MARK R. ELLIOTT
This reflection is offered by the founding editor of the East-West Church and Ministry Report (1993-), who is editor emeritus as of January 2018.
In my college classes, I often shared with my students that certain generalizations on Russian history have held true over centuries. For one, Russia, straddling Europe and Asia, has perpetually struggled to define its place under the sun. To the point, is it occidental or oriental? In unpacking this longstanding identity crisis, I stressed in class that Russia has consistently chosen to define itself in relation to the West, not the East. China, for example, has never been Russia’s point of reference, whereas Europe for centuries, and the U.S. more recently, have been. This westward orientation has been the case even in the face of Russia’s frequent, frightful conflicts with powers to the West: Poland, Sweden, Austria, France, Germany, and the United States.
In psychological terms Russia has long exhibited a lovehate relationship with the West. Radical, sometimes abrupt, and often violent swings between emulating and vilifying all things Western have been the pattern for centuries. Admiring and loathing the West has sometimes even occurred simultaneously. Peter the Great, for example, fought Sweden for 21 years, even as he was adopting elements of its bureaucratic system. Likewise, and just as paradoxical, Soviet Russia sought to vanquish the West relying upon the prophecies and prescriptions of Karl Marx, the West’s most famous revolutionary.
In Russia’s recent past, as regards questions of faith, we observe the same confounding course changes and contradictions. After seven decades of state hostility toward religion, Gorbachev’s glasnost ushered in fulsome support for religious freedom. This uncharacteristic state tolerance was enshrined in 1990 in Soviet and then Russian Federation statutes that granted unprecedented protections for minority as well as majority faiths. Then under Yeltsin (in 1997) and Putin (in 2016) the Duma gutted legislative safeguards for freedom of conscience as thoroughly as it had championed them in 1990.
As for contradictions, Russia’s generous constitutional affirmations of human rights and its adherence to a host of international human rights treaties have no bearing on its frequent violations of its citizens’ civil liberties. Also, in the post-Soviet era, the Kremlin—so far—has chosen not to confer upon the Russian Orthodox Church the status of an established religion, even as it has granted it wholesale concessions and privileges that amount to a de facto state church status. In recent personal correspondence, respected church historian and missiologist Walter Sawatsky has called to my attention “the odd word majoritarianism,” which he has borrowed from Indian Muslim historian Mukul Kesavan and German scholar Astrid von Schlachta. Sawatsky sees a tyranny of the majority on the rise worldwide, fed by a bacillus of undemocratic, racially charged nationalism. The consequence has been a growing political force hostile to religious and ethnic minorities not only in Putin’s Russia and other post-Soviet authoritarian republics, but in Eastern Europe (especially Hungary, Poland, and Serbia), in nativist parties in Western Europe, among Hindus in India and Buddhists in Myanmar, and in Trump’s America.
In the case of Putin’s Russia, was it missionary activity that fueled this bellicose, majority-driven chauvinism? In the past 25 years the East-West Church and Ministry Report devoted a great deal of attention to Western and Korean missionary efforts in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe, particularly suspect now in a climate of supercharged, jingoistic patriotism. Following the collapse of Soviet bloc regimes, the scale of the mostly Protestant outpouring of personnel and resources across the region was unprecedented. Some have argued that the cultural miscues and off-putting triumphalist mentality of many missionaries triggered the region’s political backlash and the resulting restrictive legislation. But is that the best explanation?
“In the case of Putin’s Russia, was it missionary activity that fueled this bellicose, majority driven chauvinism?”
Mission missteps and arrogant attitudes—painfully parsed repeatedly in the pages of the EWC&M Report—no doubt contributed to post-Soviet laws limiting freedom of conscience. But I myself also witnessed many other missionaries who worked hard to respect the customs and traditions of the people to whom they witnessed. Peter Deyneka, Jr., a leading Slavic mission activist of the 1990s, heavily influenced my thinking on this subject. I have come to believe, as he did, that those hostile to the foreign missionary presence in post-Soviet states were actually more alarmed by what Christians from abroad were doing right than by what they were doing wrong. This perspective helps explain why Protestant missionaries were seen to be a threat to the region’s traditional confessions. Representatives of historic majority faiths, be they Polish Catholic or Russian Orthodox or Armenian Apostolic, do not want to concede their centuries-old status as bulwarks of national survival and preservers of their nations’ cultural heritage. In this light most post-Soviet states find themselves in lockstep with proponents of resurgent nativist ideologies. Their conviction is that Western championing of pluralism and religious and ethnic minority rights is a threat to social order, political cohesiveness, and national unity.
The Russian Orthodox Church has reacted to the religious pluralism of the 1990s in two ways. It has made common cause with growing nationalist sentiment, some of it harmless, but some of it dangerously xenophobic and anti-Semitic. Orthodoxy has also tied its fortunes to those of the state, and to Putin in particular. Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill and Putin both feel embattled and seek the support of the other. By way of illustration, in 2012 Kirill praised Putin’s then 12 years in power as a “miracle of God” and dismissed anti-Putin protests as the “ear-piercing shrieks” of a minority. In answer to the Patriarch’s fawning before power, female punk rockers co-opted Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior for a raucous concert, singing protests against cozy church-state collusion. Putin’s response was to have the women tried, convicted, and sent to prison.
“Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill and Putin both feel embattled and seek the support of the other.”
The yoking of Russian Orthodoxy to Putin’s nationalistic authoritarianism poses two dangers for the Church. First, a church dependent upon the state for support against its religious “competitors” invites spiritual complacency as it becomes less dependent upon its own faithful for its temporal existence. For this reason I have long contended that Russian Protestants and Catholics render Orthodoxy a great service to the extent that the state tolerates their existence. This is so because the ministrations of other Christian confessions can awaken the Russian Orthodox Church from the comfortable but deadening stupor of a nearmonopoly status, motivating it to try harder to serve its flock.
Second, a church dependent upon the state jeopardizes its future at whatever point citizens conclude that their rulers do not deserve their allegiance. One of the main reasons Orthodox suffered drastic persecution at the hands of the Bolsheviks was because their church had become so closely identified with the ousted Romanov regime. The frequent press photos of Patriarch Kirill with President Putin serve as visual props illustrating an ever-deepening alignment of church and state. Should Putin lose his grip on power, the church of his choice could once again suffer a precipitous fall from grace through guilt by association.
In the meantime, Russian Protestants are tarred with the popular perception that they are adherents of a Western faith. As a consequence, churches of Reformation heritage are struggling to find their way in an increasingly hostile environment. To their credit, state-sanctioned press attacks and ever-increasing legislative restrictions on non-Orthodox minority faiths do not seem to bother Russian Protestants nearly as much as they bother their Western co-religionists who sympathize with their plight. The explanation is simple enough. In the past under tsars and commissars Russian Protestants had to deal with much worse.
In the past quarter century, what has been far more crippling than domestic opposition has been Russian Protestant hemorrhaging in the form of migration to the West. In the former Soviet Union substantial numbers of non-believers and nominal believers came to faith through the witness and preaching of indigenous Protestants and foreign missionaries. But total Protestant numbers have not increased appreciably because of large-scale departures to the West
“Total Protestant numbers have not increased appreciably because of large-scale departures to the West.”
Over the past 25 years, despite negative press, a hostile majority faith and state, and demographic losses, Russian Protestants have still managed to develop a remarkable range of initiatives that have made a positive impact out of all proportion to their size. Russian Evangelicals have made significant strides forward in church planting, theological education, Sunday school instruction of youth, Christian journalism, and Christian publishing. Especially impressive, given their modest numbers, has been the growth of Russian evangelical compassionate ministries, in particular work with children at risk (street children, orphans, youth who have aged out of orphanages, and teenage single mothers), prisoners, ex-offenders, alcoholics, and drug abusers.
Unfortunately, space does not permit the treatment of many other issues related to post-Soviet church life that deserve attention: the diminishing strength of the Catholic Church in Poland; the travails and successes of Catholicism in the Russian Republic and elsewhere; the remarkable vitality of all churches in Ukraine (Eastern Rite Catholic, Protestant, and—despite its divisions—Orthodox); the persistence of secularization, especially in Estonia, Latvia, and the Czech Republic; the religious dimensions of the fallout from the Yugoslav Civil War; and the impact on churches from the Islamic resurgence in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
In closing this all-too-brief reflection on 25 years of post-Soviet Christianity, a comparative perspective may prove instructive. We are all bound to some degree by the blinders of our particular time and place. I, for example, in my professional life have sought to shed light on the promise and peril of Christian life and practice in Soviet and post-Soviet space. But my efforts to call attention to violations of the free exercise of faith in the region have been from the vantage point of one living in the comfort of a country that historically has respected freedom of religion—often imperfectly to be sure, but with a better than average track record. Given my time and place, I have tended to view the waxing and waning of state and societal strictures on freedom of conscience in the East through the prism of Western, democratic norms of respect for civil liberties—in theory, if not always in practice.
“I have sought to shed light on the promise and peril of Christian life and practice in Soviet and post-Soviet space.”
What is needed is the placement of infringements upon the free exercise of faith within a broader global and historical context. And in that light, sadly, we have to conclude that in most countries and in most centuries up to the present, the right to freely believe and practice that belief has frequently been violated. It has not been, and it is not now, out of the ordinary for states and majority faiths to disregard the religious preferences of minorities. Throughout history and to the present, religious intolerance has been—and is—far more prevalent than tolerance. Heaven forbid that this pattern of religious discrimination and persecution across the globe and across the centuries be taken as an excuse for the precarious state of religious rights. Rather, it should be a reminder to all believers who cherish religious liberty for all that protecting freedom of conscience requires, in addition to human effort, a call upon the Almighty for His blessing in this uphill battle.
