Orthodox Theology and the Politics of Transition

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, I have been moderately surprised at the level of commentary in the Western media about the role Orthodoxy plays in both countries. I suspect we will see a spate of new books on this intersection of theology, culture, and war. Indeed, we are already seeing some, as in this new book: Orthodox Christianity and the Politics of Transition by Tornike Metreveli (Routledge, 2022), 196pp. 

About this new book the publisher tells us this:

This book discusses in detail how Orthodox Christianity was involved in and influenced political transition in Ukraine, Serbia, and Georgia after the collapse of communism. Based on original research, including extensive interviews with clergy and parishioners as well as historical, legal, and policy analysis, the book argues that the nature of the involvement of churches in post-communist politics depended on whether the interests of the church (for example, in education, the legal system or economic activity) were accommodated or threatened: if accommodated, churches confined themselves to the sacred domain; if threatened, they engaged in daily politics. If churches competed with each other for organizational interests, they evoked the support of nationalism while remaining within the religious domain.

Religion and National Identity in Eastern Europe

This collection, set for release in early August, features the respected historian Barbara Skinner and a series of other international experts looking at the complicated relations between various Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches and their respective and often changing national homelands--especially Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine: Entangled Interactions between Religion and National Consciousness in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Yoko Aoshima (Academic Studies Press, August 2020), 220pp.

About this collection, whose table of contents you can read here, the publisher tells us this:

This book elucidates the complicated relationship between religion and national consciousness in the modern world, highlighting various cases within Central and Eastern Europe. Through these analyses, contributors demonstrate how religion, far from disappearing, strongly impacted the emerging national consciousness. Starting with the pre-modern era, essays examine the long-term transformation of religious, political, and social situations of the region. In addition, the book considers the impact of imperial powers, which tended to be linked with a universal religion. Light is also shed on the multifaceted nature of nations, which contribute to a new vision of the historical transformation of the region that enriches the general theories of nationalism.

Orthodox Secularisms and Entanglements

Are there more tedious phrases on the lips of Christians today than "secularism" or "secular humanism"? The whingeing about these developments, which are rarely treated with any attendance upon questions of economics or the role Christianity itself has played in bringing us to the perceived present position, is not only off-putting but also misplaced. We would do well to meditate for a while upon Benjamin Fong's recent observation (discussed in some detail here) that

there is perhaps no more confused assertion, for a critical theorist, than that capitalist society is becoming increasingly 'secular'.

The situation, then, is not at all straightforward even in the Western world, where complaints about "secularism" usually mean nothing more than "declining church attendance" and increasing criticism of Christian beliefs and practices by people (e.g., Beto O'Rourke) who are NQOUCD ("not quite our class, dear").

How much more different and no less complex are the situations faced by several Orthodox countries in Europe treated in a recent book: Tobias Koellner, ed., Orthodox Religion and Politics in Contemporary Eastern Europe: On Multiple Secularisms and Entanglements (Routledge, 2018), 274pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

This book explores the relationship between Orthodox religion and politics in Eastern Europe, Russia and Georgia. It demonstrates how as these societies undergo substantial transformation Orthodox religion can be both a limiting and an enabling factor, how the relationship between religion and politics is complex, and how the spheres of religion and politics complement, reinforce, influence, and sometimes contradict each other. Considering a range of thematic issues, with examples from a wide range of countries with significant Orthodox religious groups, and setting the present situation in its full historical context the book provides a rich picture of a subject which has been too often oversimplified.

Canonical Considerations of the Russian Church-State Relationship

The unwieldy title of this new book is perhaps fitting in some ways insofar as the relationship it treats is, to put it mildly, unwieldy also: Alexander Ponomariov, The Visible Religion: The Russian Orthodox Church and her Relations with State and Society in Post-Soviet Canon Law (1992–2015) (Peter Lang, 2017), 362pp.

