For the real influence of religion on the state of society, it is not those who passively agree to be identified with a particular confession that matter, but those who listen to sermons and actively participate in parish life.

The tradition of demonstrating closeness to the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) was inherited by the modern Russian government from its founder, Boris Yeltsin. Trying to create the traditions and rituals of the new Russian government, he purposefully pushed away from everything Soviet, relying on what was condemned under the Soviet government. One should not forget the then popular thesis about "the Russia we have lost." It was assumed that the rejection of state atheism would return Russia to the state it was in before the Bolsheviks, i.e. make it an Orthodox country.

The undisguised desire to emulate the United States, where the level of religiosity of the population is extremely high, also played a role, and therefore, despite the separation of the state from the Church, a politician not only cannot be anticlerical, but must demonstrate religiosity in one way or another.

More than 20 years have passed since then. The ostentatious churching of officials and security forces has become something commonplace, while the level of churching of the population over these years has not reached American or even European indicators.

In the Orthodox Church, Easter is the most important holiday and church attendance on these days is the highest in the year. But, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 4.3 million people took part in Easter services in 2017. The population of Russia is 143.5 million people, and it is easy to calculate that 3% of the population went to church on Easter night.

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Of course, you can include as believers all those who wear crosses, stick icons in their cars and sometimes go to church to light a candle. This is beneficial to the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, it is interesting for sociologists who study the religiosity of the population, but in a practical sense it does not give anything. For the real influence of religion on the state of society, it is not those who passively agree to be classified as belonging to a certain confession that matter, but those who listen to sermons, actively participate in parish life and, especially, do not miss holidays important for their confession.

Therefore, it is easy to see the difference between the influence of, for example, the Catholic Church in Poland or religion in general in the USA and what is happening in Russia. Despite the long-standing calls of the ROC leadership to regularly and constantly attend churches, only 3% of our fellow citizens do so. In a practical sense, this is the mobilization resource of the ROC in its maximum value. It is obvious that the real influence of the ROC leadership on the population of the country is even less: one thing is the Easter maximum observed once a year, and another is the attendance of a regular Sunday service and, accordingly, the audience of the sermon heard there.

Relying on such an outspoken minority does not give anything in an electoral sense, and even the opposite: by actively playing into the hands of the church-going minority of the population and persistently demonstrating its clerical sympathies, the political elite is in fact opposing itself to the overwhelming non-church-going majority of Russian citizens.

One can understand the Russian Orthodox Church, which uses the religious sentiments of the country's top leadership to its maximum advantage, but it is difficult to understand the logic of the leadership itself: it is very strange to demonstratively show solidarity with a minority of the population, pretending to rely on the majority. If even in Russia in 1917, where the majority of the population was truly religious, the Church could not help the tsarist government in a difficult time for it, then how can the Church, which is capable of mobilizing only 3% of the population, help the government in 2017?

A separate topic for discussion is the effectiveness of investments. Since 1988, when the authorities stopped interfering with the Church and began to help it, astronomical amounts of money have been invested in religious propaganda. In recent years, the country has been living in a religious fever: new churches are being built, there is constant religious propaganda at all levels, the Church demands access to schools and universities - and against the backdrop of all this, we have been observing the stabilization of the church-going population year after year at the level of statistical error.

Isn't it time to look at the relationship between the state and the Church from a realistic perspective?

Author – President of the Institute for Development and Modernization of Public Relations, Yekaterinburg

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