Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 2 – The Russian
Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate remains the dominant religious group
in Russia in terms of parishes, but its advantage over other denominations and
faiths has been declining and fell precipitously this year in terms of the
number of parishes registered with the state, Mariya Nemtseva of the Daily
Storm portal says.
Religious groups can function
without that registration, although they then operate under significant
disadvantages as they cannot own or rent property or even open a bank account.
But registered groups nonetheless provide a rough estimate of the relative size
of Russia’s various religious groups.
There are currently 31,392 religious
organizations representing more than 60 different confessions, Nemtseva says. They
are overwhelmingly Russian Orthodox, but among the 2927 registered in the last
five years, and especially among the 483 registered during the first five months
of 2019, the balance has shifted dailystorm.ru/obschestvo/v-rossii-s-nachala-goda-poyavilis-483-novye-religioznye-organizacii).
Of those registered this year, only 267
were Orthodox, significantly fewer than half while 152 were Muslim and 42 were
Protestant. In addition, there were 12 Buddhist groups, 4 Jewish ones, four
neo-pagans, on Vishnu, and one Catholic. Of the Orthodox, 253 were part of the
ROC MP, eight were Old Believers, three Orthodox Catholics, and three
Armenian.
Some groups do not register out of principle,
while others face difficulties in gaining official status. Muslim leaders promote
registration in order to isolate extremist groups while some Muslim communities
either avoid registration or face difficulties in getting the Russian
authorities to register them.
The justice ministry maintains a list of
those groups which exist but haven’t registered with the state. At present,
there are 2514 religious bodies of various denominations on it; but Nemtseva
doesn’t provide a breakdown.
At the same time, there are 25 religious groups
which the authorities have banned as extremist. The most prominent of these are
the Jehovah’s Witnesses, 395 branches of which have been shuttered by court
order. But others include the Ancient-Russian Inglist Church which views itself
as Orthodox but which the Orthodox say is pagan, and the Karakol Initiative
Group in the Altai which fights both Orthodoxy and Buddhism.
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