The publisher tells us the following about this new book:

«The Visible Religion» is an antithesis to Thomas Luckmann’s concept. The Russian Orthodox Church in post-Soviet canon law suggests a comprehensive cultural program of modernity. Researched through the paradigms of multiple modernities and post-secularity, the ROC appears to be quite modern: she reflects on herself and the secular environment, employs secular language, appeals to public reason, the human rights discourse, and achievements of modern science. The fact that the ROC rejects some liberal Western developments should not be understood in the way that the ROC rejects modernity in general. As a legitimate player in the public sphere, the ROC puts forward her own – Russian Orthodox – model of modernity, which combines transcendence and immanence, theological and social reasoning, an afterlife strategy and cooperation with secular actors, whereby eschatology and the human rights discourse become two sides of the same coin.

The Chaldean Catholic Church

For nearly 15 years, to think of the plight of Iraqi Christians is to weep. The unjust war that was waged in that country in 2003 did incalculable damage to Christians there and in neighboring countries. The Christians of Iraq, like those of Iran, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere in the Arab and Islamic world, remain largely unknown by too many North Americans in particular.

A book coming out later this year will help to change all that: Kristian Girling, The Chaldean Catholic Church: Modern History, Ecclesiology and Church-State Relations (Routledge, 2017), 224pp.

About this study we are told by the publisher:

This book provides a modern historical study of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Iraq from 2003 to 2013, against a background analysis of the origins and ecclesiological development of the Chaldean community from the sixteenth century onwards.

The book offers an insight into the formation of Chaldean ecclesiological identity and organisation in the context of the Chaldeans as a community originating from the ecclesial traditions of the Church of the East and as an Eastern Catholic Church in union with the Holy See. The book argues for the gradual and consistent development of a Chaldean identity grounded and incarnated in the Mesopotamian-Iraqi environment, yet open to engaging with cultures throughout the Middle East and West Asia and, especially since 2003, to Europe, North America and Australasia. It also examines the effects of religious and administrative policies of the governors of Mesopotamia-Iraq on the Chaldeans, from their formation in the sixteenth century until the installation of the new Chaldean patriarch, Louis Raphael I Sako, in March 2013. Furthermore, the book provides a unique analysis of the history of Iraq, by placing the Chaldeans fully into that narrative for the first time.

Providing a thorough overview of the history of the Chaldeans and an in-depth assessment of how the 2003 invasion has affected them, this book will be a key resource for students and scholars of Middle East Studies, Modern History, History of Christianity, as well as for anyone seeking to understand the modern status of Christians in Iraq and the wider Middle East.

Christians in the American Public : Notes on Neuhaus

As a loyal subject of Her Britannic Majesty's Canadian Dominion who is also a permanent resident of these United States of America, I find myself writing between Dominion Day (July 1) and Independence Day (July 4th) in the midst of another election campaign, with more and more Christians reporting a feeling that America is no longer a hospitable place for the faith, and with Eastern Christians in particular still struggling how to relate to the various states in which they find themselves. In such a context, let us consider for a moment how Christians, Eastern and Western, can engage the public square in this country by considering how one very prominent Christian did just that.

I just finished reading the wonderfully written biography by Randy Boyagoda, Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square (Image Books, 2015), 480pp. For those interested in the figure of Neuhaus, or the questions of how one Christian chose to engage the public square and such issues as racial relations in the south, the Vietnam war, the Iraq wars, abortion, and much else, this book will be fascinating. It also contains much on American Lutheranism (in which Neuhaus was a pastor for many years) and American Catholicism (to which Neuhaus converted in 1990 and in which he was ordained a priest in 1991) in the critical years from 1960 until the end of the last decade. It is, finally, a splendid example of how to write a critically intelligent biography of a controversial figure. (In a personal conversation I had last year at Baylor with Robert Louis Wilken, who was Neuhaus's oldest and closest friend for half a century, Wilken told me the biography was simply first-rate not only for its treatment of Neuhaus but also for the accuracy with which it rendered any number of controversial issues, episodes, and personages.)

Neuhaus grew up in the Ottawa Valley in Pembroke, Ontario, the son of a manse, his father being a pastor in Lutheranism's Missouri Synod. He would go on to bounce around the US in Texas and Missouri, inter alia, before spending his entire adult life in New York as a pastor and writer, where he got to know such Orthodox figures at Fr. Alexander Schmemann. He was a life-long registered Democrat and a man of the left in the 60s and 70s, opposing the Vietnam War and marching for Civil Rights, before gradually coming to be thought a "neoconservative" from the 1980s onward. Neuhaus died in New York in January 2009 after a second battle with cancer.

