Religious Freedom in Russia Today

Ecumenical Review, The, Oct, 1998 by Vladimir Feodorov

The desire to protect society from criminal behaviour and commercialization by religious communities and to oppose anti-religious political tendencies which threaten to split the church often explains initiatives and actions which would be considered undemocratic in liberal-democratic circles. Perhaps iris only by going the way of neo-fundamentalism that it will be possible to realize the objective of bringing out in people the aspiration for inner freedom, the taste for freedom, the value of freedom of conscience which Christianity brought into the world.

More than 70 years ago the noted Russian religious thinker Nicolas Berdyaev reacted to the dissent marked by the appearance of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in these words: "The issue of freedom of conscience seems to me central to Christian consciousness, and it must be raised with maximum clarity and radicalism. Freedom always takes priority over authority."(10) The apologists for authority and opponents of freedom usually stand for complete and unrestricted freedom for themselves while denying it to others. Berdyaev uses the example of the ROCA and the rightist clerical trend among emigrants of the 1920s to illustrate this:

   Those extremist and often fanatical supporters of the policies of the
   Archpriest's synod in Karlovtsy opposing Metropolitan Evlogy form an
   extreme rightist monarchist group which elects the supreme body of the
   Church and metropolitans not as based on church or canonical principles,
   but based on their own political sympathies and their black revolutionary
   lust. If the Archpriest's synod and sobor displayed more leftist and
   freedom-oriented church policies breaking away from the rightist monarchist
   trend, its present supporters would leave it and would deny its church
   authority. Such are communists, who recognize complete freedom as long as
   it is their own, while denying the right to breathe freely to others.(11)

Curiously, the polemics with the ROCA concerning the freedom of conscience continue, though within a totally different legal context. It is of principal importance to recognize which of the two parties in this argument is truly assuring the birth of a free personality and which is manipulating slogans and concepts. The paradox is that "democratic principles" necessitate supporting a movement which is in its essence anti-democratic, fundamentalist, falsifying the profound and rich traditions of Orthodox spirituality, of an Orthodoxy which makes people both responsible and free.

Without a truly religious upbringing -- one that is tree and not fundamentalist -- the Russian people has no future. I am not referring here only to religious education in the schools. I mean an upbringing in love as opposed to a rigid disciplinary system, upbringing based on sincerity and trust of one another. This must be the Orthodox witness in a secular society. During the slow but sure change from a totalitarian regime to a new society in Russia, we should heed more than ever the insights of Pavel Novgorodtsev, a prominent Russian thinker, head of the Moscow School of the Philosophy of Law, the editor of The Issues of Idealism (1902), which became the manifesto of the idealist movement in Russian philosophy, and one of the inspirers and organizers of the constitutional democratic party. Already in 1923 he wrote: