Church, state and society in the countries of Eastern Christianity [thematic selection] / / Pro et Contra. 2013. N3-4 (59), N5 (60).

The magazine Pro et Contra, published by the Carnegie Moscow Center, carried out an interesting and ambitious project last year: a selection of articles was published in two issues under the main topic "Church, State and society in the countries of Eastern Christianity". Separate review articles are devoted to Orthodoxy and Orthodox churches in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Armenia.1 In addition, the collection includes two additional articles that describe the Orthodox Church in Russia from different points of view, as well as a more general, methodological article that deals in general with the methods of such descriptions.2
Just note two points. First, the relevance of the journal's project. In the context of the growing religious factor in the modern world, including in Russia, where the Russian Orthodox Church dominates - both statistically and in the media - coverage of the religious situation in different national contexts, but within the framework of one, Orthodox, confessional-

1." Russia: the Official Church chooses Power " by Svetlana Solodovnik," Ukrainian Orthodoxy and the Ukrainian Project "by Viktor Yelensky," The Belarusian Orthodox Church in the Shadow of the State" by Natalia Vasilevich, " The Georgian Church: the embodiment of National Unity or an opposition force?" Silvia Serrano, "God in the border zones" Vitalie Sprincean, "Romania: The Orthodox Church after Communism" Christian Vasile, "Bulgaria: the Invisible Church" Tony Nikolov, "The Serbian Church and the National Idea" Maria Falina, "The Greek Church: Waiting for a Dialogue with Society" Alexey Bogdanovsky, " The Church - post-secular or post-sacral" by Hovhannes Hovhannisyan.

2." The Russian Orthodox Church as the Majority Church " by Alexander Verkhovsky," The Russian Orthodox Church: the Church as a Symbol of Desired Integrity "by Boris Dubin," The Church, Ethno-Nationalism and the State " by Nikolai Mitrokhin.

page 294
It seems to be a very important task for the whole family, because only a broad international scope allows us to get out of the "provincial narrowness" and identify both the typical-general and the individual-special. Secondly, the published articles address many aspects of the general topic and contain rich material for reflection and analysis, which should be recognized as an important positive result achieved by the editorial board of the journal: a whole "catalog" of specific topics, questions and assessments, and, accordingly, the directions of necessary research. This is a good application that should encourage specialists to work systematically in the relevant field.

And now we will try to formulate the reactions that arise after reading the above texts-individually and in general.

The first reader reaction concerns consistency. On the one hand, it is noticeable that all country studies articles contain answers to a set of questions: the number of Orthodox and adherents of other faiths, church-state relations, church property issues, the presence of the Orthodox Church in the educational system, its relations with other religious associations, church and politics, church and nationalism/xenophobia, media scandals, etc. other information. This set of specified aspects, which are covered by all authors, creates a certain primary consistency in the presentation of the material and, accordingly, potential comparability, the possibility of a panoramic view of various situations in the general thematic space. This is certainly good and useful. However, the next step has not been taken: no serious comparative analysis has been presented. And therefore, the consistency is obtained, so to speak, half-hearted.

What is the reason for this? Most likely, this is due to the fact that the texts offered to us are not so much scientific as journalistic articles. Their authors are mostly journalists or specialists of a "broader profile", that is, not actually religious scholars. And in the case when the author is a profile specialist, the task assigned to him by the editorial board, if necessary, orients him to "answer questions", and not to offer his own - different and, possibly, more complex-interpretation of the topic.

page 295
As a result, the work on identifying both the typical and the special is left entirely to the reader, although the differences in the situations described are sometimes so striking that they simply require special analysis and some generalizing conclusions (this applies to "church pluralism", the presence of the church in the educational space, the nature of its political participation, and some others aspects of the overall theme). The consequence of this is a peculiar effect produced in the reader's mind by country-specific articles: the general given angle creates the impression of an almost uniform picture, which, however, is doubled, tripled, etc.due to the specific facts that indicate national specifics.

