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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.
To provide a contrast in how I think about this: In people’s daily habits, lifestyle and rituals in Russia, would you say they take after the influence of Communism or Orthodox Christianity more, in either an explicit or an implied sense. Because if I remember correctly (although I can’t recall the title of the book), it was either after Stalin’s death or the dissolution of the USSR that Russians found a great sense of relief and refuge in going back the historic traditions of their church. Whether is was impactful on a grand scale or lasted very long is beside the point.
What I’m getting at is that even if most Russians aren’t explicit practitioners of the faith or attend church regularly, I would still argue their lives are full of the trappings of what Orthodox Christianity has left behind for them in the way they live their lives. You can argue it’s not meaningful if you want. You can say Orthodox Christianity is a mile wide and an inch deep if you like. Sure. Most people aren’t ideologues to an extreme extent and only have brief moments of their lives where they experience such commitments to ideas, perhaps under trying circumstances. But take away Orthodox Christianity and think of how much of the history of Russia you erase, if not the country itself, in every dimension.
I don't know about the church. I would assume that after Stalin's death, Russians found a great sense of relief and refuge mostly because Stalin's time was characterized by political purges of anyone who slightly misstepped on the party line. Not necessarily in the direction of religion. As for the dissolution of the USSR, well, it is widely reported that things just went to complete shit in general for a few years after that. Maybe half of the country rushed to the church while the other rushed to the bottle (or worse). I don't have the statistics. What I know is that while I was baptized, neither my parents nor grandparents have been particularly religious in all the time I remember them. No Lent, no special meaning given to Orthodox Christmas, etc.
Disentangling the entire concept of "conventional morality" as we know it today from Christianity (in general) is admittedly hard. And religion had been important before communism. And we do say "oh Lord" in the moments of exasperation. It's in the language. But all of that is distant from churches, and very distant from high-ranking clergy who pose in gold-laden robes, drive luxury cars and bless tanks that drive out to the west. (Originally my disagreement was about the notion that the Patriarch's promise to be godfather to third children would have any sway over those who aren't already in the most churchgoing percentile and having 5 kids.)
(From what I heard, the saints many Orthodox Russians pray to are basically rebranded local pagan deities. So take the Christianity away from that, and how much would you really lose?)
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