Paul Goble
Staunton, December 12 – A Duma roundtable
this week shows that deputies are preparing to further gut the 1997 Russian
Freedom of Conscience Law and bring the power of the Russian state to bear
against all religious faiths, including some within the other three “traditional”
religions of Russia that law recognized, that the Moscow Patriarchate doesn’t
like.
Indeed, the head of the Moscow
Institute for Religion and Law suggests that as a result of these and earlier
efforts “nothing remains” of that much-criticized law, now that “the time of
freedom has ended” in the Russian Federation and “intolerance become
fashionable” (sclj.ru/news/detail.php?SECTION_ID=434&ELEMENT_ID=6533 and sclj.ru/news/detail.php?SECTION_ID=436&ELEMENT_ID=6539).
Indeed, Lunkin says, the government
appears, if one is to judge from comments at this roundtable on “Sects and
Destructive Cults as Challenges to Russian National Security,” to have decided
that its legislation allowing it to accuse at will NGOs of being “’Western
agents’” is not sufficient in the religious sphere and that there “other,
special measures are required.”
Hosted by the Duma committee on the
affairs of public and religious organizations, the roundtable featured as
speakers Abbot Serapion, deputy head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s missionary
department, and Aleksandr Dvorkin, who has become notorious as an opponent of
Protestants and other sects.
The 1997 law has already been
amended this year in unfortunate ways, Lunkin says; but these two figures and
their supporters in the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian state clearly
believe that things have not gone far enough to allow the state to control the
religious situation in the country and reinforce the dominance of the Russian
Orthodox Church.
Now that such people have ensured
that non-Orthodox groups have to report their incomes every year, something the
Moscow Patriarchate has not done in modern times and now won’t have to in the
future, Lunkin says, they want to “draw a line between Orthodox and
non-Orthodox” in such a way that “any non-Orthodox Christian or believer in any
exotic religious will always feel himself to be ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’” in
Russia.
To achieve this goal is quite
difficult in today’s globalized world, but “a mechanism has been thought up for
the division of believers in the country,” one that involves expanding the
definition of the term “sect” to apply to many groups that it has never been
used for up to now and declaring, as Dvorkin did, that “the liquidation of
churches cannot be called repression.”
Moreover, Lunkin continues, “Abbot
Serapion proposed extending the status of ‘foreign agent’ to religious organizations
financed from abroad;” and both he and others at the meeting “sounded calls to
find ‘enemies’ and ‘spies’ in connection with the Ukrainian situation and the struggle
with ‘Western influence.’”
“The main enemies,” in the minds of
these people, the religious law specialist said, “are Protestants (Baptists,
Pentecostals, Charismatics, and Adventists), Jehovah’s Witnesses alongside neo-pagans
and Wahhabi extremists,” some of whom are to be identified as extremist by
asking their opinion about the annexation of Crimea.
Such an approach will make “impossible
any manifestation of religious life or missionary activity beyond the limits of
‘traditional religions’ and in fact beyond the limits of the Russian Orthodox
Church,” Lunkin says. But it will also likely be used against liberals within
the church given the hatred for them that the anti-sect activists have
displayed.
Clearly, the religious law
specialist concludes, in today’s Russia, “freedom of conscience is not for all”
but only for those who have the approval of the state and the Patriarchate.
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