Russian Orthodoxy Did Not Experience a Genuine Rebirth after Fall of Communism, Father Solovyev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 17 – Many suggest that after the fall of communism, Russia experienced a religious rebirth, one comparable in many ways to the increase in the role of Orthodoxy in Russian thinking at the end of the tsarist period, Father Ilya Solovyev writes in the independent Orthodox portal Akhilla.

            But that comparison is misplaced. Before 1917, Russian Orthodoxy was experiencing a genuine rebirth, one in which many in the clergy and the population were taking the basic aspects of their faith more seriously. What has happened since 1991 is very different, and the differences are fundamental (ahilla.ru/vozrozhdenie-ili-ozhivlenie/).

What has happened over the last 30 years, Solovyev says, is not the revival of faith but rather “a sharp in crease in the so-called ‘external’ indicators of church life,” in the number of churches, bishoprics, clergy and even those who identify as Orthodox. What has not happened is a genuine religious revival.

Over the last generation, the priest continues, “an obvious sympathy for religion and the Church has appeared,” but “the majority of the population conceives religion not according tot heir personal experience or the experience of church life but under the influence of external informational such as the media.”

Under those conditions, Solovyev argues, “an individual can define himself as an Orthodox Christian, but the fruits of faith are given through religious experience, and this experience is something that in the overwhelming majority of cases, people do not now have.” Instead, they focus on rituals and on collective identities.

In fact, he says, “the peoples of Russia have conceived religion as a cultural phenomenon assisting in the formation of ‘ethno-cultural and civic identity’” rather than as something involving individual spirituality and behavior. In the absence of the latter, it is wrong to speak of a religious revival. Instead, what there has been is a lot of activity but little spiritual growth.

Much of this view of religion and of this religious activity enjoys the active support of the government, and both these things too set the situation today at odds with the end of the tsarist period when the regime sought to control the growth of religious faith rather than allowing it to flourish.

This is a bitter lesson for today, Father Solovyev says; but it is an important one. And it is a reminder that “in church life, triumphalism [of the kind that the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian government now display] is just as dangerous as alarmism” that characterized Orthodoxy more than a century ago.