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Ukraine had over half the surviving churches, and 2/3 of convents by the the fall of the USSR. Sergius pledged total loyalty to the state and is goals, feeding believers to hungry quotas until only a few hundred priests remained (100k were executed). When Stalin (responsible for many of those deaths, and a former seminarian) rehabilitated the church during WWII, the NKVD staffed most of it. Today, the Russian Orthodox Church serves the state, not Christ; he current patriarch worked for the KGB from the 70s on. This is no more survival than if the literal anti-Christ headed it. I pray the church cease to exist, like the blessed martyrs of the Assyrian Church of the East in China and the wider East, than actively damn its followers like today.
I've heard of Patriarch Kirill's collusion with Russian state agencies before but wondered if that was just a western smear and accusation against him. But in a way, it just repeats the same pattern most Christian states have done throughout the centuries. There was always massive interplay between state and religion. The religious authorities were always seen as a keeper of public opinion and the psychological, spiritual and material welfare of the people. Any ruling political elite/class had to be seen as having the approval of the religious body. I don't really share your opinion on this but I do understand it.
Maybe Russia could reverse their demographic decline with what Ilia II did in Georgia by promising to baptize every third child. That seemed to stem and reverse the population drop off. Being godfather to millions of children across the country is quite a job for the clergy however. Good luck on the logistics with that.
As far as I know, Georgia is much much much more religious than Russia, in the actual religion sense. Religious authorities doing stuff like that matters in societies which care about religion for the sake of religion, not for the sake of larping.
Could be. But the fact that millions of Russians are spiritually apathetic has no impact on the observation that Orthodox Christianity matters enormously to them as a matter of their culture. Just because Russians aren't as committed as Jesus as the average Muslim should be with Osama doesn't mean they're faking it when it comes to the importance of their faith to them. Otherwise, try blowing up a Russian cathedral and not expecting a response. You'll quickly find out how much they're LARPing.
According to that logic America's reaction to 9/11 showed that their true God is the God of Capitalism.
"How would the country react if someone blew up a public place of theirs" is an atrocious measure of their dedication to that particular public place's importance in each citizen's lives, specifically. You don't have to be religious to dislike someone blowing up religious buildings in your country.
Now, if someone blew up a mosque, I can see many non-Muslim Russians being apathetic to that.
Believe it or not people ‘do’ make that argument, and it rings pretty true to most astute observers. It’s one of the things that sucks about this society.
It’s the one people use every single day. It’s the one that lets you know you live in a bad neighborhood when people dump trash on the road or shit on the sidewalk. If some gangbanger tags the back wall of a local supermarket, nobody here gives a shit. If someone were to do that to your historical church you’d better prepare for an enormous lynch mob to come after you.
Well, it doesn't ring true to me. I think blowing up a trade center is a big deal whether you worship money or not.
But people don't use it every single day. That's kind of my entire point. The reaction to a historical church's defacement proves its historical value, not spiritual.
And I really don't think there would be an enormous lynch mob. Cops, at best, if someone saw it. If Russian Christians are capable of organizing in mobs, lynch or otherwise, I had never seen it. Nothing like that one Muslim holiday that has them fill the streets facing the mosques.
When I hear of any activism from Russian Christians it is usually top-down state-adjacent bullshit like canceling permits for Halloween cons for vaguely-danced-around reasons. Another example of the reasons for my general disdain towards ROC.
And not everybody’s relationship to Christianity is devout or spiritual, which is my point. Mine is cultural and heavily intellectual. Prayer and attendance is something I’m clearly spiritually deficient in which I desire to greatly improve.
Okay. What I observe is that for most Russians, the most relationship they have to Christianity is owning a cross from their childhood baptism and maybe a habit of perfunctory praying when frustrated with something, if their family was religious. Instead of devout, spiritual, cultural or intellectual, I'd call it rudimentary.
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