In this case, we are faced with what can be called a "natural defect" of the media in their approach to complex socio-cultural subjects (even when journalists attract specialists). Unlike the scientific approach, which involves analyzing the real complexity of the phenomenon under study using a clearly articulated methodology (assuming other methodologies), the media approach implements a different strategy: a simplified implicit scheme is set, which is filled with empirical material collected by a journalist or provided to invited "scientists". In other words, the media approach is by definition ideological, which in principle is "forbidden" to the scientific approach (although it is never free from some hidden or residual ideology).

Most likely, the editorial board of the journal Pro et Contra did not set itself scientific tasks, but only sought to collect and provide the reader with primary material on a relevant topic, using the resources of various authors who are more or less familiar with the relevant issues. Therefore, it has limited itself to the half-hearted consistency discussed above, and thus fulfilled the mission of the media. And this is in a good sense a provocation for religious studies, which, unfortunately, has not yet reached the hands of systematic work in the relevant direction.

At the same time, it should be noted that, while remaining within the media approach, the editorial board of the journal also identified a different dimension of the topic under consideration, which is related to-

page 296
It is connected with the methodology of its consideration. Thus, the editorial board partially abandoned the axiomatics of the initially given scheme, since it gave room for criticism and discussion. We are referring first of all to the article by N. Mitrokhin, who calls into question the relevance of the sociology of mass surveys for understanding real religious and social processes and in this sense stands in contrast to B. Dubin, who broadcasts such surveys without any problematization of them. Mitrokhin draws attention to the complexity of such a phenomenon as a specific religious community, which requires not only and not so much quantitative as qualitative research. In Dubin's article, on the contrary, we encounter what can be called "sociological positivism", that is, the naive "natural attitude" (think of Husserl), according to which a standard sociological survey gives us knowledge about "the world as it is". This kind of naivety has long been outdated, and therefore Mitrokhin's methodological criticism deserves the most serious attention. Especially if we take into account the fact that the "figures" constantly offered by sociological services have a certain magical power, under the spell of which experts, authorities, and religious institutions themselves fall. Figures in this case act as (scientific) facts, but the facts themselves do not mean anything, the meaning depends on the interpretation, which, in turn, depends on certain theoretical models.

At the same time, this very important dispute about the relevance of opinion polls is not only not resolved, but also not discussed in the journal's pages. The problem itself is not raised: what methods of studying and describing the phenomena and processes under consideration should be considered the most adequate? The authors ' statements hang in the air. The rich material presented is not generalized in any way, and the ratings remain a subjective matter for the authors.

Let us repeat: the main drawback of journalistic descriptions and assessments of contemporary religious dynamics is that they are carried out in an implicit conceptual framework, which obviously determines both the angles of consideration and the conclusions and qualifications that follow from it. In other words, the very concepts used to describe hair dryers-

page 297
exchanges are not problematized. But this means that both the choice of factual material and its interpretation are arbitrary.

The scientific approach, on the contrary, cannot do without such problematizations.

What is a "church"? On the one hand, a religious institution that is present and operates in the public space through its official representatives, and on the other hand, a community that includes a certain number of micro - communities. What is "religiousness"? On the one hand, what is produced by institutional religion, and on the other - what is produced by individual carriers of religiosity themselves. What is "political involvement of the church"? On the one hand, the active or passive reaction of the church (both as an institution and as a community) to political processes, and on the other - the consideration and use of the church factor in political processes (again, active or passive) from the political actors themselves. In other words, each of these issues should be considered in at least two aspects. This is the primary complexity set by the phenomenon itself. We do not have clear concepts and their corresponding "objects/subjects", whether it is" church"," religiosity "or"political participation".

But neither do we have an a priori, "natural" evaluation criterion that "tells" us what is good and what is bad when we talk about church, religiosity, and political participation. In other words, such a criterion does not exist for an analyst engaged in scientific research, but it is usually present in the mind of a publicist who proceeds from a certain scale of values that he is guided by.

