Religious Freedom in Russia Today

Ecumenical Review, The, Oct, 1998 by Vladimir Feodorov

Two "fundamentalist" attitudes

Orthodox Christianity distinguishes between two approaches in church life: akribia and oikonomia. The former is a strict following of the letter of the law; the latter allows a compromise when necessary, so long as fidelity to the spirit of the law remains intact. Classical fundamentalism tends to follow uncompromising akribia.

As I see it, fundamentalist tendencies in Orthodox Christianity are destructive to the Russian Orthodox Church and harmful to the formation of democracy and civil society in Russia. These tendencies often manifest themselves in nationalistic, anti-Semitic, anti-ecumenical and other anti-democratic ways.

The main conflict around the 1997 law was between representatives of two kinds of fundamentalism: religious and liberal-legal. Liberal-legal fundamentalism demands on principle the passage of ideal liberal and democratic laws, by whatever means and regardless of the consequences. It sometimes forgets the spirit of democracy. As a rule, this is an unrealistic position, since it does not take account of the conflicts that arise from trying to acknowledge all possible rights.

There are undoubtedly some carriers of the virus of religious fundamentalism within the Russian Orthodox Church itself, although its main source has been the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCA), which managed to open a number of parishes in Russia during the post-perestroika years. This has not only meant the appearance of foreign dissidents but also an attempt to draw members of the Moscow Patriarchate into this jurisdiction. No one in the Orthodox world recognizes the ROCA, but the 1990 Russian law entitled it to register as such.

The situation is complicated by allegations that the Moscow Patriarchate collaborated with the KGB during the Soviet period, which have been used to undermine the people's trust in the patriarchate and attract them into the so-called Free Russian Orthodox Church. This alleged collaboration may have been a compromise made with the political authorities judged necessary for the sake of the survival of the church; and some of those who spread these charges entered into the same kind of compromise with the Nazi regime in Germany.

It is not entirely clear why many communists connected with the old Soviet regime are now actively supporting the fundamentalists of the ROCA, or why communist newspapers like Soviet Russia publish fundamentalist propaganda criticizing the hierarchy. In the 1920s the authorities tried to weaken and ultimately destroy the church by promoting dissent from "renovationist" circles in the church; it is probable today that there are forces interested in reaching the same goal but now with help from the opposite direction -- the fundamentalist wing. The cadres leaving for the ROCA are not of the highest moral character; and even if it is tempting to neophytes, this foreign jurisdiction will never enjoy the confidence of the Christian masses. While some might argue that at least people are coming to Orthodoxy in this way, this is not an Orthodoxy of the church but an Orthodoxy promoting dissent and therefore in essence not Orthodoxy at all.