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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.
I have to admit I don't quite see what the incentive would be here. Having "Godfather: Patriarch Kirill" on your kid's birth certificate? I don't think the demographics who need the incentive really hold the church in such a high regard.
I don't know the specific demographic composition of Russia, bur Orthodox culture is still a very big part of their society. To assume social status doesn't matter to them in religious terms when it still retains a huge amount of cultural capital in the country is placing a large bet against common sense. It's possible I could be wrong here, but I 'highly' doubt it. And at the very least, it doesn't hurt their effort even if it doesn't help it.
According to the latest polls, while up to 70% of Russians consider themselves Orthodox, 6% of those have been to the church within the past month, and 10% commit to fasts. Polls are subject to selection factors, but we have a specific number of those who were in church for Orthodox Christmas in 2024 - 1.4m people, which is about 1% of Russians.
Anecdotally, I live here and while I know a few people who were part of the faith as children, I know no one who has ever mentioned adhering to any religious ritual as an adult, aside from the universally enjoyable ones like eating the Easter pastries or painting eggs. Weddings rarely involve the church, too.
I have got the impression that unless you are extremely urban and Blue in USA, your circle of acquaintances will include practicing Christians to the point where they will not stand out. In Russia, the bubbles of atheists and the Orthodox do not appear to mix as much.
My observations fit my theory that the Russian Orthodox Church is largely grift and a tentacle of generic pro-state ideology.
I actually thought you were going to cite Anne Applebaum who's pointed out similar statistics that I'm aware of. Most Russians as I understand it are cultural Christians in the same sense Americans are cultural Christians in that they celebrate Christmas as a consumer holiday, not as a way to celebrate the glory of Jesus. That doesn't mean Christianity doesn't have a significant sway in both countries. The major reason the US foreign policy establishment is in hock to Israel is because of the massive amount of financial and religious support given to them by the Evangelicals and Christian Zionists in our country, both of which are heretical. That testifies to the institutional power an even secularized Christian society has in advancing their religious causes on the international stage.
You may be surprised to know that I've never formally attended Mass or a church before (in a devout ceremonial sense). Culturally, Christianity was a 'huge' influence in my local community as is Catholicism specifically in the case of my family. It is so huge in fact, that the secular community borrows heavily from the norms and habits largely introduced by Christians as part of their daily lives, without even recognizing it. You may say that that's not unique to Christianity, but Christianity has been the standard bearer for most of our practices from the day this country was founded. I'd argue that's probably historically the case in your country as well.
As I've gotten older, I've become even more attracted to the religion in the sense of a semi-devout or at least lay practitioner. That is to say someone that does more than just profess the faith and pays lip service to it but partakes in the demands and activity of it's more serious adherents. To call your tradition a "grift" I think is an insult to your history. That it's an ideology in league with functioning of the state system isn't a surprise because that hasn't been a historical anathema anywhere in the world and to any religion that's ever coevolved with state institutions.
I did not call "my tradition" a grift, and certainly not the broader kind of traditions that stem from Christianity without being explicitly recognized as religious. I called the church, as in the government-adjacent institution, a grift.
Regarding Christmas as a consumer holiday, it might provide some perspective that while in the Catholic West, as I understand, Christmas is synonymous with the winter holidays and New Year's Eve is an afterthought, in Russia New Year's Eve is synonymous with the winter holidays and Christmas is an afterthought. It is not nearly popular enough to be a consumer holiday.
I don’t know how you can speak meaningfully of Orthodox Christianity without the church. That’s like speaking about governance without the state. By this logic most of Christian history the world over should be discarded and throw on the scrap heap as a grift.
The US in particular is still dominated by non-denominational Protestantism. Calling yourself Catholic in certain areas some of my relatives live in will leave people scratching their heads or looking at you with a raised eyebrow. In both Protestant and Catholic cases, a true sense of bound up spirituality in the religion exists only in pockets across the country, the same as I’d wager it does in Russia. The average American shares much more in common with the average Russian in that neither is anywhere near as religious as the average Jew in Israel or Muslim in the Middle East. If you asked me to say the Our Father in ecclesiastical Latin I couldn’t do it unlike a Muslim who could give Salat in Arabic (which was already given by Muhammad in his native Arabic, save the classical-modern distinction).
You can speak of governance without the state pretty well. There's the king far away in the capital, and then there's your local lord who actually determined the minutia of your life. Totalizing nation-states are recent.
And maybe I'm not very well-versed in Christian theology (rather, not at all), but I don't recall Jesus Christ saying anything about the Pope and the cardinals and Patriarchs being very important for Christianity. Didn't people believe, back then after his death, that the Second Coming would happen within their lifetimes?
I'll take you up on your word. Now that you mention it, by the way, I realize I have no idea who actually runs the church in the US.
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