the majority of the Russian population underwent a deep existential crisis and experienced rapid social decline. Along with radical economic and political reforms, Russian society faced unprecedented freedom, profound social upheaval, and a breakdown of trusted public institutions, common values, and norms. In these times of sudden changes and traumatic experiences, the Russian Orthodox Church, widely perceived as a victim of Marxist-Leninist ideology and state atheist politics, faced a tremendous religious demand among the people, albeit one that was broad and controversial (Agadjanian 2001: 352). Soviet Georgian film director Tengiz Abuladze aptly expressed this in his film Repentance (1984), where he placed a central Christian message into the mouth of an old woman asking a stranger if the road was leading to a church. After receiving a negative answer, she replied: “What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to a church?” This final scene is a strong metaphor for people’s rediscovered longing for spiritual guidance, morality, and freedom. Every road eventually leads to God. “The ‘compulsory secularization’ only managed to ruin the religious infrastructure by closing or blowing up churches, mosques and houses of prayer, but was not able to entirely overcome belief in the supernatural” (Kääriäinen and Furman 2000: 70). Historian and scholar of Soviet atheism Victoria Smolkin comes to a similar conclusion in her detailed, carefully researched and analyzed The Sacred Space is Never Empty: “[…] Soviet Communism never managed to overcome religion or produce an atheist society” (Smolkin 2018: 3). After the fall of the officially atheist regime, Russia re-embraced Orthodoxy in search of meaning, identity, and moral values.

The early 1990s were characterized by a massive reopening and renovation of Orthodox churches, monasteries, and seminaries. It was not a narrow circle of (post-)Soviet dissidents and intellectuals, but large segments of the Russian population who rediscovered religion and streamed to the newly reopened religious sites and places of worship (Batalden 1993: 3). If in 1989 75% of the population considered themselves to be non-believers and only 17% declared themselves to be Orthodox, in 2009, by contrast, the number of Orthodox adherents increased significantly to 73%, whereas atheists officially accounted for only 7% (Zorkaia 2009: 65). In 2014, the number of Orthodox believers slightly decreased to 67% according to a survey conducted by the Levada Center, an independent polling and sociological research organization (Simonov 2015: 13). The Russian state polling agency Public Opinion Foundation (Fond Obshchestvennogo Mneniia or FOM) refers to similar figures—after reaching a peak of 71% in 2012, the number of respondents who consider themselves Orthodox remained at 68% in 2014 (FOM 2014). In 2020, FOM estimated that 63% of the population declare themselves to be Orthodox Christians (FOM 2020). These numbers need to be treated with caution, as the answers largely depend on the way the question is formulated and can be either significantly higher or lower.

Ambiguity of post-Soviet religious identification

When analyzing this unexpected religious shift after the fall of the Soviet Union, Kääriäinen and Furman vividly describe it as “the motion of a pendulum” recalling not simply the religious recovery from the atheist communist times but also from the events that preceded the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, as the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intelligentsia was overwhelmingly atheistic or agnostic (Kääriäinen and Furman 2000: 28). And yet, the authors evaluate the impact of both atheist views and religious beliefs with extreme caution. By analyzing and comparing statistical data collected in the late socialist period with surveys that were conducted in post-Soviet Russia, they convincingly challenge the deep-rootedness of atheist ideology as well as the influence of newly discovered religious beliefs. The religious situation did not change rapidly, even after the atheist worldviews and the communist regime had been largely discredited and religious tolerance and freedom of conscience had been enshrined in the Russian Constitution of 1991 (Kääriäinen and Furman 2000: 49).

Analyzing religious transformation in contemporary Russia, American theologian John P. Burgess has observed that “[r]e-Christianization is not the only way to think about what is happening. Suspicion, ignorance, indifference, detached curiosity, and sympathetic disinterest—these, too, accurately describe Russians’ attitude toward the Orthodox Church” (Burgess 2017: 14). However beautiful the metaphor of the second baptism of Russia may sound, it largely reduces the complexity and inconsistency of Russia’s post-atheist religious transition with its peculiar forms of expression and paradoxically intertwined patterns of traditional religiosity, folk Orthodoxy, and national identity. Due to these entanglements that reveal contradictory beliefs in God and, at the same time, in magic and sorcery, there is hardly another issue related to Russian Orthodoxy that has attracted more academic and journalistic attention than the “real” number of Orthodox adherents and the question of how widespread their religious practices and beliefs are (Kääriäinen and Furman 2000; Dubin 2006; Zorkaia 2009; Chapnin 2013; Simonov 2015). Given that living religious tradition had been interrupted for decades, if not largely destroyed, and state atheism had been successfully installed at all levels of the Soviet education system and socialization process, the fact that a majority of the Russian population designates itself as Orthodox appears remarkable indeed (Zorkaia 2009: 65; Simonov 2015: 13). What picture is behind this upsurge in affiliation with Russian Orthodoxy? What meaning does it have for Russia’s religious life?

As many researchers and sociologists have observed, this exceptional quantitative transformation has not been accompanied by a corresponding qualitative change. The interest in Christian teaching and the knowledge of the basic tenets of the Orthodox faith has remained relatively low. In their analysis of World Values statistics on Russian religiosity in the 1990s, Kääriäinen and Furman were astonished to discover that the percentage of Orthodox followers significantly outnumbered the total number of believers, vaguely characterized as those who experienced concerns to discover the purpose and meaning of life and resolved these concerns.³ While believers constituted only 40% in 1999, the number of Orthodox adherents amounted to 75% (Kääriäinen and Furman 2000: 54). Even more astonishing was the fact that both atheists and non-believers largely identified with the Orthodox majority. Among this Orthodox majority, most respondents regarded themselves as “Christian in general” or as “Orthodox in general.” The number of those associating themselves with official Orthodoxy, though, was only about 22% (Kääriäinen and Furman 2000: 52). Being Orthodox in Russia is for many a rather broad, vague affiliation that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on transliteration and translation
• Introduction
• 1 Post-Soviet religious revival: Belonging without believing?
• 2 The Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Kirill
• 3 Seeking power: The Russian Orthodox Church’s media strategy
• 4 Atheist, religious, secular: Church criticism in digital media
• 5 From victim to persecutor: The Russian Orthodox Church after Pussy Riot
• 6 Russia’s YouTube generation and the Orthodox Church
• 7 Orthodox clergy and laity voicing dissent online: The case of Ahilla.ru
• Conclusion: Mediatization of Orthodoxy in present-day Russia
• Appendices
• Index