Lawrence A. Uzzell
Here is a radical suggestion. Rather than trying to produce precise numbers nationwide for various religious confessions and denominations, scholars should hire a large but very short-term team of pollsters, perhaps students. The team could descend – tactfully – on a small city not far from Moscow on the Volga River, spending an extended weekend (Friday-Sunday) there. The weekend should not be within a special holiday period such as Nativity (Christmas) or Pascha (Easter). On Friday teammates would physically visit inside every – literally every – mosque or building rented for Muslim services in that city. Similarly, on Saturday teammates would attend every synagogue or building rented for Jewish services – and also every church or building rented for Seventh-day Adventist services. Then on Sunday the team would attend every church or building rented for Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, or other Christian services. The task would be to do literal nose-counting in order to produce genuinely precise numbers. Such a face-to-face project could be far more revealing than current guesswork. Of course, the project would not produce nationwide numbers, but it would be quite helpful in trying to analyze the claims of both supporters and foes of the various religions in Russia.
As far as I know, no pollsters have attempted what I propose above. However, two Russian scholars (Nikolai Mitrokhin and Olga Sibireva) did some fascinating, detailed fieldwork concentrating on one province, including not only Ryazan city (about 120 miles southeast of Moscow), but also the province’s rural villages. They repeatedly visited various churches at different seasons.Unfortunately, they covered only the mainstream Russian Orthodox Church. The bottom line: On a typical Sunday, 0.9 percent of the province’s population attended Divine Liturgy. (“ ‘Ne boisia, maloe stalo!’Ob otsenke chislennosti pravoslavnykh veruiushchikh na materiale polevykh issledovanii v Riazanskoi oblasti,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas, No. 1 [2007], 51; http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2007/1/mi24.html. Geraldine Fagan considers this sociological study as “likely the most systematic to date”: Believing in Russia: Religious Policy after Communism [London: Routledge, 2013], 25.)
Unfortunately, I have difficulties trusting religious statistics in Russia today.Under current conditions, are members of marginal groups (such as Old Believers or unregistered Protestants) really willing to talk about their religious beliefs with a stranger? The true numbers, available only to God, might be larger than the numbers estimated by journalists and scholars forced to engage in guesswork. On the other hand, the true numbers might be smaller than the claims of organizations (either religious or nonreligious), tempted to inflate numbers for the sake of public relations or fund-raising. Certainly, Gallupstyle polling methods have their value. Without such surveys we would be even more ignorant about Russia. Nevertheless, it bears repeating that polls may be problematic in a less-than-free country. A Pew Research Center report cautioned that “government and academic researchers have found evidence that Christians in general, and members of unregistered Christian groups in particular, are less likely than Chinese as a whole to participate in public opinion surveys” (Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population, [2011], p. 102). The same is likely the case in Russia.
Another problem with polls is the method of self-identification, probably inevitable in mass surveys attempting to compare various religious, nonreligious, and anti-religious groups with dramatically different criteria of “belief” or “membership.” Geraldine Fagan’s wonderful book pinpoints the dubious claims of Russia as a “truly Orthodox” society. She correctly emphasizes how hugely important are the sacraments in the Orthodox Church, the core of Orthodox life.However, “Few of Russia’s majority who identify as Orthodox conform to the Church definition.The recent surveys reveal that while some 80 percent are baptized, over 70 percent have never taken communion in their lives” (Believing in Russia, 24-25). On the other hand, surveys give us a glimpse of those Russians who vaguely consider themselves “believers” but explicitly decline to label themselves as members of any specific religion.Like it or not, many post-moderns now prefer amorphous “spirituality” rather than any rigorous theology. Strikingly, a 2012 survey by Moscow-based Sreda found that 25 percent of respondents chose “I believe in God, but I do not profess any concrete religion” (http://sreda.org/arena).
Even more striking for those who follow Protestant life in current Russia: Apparently four times more Russians label themselves as generic “Christians” than call themselves specifically Protestants.Again from the Sreda survey, 4.1 percent of respondents chose “I profess Christianity, but I do not consider myself Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant.” Few respondents chose to label themselves as Protestant, Pentecostal, Catholic, or Old Believer: less than 0.5 percent each. In sum, are Orthodox and Western forms of Christianity thriving in Russia today? With the possible exception of Pentecostals, the answer seems to be no.
Lawrence A. Uzzell, retired president of International Religious Freedom Watch, Fishersville, Virginia