parliament unveiled two amendments to the religious freedom act that
echo these sentiments.
At a World Council of Russian Peoples in 2001, several speakers noted the
spread of alien religious beliefs and cults in Russia. The Russian Parliament
passed bills restricting the freedom of foreign proselytizing in Russia—aimed at
Western Christianity, not Islam. Most Russians strongly
supported this defense
of the native faith against outside influences, whose goals and intentions were
suspect. The Orthodox Church therefore makes it difficult for Catholic,
Protestant, and especially Evangelical churches to proselytize in Russia, open
churches, or organize. Once again
traditional national religion becomes a key
vehicle for cultural pride and nationalism; this phenomenon entirely parallels the
role such pride plays in the Muslim world
when the Muslim community
confronts a rich and powerful West, similarly perceived to be operating to
weaken Islam. This is not about religion, but about identity, tradition:
Proudly, [the Orthodox Church] points to a 1,005-year-old tradition of
faith, liturgy, music, saints and iconology. While that does not necessarily
make it a state church, many within Orthodoxy see themselves as the state
religion. They argue that Russia can only be Orthodox and that
historically it has been a state church.
The Russian state is thus
revivifying its nationalism, national traditions, and
glories in particular through the magnificent cultural vehicle of the Russian
Orthodox Church.
Christian themes are now restored to the once-atheist Soviet political scene;
few politicians in the post-Soviet period fail to invoke the importance of
religious values. Grigory Yavlinski, the head of the political movement Yabloko,
commented that “lack of faith is the prologue to corruption and bureaucracy,
which produce terrorism…. Economic reforms in a nation that does not believe
in God are totally impossible.”
The
writer Valery Ganichev, chairman of the Russian Union of Writers,
proclaimed his fears that “Russia is cloning the cells of immorality that it
grasped from Western culture” and called for popular demand that the
government “help save the nation from depravity.” These tensions were further
reinforced by the bitter so-called Uniate controversy, still ongoing, between
Catholicism and Orthodoxy over who should control the Nestorian and
Monophysite churches in Ukraine and Belorussia—an
issue now inevitably
entangled in the geopolitical struggles between Russia and the West.