So there are cases of thoughtlessness. Take, for example, a fairly simple question about a state or national church: is it good or bad, "legal" or" illegal " in a modern society where the right to religious freedom is recognized? If the author is outraged that the church is seeking such a status in an Orthodox country, he should clarify whether the negative assessment of the possibility of such a status is related to the fact that this status will hinder the observance of religious freedom, or to the fact that this status is unacceptable in itself. For example, in the UK and not-

page 298
in other European countries, there are state churches and at the same time the religious freedom of citizens is respected, and this means that one does not contradict the other in principle. Following an elementary logic, one can negatively assess the desire of the Orthodox Church of a certain country to acquire a state or semi-state status on the grounds that human rights in the field of religious freedom are not respected in this country and that this church explicitly or covertly opposes such observance (citing relevant facts and evidence). However, the established Church status itself can only be negatively evaluated arbitrarily, based on very subjective ideas and preferences. But this is exactly the assessment that some authors of the collection in question have.

More complex is the question of the relationship between "church" and"society." For example, the concept of "civil society" creates expectations that the "church" as a non-state institution and as a kind of voluntary community is part of this social space located between the state and the individual. Accordingly, it is considered that the church should "respond" to social and sometimes political issues, either through public rhetoric or through concrete material actions. However, it should be said that these expectations arise precisely in the theoretical paradigm of civil society and always need contextualization. If we are talking about analytics, evaluation in the mode of ought is inappropriate. For the construct of "civil society" is not universal and, as a rule, does not work well in non-Western contexts, including the zone of dominance of Eastern Orthodoxy. If we want to understand the specifics of certain religious and social processes, we must focus on the relevant historical and contemporary contexts and clearly separate analytical research from ideologically loaded qualifications. Unfortunately, in journalism, regardless of its "sign", there is a confusion of these angles, which is also typical for some articles in this publication.

At the same time, I would like to pay special attention to article A. Verkhovsky, which is

page 299
a different way of working with the material: this is an example of professional analysis that is not ideological and at the same time takes into account the latest conceptual approaches to the consideration of religious processes. In addition, Verkhovsky, focusing on the Russian situation, compares it in a number of aspects with other national situations described by other authors, so that there is at least a minimal comparative effect.

In this brief review, we did not touch on the specific content of the published articles, 3 since this would require not only a much larger volume, but also, so to speak, a double (and also very detailed) analysis - both of the presented texts and the problems they are devoted to. In fact, this is a matter for a whole "team" of professional researchers. And this is exactly what I would like to say in conclusion. More precisely, the fact that such a ready-made team simply does not exist - due to the poverty of the Russian religious studies science, which currently does not have a sufficient number of specialists, much less scientific schools that are seriously engaged in the topic that the selection of articles in the Pro et Contra magazine is considered in this review. This is a very serious problem, given that it has not only academic, but also cultural, social and even political dimensions.

Regardless of how Eastern Christianity or Orthodoxy is understood - as a confessional family, as a cultural substratum, or as a possible factor in some" civilizational " consolidation-the typological similarity of societies with the Orthodox religious dominant is obvious. And this similarity is evident regardless of whether these societies experienced "communist captivity" and what was the nature and duration of this captivity. And there is an unquestionable truth in the concept of the late S. Huntington, who referred "Orthodox societies" to a different civilizational paradigm compared to the so-called "Western"one.

At the same time, it is important to understand something else: modern "Orthodox societies" (that is, societies with an Orthodox religious dominant) differ and sometimes very much. In these

3. The journal is publicly available on the Carnegie Moscow Center website.

page 300
societies loaded with archaism are undergoing relentless modernization processes. Accordingly, the Orthodox churches are also being modernized - or at least they are facing the challenge of modernization and are forced to respond to it (as A. Verkhovsky rightly points out in his article). Therefore, the study of current processes in the zone of "Eastern Christianity" should be focused not so much on detecting the inertia of the archaic, but on identifying the latest post-secular trends and processes that reveal new religious and social configurations. In other words, it is necessary to question the old ideological schemes and corresponding research perspectives in order to give place to a new vision. But it is science that should do this, and not "normal" (according to Kuhn), but innovative, offering new paradigms. And only after that, the relevant journalism will part with outdated, no longer relevant approaches.

page 301

Permanent link to this publication: