Out of phase

A seminar was held at the Carnegie Moscow Center on the topic “Religious organizations and the possibilities of ideological design in modern Russia.” The director of the SOVA information and analytical center, Alexander Verkhovsky, who made a presentation, outlined the paradoxical situation that has developed in post-Soviet Russia. On the one hand, there is a certain demand for ideology both from the authorities and from society. There is also a religious organization - the Russian Orthodox Church (to a certain extent Muslim, the efforts of other faiths are almost invisible in the public space) - ready to become a supplier of ideology. However, things are not going well. A. Verkhovsky sees the reasons for this state of affairs in the fact that the interest of the church is mainly anti-modernization, and the government, for all its traditionalist rhetoric, still sees itself as a modernizing force. In addition, the authorities are sensitive to any other bearer of authority other than themselves, and they do not need the church as an independent actor at all. However, according to the speaker, power cannot be concentrated indefinitely; someday this process will have to be reversed, and then, subject to the rapprochement of church and society, the church’s ideological project can be successful.

Along the way, the meeting participants—sociologists, religious scholars, and political scientists—discussed a number of other questions: why, despite all the selfishness of the ideology of “sovereign democracy,” does the church have no need to either criticize this ideology or try to ennoble the political interests of the authorities? Why are behavioral indicators invariably lower in today's supposedly Orthodox society than in Soviet atheistic times? Is it possible to “convert” into each other the three realities in which modern Russian people exist - the state, the church and civil society?