Ever More People in Kazakhstan Choosing a Different Religion than Their ‘Ethnic’ One, Polls Show

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 1 – “Approximately every tenth resident of Kazakhstan is changing is religious convictions and about two percent have shifted from one confession to another,” Zulfiya Raisova says, citing a major study conducted three years ago and experts and religious leaders more recently (cabar.asia/ru/kak-kazahstantsy-menyayut-svoi-religioznye-ubezhdeniya/).

            In 2017, the Nur-Sultan journalist reports, the education ministry released a 431-page report, Religious Conversions in Post-Secular Society (in Russian, Alma-Ata, 2017, available at /iph.kz/doc/ru/1249.pdf) which was based on a survey of 2500 citizens in 14 oblasts of that Central Asian country.

            It found, Raisova says, that “approximately 12.5 percent of Kazakhstan residents” are examining a possible change in religious affiliation” and that nearly two percent have already made the change.  She says that this trend is continuing in most of the country but not in the West where any shift from Islam to Christianity or the reverse is a rarity.

            Aleksandr Antippin, a specialist on religion at the Nur-Sultan Center for Research on Problems of Religion, stresses that such regional variations are the rule. “In western regions, conversions from Muslims to Christians, that is, the transition from one worldview to another is an extremely rare phenomenon.”

            “In other regions, however, “from ten to 60 percent of the members of Protestant communities are neophyte Kazakhs,” and both Muslims and Christians accept some new faiths regardless of their parents’ affiliations. Their children are more likely to follow their parents than their grandparents, making such shifts irreversible in the short term.

            Father Viktor Drozhnikov, a priest at the Russian Orthodox Uspensky Cathedral in Nur-Sultan, says that it is no longer the case that Russians always remain Orthodox or Kazakhs Muslims. “In my services, I periodically encounter people who are not Slavs who are interested in Christianity.”

            According to the 2017 poll, 47 to 63.7 percent of Kazakhstan residents follow the religious preferences of their families and friends. Those who don’t are most often influenced by studying publications or online resources or, in the case of women in particular, by marriage to a member of another faith.

            Imam Yakhiya-haji Ismailov says that when such women come to him in order to convert, he asks them to take their time and stresses that Islam allows its followers to marry people from other faiths and for those they do marry to keep their original religious affiliation. There must not be any rush or force in such situations.