Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Mon, 9 Nov 1992 16:44:58 EST
From:         Frank <ST403231@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject:      Religion in Russia (was: When gods die)
Comments: To: words-l@uga.cc.uga.edu

>From:         blomberg cepeda <ST402747@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
>
>Since I suspect that Frank will put an entirely different spin on this, I'll
>put in my own 20 rubles (400=$1) in.

Different, but not entirely, as I expect you will find.

>     Religion does not seem to be sweeping the neighborhood. There is a large
>core of believers, but most of them are of the only-on-Easter variety. It's
>almost just an in-thing, or (shudder) a nationalist statement. The fundies get
>crowds, but not much commitment--I spent some time in a provincial city close
>to what had always been a "burnt-over" district (Vladimir, 100 miles east of
>Moscow), and another American I knew there, a born-again himself, said that
>most of them were just going for the novelty or the free Bibles.

Here I would have to concur.  In 1989 and 1990, religion was all the
rage.  People were crowding the open churches (and more and more were
opening in those days), seeking baptism.  Young women, and to a large
extent, yount men as well, were wearing crosses openly.  But, like all
fads, it passed with time.  Today there are more people in church than
there were in 1985, certainly, but not as many as there were in 1990.

The American and other Western-based evangelicals are doing a fair
but no-longer-increasing business.  Part of the reason, as I said
in an earlier, tongue-in-cheek posting, has to do with the emphasis
some of these groups place on temperance.  Part of their initial success
had to do with the fact that the senior hierarchy of the Moscow Patriarchate
has been seriously, publicly compromised by recently declassified
documentation of their collaboration with the former Communist
regime.  But a significant part of their failure to continue to
win converts has to do with their ignorance about Russian culture and,
to some extent, about the Russian language.  (I read advertisements
on the Metro for their services in rather illiterate-sounding Russian.)

>      But, as Graham inferred, the real obvious revivial is in such things as
>astrology. Astrology is everywhere, including five minutes every night after
>the national news. And, as a connoisseur myself (though not a fundy), it is of
>a fairly high quality. Astrology books are outselling the Bible, but then, both
>are being murdered by Tolkien and Erle Stanley Gardner.

Again, I was appalled by the interest in and huge following of the
faith healers Kashpirovsky and Luzhin.  Another hot item in the book
kiosks is pulp translated from English on how to improve your
sexual technique.  Some friends bought one of these (because of the
provocative cover, showing a nude picture of a very well-endowed woman)
and hid it in my luggage for me to find later.  The title?  Teper',
kogda ty zapoluchil men'a s'uda, chto my budem delat'?  (Now that
you've got me here, what are we going to do?)

>      Orthodoxy has more adherents than I might have let on above, but it is
>hard to call it a revival, at least in the Anglo-American sense. Orthodox
>fundamentalism is in some respects an oxymoron; it is a phenomenon that I have
>only noticed (tellingly?) among emigres in the States. And no one sees
>astrology or spiritualism as a contradiction to a belief in Orthodoxy.

Indeed, the Western notion of revival is somewhat foreign to Orthodox
religious sensibilities.  The interest in the Church peaked and ebbed,
and the Patriarchate missed a huge opportunity to undertake a serious
religious education project when the interest was high.  I tweaked
the Rector of the (then) Leningrad Theological Academy by asking
him, as a religious educator, what was being done to meet the needs
of the many many thousands of people seeking baptism who only had
a vague idea of who Jesus Christ was.  He hemmed and hawed and launched
into an explanaiton of how difficult it was to get things done and
how limited their resources were.  This was in August of 1989.

And you are right.  Orthodox fundamentalism is usually a phenomenon
that occurs among people who haven't been Orthodox for very long, or
who have just rediscovered Orthodoxy and are all excited about it.
The extreme rightist political activists in Russia all claim to
be Orthodox, but mostly use that as a political hot button to
push.  Fortunately, it doesn't work that well.

And better educated Orthodox do realize the incompatibility of
astrology and faith healing with Christianity.  A friend of
mine, a priest in the Altai region of Siberia, received death
threats after criticizing Kashpirovsky in a sermon.

>     Actually, if I ever did become a Christian, it would probably be into
>Orthodoxy. One of the traits of Russian culture which has always attracted me,
>and which Orthodoxy shares, is a great respect for chaos. Orthodox services
>are wonderfully disordered affairs, with people buying candles and looking for
>the icon of their saints, others confessing, others following the service, but
>the whole is a wonderful mishmash in a cavelike atmosphere, with icons taking
>up just about all the available space.
>      This chaotic quality is responsible, I think, both for Orthodoxy's
>resilience--you can't really erase something so amorphous--but also for its
>inability to really support a fundy-type movement--there is really no core, no
>fundament to claim as the only. If there is a fundy Orthodoxy, it will only be
>as an adjunct to nationalism. And that would, I posit, be very scary.

Interestingly, the group which split from mainstream Orthodoxy in the
17th century and is considered ultra characteristically Russian by
many people, the Old Believers, differs from your description of
most Orthodox services in that everyone does the same thing at the
same time.  This is reminiscent of Western congregations who all
stand, sit, recite the same words and sing the same hymns together.
I appreciate the lack of uniformity in Orthodox worship as well;
it is something like having my own personal space in which to
experience the divine, while everyone else is doing the same
thing in general, and different things specifically.

Clearly I have to disagree that there is no fundamental core to
Orrthodoxy, although I would concur that there is no single pop-
ular symbol for the troops to rally around (like the Pope or the
Bible, to name a couple).  I have experienced Orthodox fundament-
alism here in the US.  It has nothing to do with nationalism, yet
it is still scary.  Like most fundamentalisms, it is the religious
manifestation of people who want their salvation to work like an
appliance from Sears Roebuck; follow these directions exactly and
everything's guaranteed.  WIth the new crop of converts milling
around in Russia (I have met a few), I expect we will be seeing
more of it in the future.  Although here again, I would be very
pleased to be wrong.
>
>                                             b.c.
>
Frank