James Brooke
Since returning to the Kremlin last year as president, Vladimir Putin seems determined to restore the Orthodox Church to the official status it enjoyed during the time of the tsars. Nevertheless, increasingly, Protestant churches are expanding rapidly. In June 2013, President Putin signed into law vaguely worded “defense of religion” legislation. In theory, this law protects from “insults” Russia’s four religions deemed “historic” by a 1997 law: Christian Orthodoxy, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam. In July 2013 any illusion that the law covered Islam disappeared when 263 Central Asians were detained in Moscow for gathering in an informal prayer house and partaking in the traditional “Iftar” dinner to break the Ramadan fast. Although there are about one million Muslims in Moscow today, the city has only four mosques. City officials deny construction permits, saying most Muslims in Moscow are guest workers who will go home.
Instead, official support for the Orthodox Church can be seen everywhere from the restoration of golden-domed churches, to President Putin’s televised attendance at Orthodox Easter services, to the preelection comment last year by Patriarch Kirill that Putin’s leadership of Russia is “a miracle of God.” The patriarch recently was given use of lodgings inside the Kremlin, a unique privilege enjoyed during the time of the tsars. Meanwhile, Russian Protestants increasingly hold religious services in living rooms as their pastors are routinely denied permits to build churches. Visas for foreign missionaries are rare. Russia’s anti-Protestant actions are regularly chronicled in Forum 18 News Service, based in Oslo, Norway. But out of sight does not mean out of mind. Despite the efforts of Russian police and prosecutors, Protestantism keeps growing in Russia.
Last Easter, as is customary, Russian police were deployed to every Orthodox church in the land. They kept order and conducted a census. According to Interior Ministry statistics, about four million Russians attended Easter services at Russian Orthodox churches. That is 2.7 percent of the population in Russia, a nation where around 65 percent of survey respondents call themselves Orthodox. According to a survey conducted in April 2013 by Public Opinion Foundation, about half of Russians who call themselves Orthodox admit they have never opened a Bible. Russia’s Justice Ministry has registered 14,616 Orthodox parishes, 4,409 Protestant parishes, and 234 Catholic parishes. But Anatoly Pchelintsev, a religion specialist and professor at the Russian State Humanitarian University, estimates that for every registered Protestant congregation, there are at least two unregistered ones. Pchelintsev, who edits the journal Religion and Law, concludes that Russia has about 15,000 Protestant congregations, roughly equal to the number of Russian Orthodox parishes. He says the number of Catholic parishes is roughly the same as the official number.
In Siberia, long a land of dissenters and discontents, there are believed to be more Protestants in church on Sunday mornings than Russian Orthodox. On one visit to Khabarovsk, the second largest city of the Russian Far East, I went to a packed Baptist church, only a kilometer from a massive, sparsely attended Russian Orthodox Cathedral that had been built with federal funds. With the vast majority of contemporary Russians rarely entering churches, many feel the Orthodox Church will have to change or end up with declining demographics. In July 2013 a push for change came from an unexpected corner: Alexander Lukashenko, the archconservative president of Belarus, a country where half the population is nominally Orthodox. “As the world is undergoing change, therefore the Church must change also,” said Lukashenko, who has received awards from the Belarusian Orthodox Church. “I think we are on the threshold of reforms in the Orthodox Church. Our church should begin a reform, step-by-step, beginning with the church language,” he continued, referring to Old Church Slavonic, a 1,000-year-old liturgical language unintelligible to most Russians and Belarusians.
“The prayers, services, and sermons are too long,” Lukashenko continued. “Adults and the elderly just cannot endure them. One should be brief, succinct, and more modern. I am against the practice of people coming in, listening to a sermon standing on their feet and having no opportunity at all to sit,” he said, referring to Russian Orthodox churches that have no chairs or pews. “The practice of building huge cathedrals is no good either. Churches must be cozy and warm, and they must not oppress believers.” For Russia, the future offers a choice: Will Russia’s Orthodox Church compete with Protestantism, or try to crush it?
James Brooke is Moscow Bureau Chief for Voice of America. Edited excerpts published with permission from a Voice of America website posting: http://blogs. voanews.com/russia-watch/2013/07/30/is-russiaturning-protestant/; August 2013.