Orthodox Christianity, Civil Society, and Russian Democracy

Tables of survey responses can be very useful for discerning patterns such as those above, but to generate a more complete picture of the relationship between religiosity and civic engagement and political efficacy one must rely upon more sophisticated statistical techniques, such as multiple regression analysis. In table 4, I used various indicators of religiosity and Orthodox belief to predict two variables associated with civic engagement: frequency of discussing politics and interest in politics. Although there appears to be a statistically significant relationship in each model, the correlation is extremely weak. Using the survey response of "often discusses politics" as the dependent variable, the independent predictors together can only explain less than one percent of the variation in the dependent variable. Within Model A, the only variables that were even weakly correlated with the dependent variable were identification as Orthodox, daily prayer, and the belief that political leaders should believe in God. The results of Model B are more rewarding, as these same variables are correlated at much higher levels of significance, and with the model itself significant at the highest level and able to explain more than 1 percent of the variation in the dependent variable.

At first glance these models may not seem to tell us much about Orthodox religiosity and civic life in Russia today, but they do tell an interesting story. As shown in table 2, there is not much variation at all between the values and beliefs of the devout Orthodox, the cultural Orthodox, and the nonreligious Russians when it comes to civic engagement. These regression analyses show further that there is only the weakest statistical association between these variables, suggesting that Orthodox Russians are not significantly less engaged in civic life than other Russian citizens.

Orthodox Christianity and Russian Democracy

The question of civic engagement is important, because of both the theoretical literature on the subject and the empirical body of evidence from around the world, which suggest that a civil society plays a critical role in pushing for democracy and is necessary to sustain democratic governance once it is attained. In modern Russia, the latter is the central issue, as the advances made in Russian democracy in its first decade are beginning to lose ground to the growing authoritarian tendencies of Putin and several other leaders in Russia who support a strong-hand approach to governance. Aside from the issue of civic engagement, therefore, we must consider the issue of support for a democratic system in Russia. The two are not synonymous and it is entirely feasible that civic engagement might be associated with authoritarian forces that seek to bring back vestiges of the old system.12

Some of the evidence presented in table 5 certainly seems to support such an idea. When it comes to the issue of how one assesses the communist regime, the nonreligious Russians are significantly less likely to offer a positive assessment of the Soviet system. Although only 36 percent of the nonreligious Russians offered a positive assessment of the communist regime, 46 percent-nearly half-of the cultural Orthodox did so. Interestingly, the devout Orthodox responded more like the nonreligious than their Orthodox brethren, with 40 percent offering a positive view of the communist regime. The finding that the nonOrthodox are less likely to have a positive assessment of the Soviet regime may be attributable to the fact that many of those in the survey who are nonreligious are also likely to be non-Orthodox (in terms of self-identification), and therefore highly likely to include a large number of non-Russians, who tend to have a more negative assessment of the Soviet Union than ethnic Russians. Similarly, the finding that the devout Orthodox are less predisposed to the communist regime can be explained by the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church was systematically attacked by the communist state, a historical fact that is not forgotten by the more devout Orthodox.