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The Wheat & The Tares In Russia

In First Things, John Burgess has a long, thoughtful, fairly comprehensive report on the rebirth of the Orthodox Church in post-Soviet Russia. Not only did I learn a lot from it, I also appreciated the author’s measured approach. He didn’t adopt the defensiveness of many Orthodox who try to downplay the corruption and other difficulties […]

In First Things, John Burgess has a long, thoughtful, fairly comprehensive report on the rebirth of the Orthodox Church in post-Soviet Russia. Not only did I learn a lot from it, I also appreciated the author’s measured approach. He didn’t adopt the defensiveness of many Orthodox who try to downplay the corruption and other difficulties in the Putin-era Church, but neither did he, like many critics, focus on those problems as if they defined the experience of Orthodoxy in contemporary Russia. It’s hard to pick out parts of this excellent essay to excerpt, but here are a couple:

During my stay in 2011–2012, I saw firsthand the gulf between the church hierarchy and the new anti-Putin political movement. Church leaders essentially ordered their flock to avoid the demonstrations that were spilling out onto the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Believers were supposed to stay home and pray. For their part, the protest leaders ­included no church representatives and did not appeal to the Orthodox faith to justify their stand. As far as they were concerned, the protest movement and the Church had nothing to do with each other. And the Church seemed all too willing to oblige, as when Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’, declared his support for Putin in the March 2012 presidential election and condemned the feminist collective Pussy Riot for intruding into Christ the Savior Cathedral to protest the Church’s unholy alliance with Putin.

But the story of the Church’s rebirth is more complicated than Western analyses suggest. Most Russians now identify themselves as Orthodox and approve of the Church’s renewed social prominence. Since the fall of communism, Christmas and Easter have been reestablished as federal holidays, and on these days the churches cannot contain all the worshippers. Thousands of church buildings have been restored to their former glory and again dominate public space. Not only President Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev but also regional and local political officials openly profess their Orthodox faith and appear next to church officials at civic events as well as religious services. In just twenty years, the Church has become Russia’s largest and most important nongovernmental organization. Sensing its growing social influence, the Church aspires to achieve nothing less than the re-Christianization of the Russian nation.

More:

The difficulty of educating people in Christian faith is hardly unique to Russia. But the Church’s ambitious hopes for in-churching will make little progress without a vibrant intellectual culture alongside its rich liturgical and monastic traditions. The Russian Orthodox Church desperately needs gifted public theologians today if it is to relate Christian faith to its culture. The challenge to developing a public theology comes not only from secularizing forces in society but also from anti-intellectual attitudes within the Church. Too many priests simply want laypeople to submit to church authority and tradition, and too many laypeople regard Orthodoxy as nothing more than a collection of rituals from which they pick and choose what works for them.

OK, one more:

Some critics assert that the evidence is already in. They believe that the Russian Orthodox Church has made a pact with the devil, who goes by the name of Vladimir Putin. I have no power of prophecy. I have learned, however, that the Russian Church has many gifts, many strengths. Today the peril in Russia to genuine Christian faith comes not from tsarism or communism but instead from an emerging global culture that reduces human life to material acquisition and consumption. In such a time, appeals to the spiritual greatness of the Russian nation may be an essential witness to the Gospel rather than a capitulation to the powers that be.

Read the whole thing. Really, do. It gives a much more complex picture of religious life in Russia than we are accustomed to reading in this country, both from Russian Orthodoxy’s fervent supporters, and its fervent critics.

By the way, you should also read Ivan Plis’s short First Things piece on the wheat and the tares of Orthodox on the Internet. Excerpt:

The Internet has given us Orthodox the solidarity, confidence, and courage to be increasingly visible among American Christians, where once we were easily ignored or forgotten. This visibility demands greater humility, love, and integrity from us, and we should welcome the opportunity to practice these virtues. But it also offers greater room for error, sin, and self-centeredness, of which we must remain vigilant.

It is unhealthy to have more co-religionist friends online than in your own parish. I have seen this happen to some converts who first encountered Orthodoxy online—an increasingly common phenomenon—and therefore naturally built their new identities around people and ideas from the Internet. The parish, characterized by creative chaos, is by definition a place to practice humility, patience, and brotherly love, and to be challenged by how others live the Christian life, not to have one’s biases reinforced.

Yes, this is all true, as I have learned through my own sins and failings.

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