He was the founder of the journal First Things (which published my review of Olivier Clement's book You Are Peter in 2004), which I read first with fascinated horror in the mid-90s, and then with increasing appreciation after that, far less for its politics than for the dashing verve with which Neuhaus wrote. He was a witty, incisive "blogger" avant la blogdom with his "While We're At It" pieces. 

First Things did, however, begin to get a bit tiresome even before Neuhaus died. You could almost invariably find articles in every issue from a small circle of people (Avery Dulles, George Weigel, Mary Ann Glendon, Michael Novak) whose writings all grew rather predictable. And then, the closer we got to the Iraq war, the more the magazine became a mouthpiece for Weigel and Novak to argue that the war would be just. Boyagoda's biography shows that Neuhaus, behind the scenes, was at least a little bit uncomfortable with this novel argument if not unconvinced.

After Neuhaus died, the magazine's new editor had a dilettantish approach and the magazine's chaotic skittering all over the place made it almost unreadable, and I never again renewed my subscription. That said, Neuhaus was himself never dull, and I still regularly refer to at least one of his essays from that time, "The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy." It is more than a little staggering that, nearly 2 decades after he penned that piece, the forces of intolerance he describes there are even more aggressive and hostile than they were. Consider just one passage:

With the older orthodoxy it is possible to disagree, as in having an argument. Evidence, reason, and logic count, in principle at least. Not so with the new orthodoxy. Here disagreement is an intolerable personal affront. It is construed as a denial of others, of their experience of who they are. It is a blasphemous assault on that most high god, “My Identity.” Truth-as-identity is not appealable beyond the assertion of identity. In this game, identity is trumps. 

Part of this essay was an extensive commentary on a fascinating book I have discussed on here before: John Shelton Reed's Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism. (Speaking of Anglo-Catholics, permit me to intrude here with an unrelated but delightful set of memoirs by Colin Stephenson, Merrily On High, documenting a type and moment in Anglo-Catholicism that is surely long dead now, alas.)

In his peroration, Neuhaus, writing in 1997, proved to be more influential than he could know in my own move out of Anglicanism and into Catholicism that same year when he wrote:

Almost five hundred years after the sixteenth-century divisions, the realization grows that there is no via media. The realization grows that orthodoxy and catholicity can be underwritten only by Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Perhaps more than any other single factor, the influence of Anglo-Catholicism among Protestants obscured this reality for a long time. It is a considerable merit of John Shelton Reed’s Glorious Battle that it contributes to our understanding of why movements of catholic restoration, posited against the self-understanding of the communities they would renew, turn into an optional orthodoxy. A century later, an illiberal liberalism, much more unrelenting than the Victorian establishment, will no longer ­tolerate the option. It is very much like a law: Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed. 

Obviously Neuhaus could certainly turn a phrase.

In addition to such delightful essays, I did also enjoy other of Neuhaus's books, including his most famous 1984 book, still of great relevance today, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. That book had great timing in that it landed during the Reagan re-election campaign of 1984, and would afterwards be read by and discussed within his White House appreciatively as Boyagoda's biography shows.

In addition, I found even more interesting and stimulating Neuhaus's 1987 book (written while he was still a Lutheran), The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World. There Neuhaus memorably and amusingly spoke of those type of Catholics who "exult in the freedom to submit to authority with wild abandon," referencing, if memory serves, Wilfrid Ward--he of the desire for a papal encyclical every morning at breakfast along with his Times of London. (Speaking of Wards and their descendants, and speaking also of biographies, Frank and Maisie: A Memoir With Parents is a rollicking good read by their son, documenting an hilarious mid-century couple engaged in Catholic apologetics.)

Anyway, back to Neuhaus and the public square: whatever one thinks of his politics and of the increasingly discredited "neoconservative" project with which he was associated (especially its boosterism for the disastrous second Iraq war, which has not just decimated but virtually destroyed ancient Eastern Christian communities all across the region), he did at least try not just to think through what it means to be a Christian engaging the public square of what he called an "incorrigibly, confusedly religious America," but also actively to engage it with vim and vigor. With some, perhaps many, Eastern Christians today pining for lost "symphonias" of Byzantium that never existed, or fatuously idealizing Putin's "Russkiy mir," or calling for confused if not superfluous "Benedict options,"  or perhaps equally romanticizing and idealizing Western liberal democracies, there is still crying need to consider the questions of how the Church ought to relate to "that dangerous and unmanageable institution" (MacIntyre) of the modern state. It is the considerable merit of Boyagoda's charming biography that he reminds us of a figure who did that with great force for many decades.

For Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free

Focused on a crucial set of questions, and with a slew of top-drawer scholars--Robert Louis Wilken, Rémi Brague, John Rist, inter alia--and a chapter by Elizabeth Prodromou devoted to "Orthodox Christian contributions to freedom: historical foundations, contemporary problematics," this forthcoming collection, set for release at the end of May, is surely not to be missed: Christianity and Freedom, Volume 1. Historical Perspectives, eds.Timothy Samuel Shah and Allen D. Hertzke (Cambridge UP, 2016), 416pp.

About this book--part of CUP's Law and Christianity series--the publisher tells us:

In Volume 1 of Christianity and Freedom, leading historians uncover the unappreciated role of Christianity in the development of basic human rights and freedoms from antiquity through today. These include radical notions of dignity and equality, religious freedom, liberty of conscience, limited government, consent of the governed, economic liberty, autonomous civil society, and church-state separation, as well as more recent advances in democracy, human rights, and human development. Acknowledging that the record is mixed, scholars document how the seeds of freedom in Christianity antedate and ultimately undermine later Christian justifications and practices of persecution. Drawing from history, political science, and sociology, this volume will become a standard reference work for historians, political scientists, theologians, students, journalists, business leaders, opinion shapers, and policy makers.<br /> me>

Church-State Relations in Finland and Russia

With chapters on two countries with large Orthodox Churches--Russia and Finland--as well as numerous other interesting chapter, this forthcoming collection The Politics and Practice of Religious Diversity: National Contexts, Global Issues edited by Andrew Dawson will enrich every library devoted to the increasingly prevalent, and maddeningly complicated, relationship between "religion" and today's politics.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The Politics and Practice of Religious Diversity engages with one of the most characteristic features of modern society. An increasingly prominent and potentially contentious phenomenon, religious diversity is intimately associated with contemporary issues such as migration, human rights, social cohesion, socio-cultural pluralisation, political jurisdiction, globalisation, and reactionary belief systems.

This edited collection of specially-commissioned chapters provides an unrivalled geographical coverage and multidisciplinary treatment of the socio-political processes and institutional practices provoked by, and associated with, religious diversity. Alongside chapters treating religious diversity in the ‘BRIC’ countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, are contributions which discuss Australia, Finland, Mexico, South Africa, the UK, and the United States.

This book provides an accessible, distinctive and timely treatment of a topic which is inextricably linked with modern society’s progressively diverse and global trajectory. Written and structured as an accessible volume for the student reader, this book is of immediate interest to both academics and laypersons working in mainstream and political sociology, sociology of religion, human geography, politics, area studies, migration studies and religious studies.

Imperial-Ecclesial Crises

As Aristotle Papanikolaou's recent book, The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy notes, questions of church and state, which for many in the Western Church seem to have been long-settled, are still live issues in new ways for many in the Christian East after the fall of the Soviet Union. But they were of course live issues around the time of the collapse of other empires, including the West-Roman Empire as a recent book elaborates: Phil Booth, Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2013), 416pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

This book focuses on the attempts of three ascetics—John Moschus, Sophronius of Jerusalem, and Maximus Confessor—to determine the Church’s power and place during a period of profound crisis, as the eastern Roman empire suffered serious reversals in the face of Persian and then Islamic expansion. By asserting visions which reconciled long-standing intellectual tensions between asceticism and Church, these authors established the framework for their subsequent emergence as Constantinople's most vociferous religious critics, their alliance with the Roman popes, and their radical rejection of imperial interference in matters of the faith. Situated within the broader religious currents of the fourth to seventh centuries, this book throws new light on the nature not only of the holy man in late antiquity, but also of the Byzantine Orthodoxy that would emerge in the Middle Ages, and which is still central to the churches of Greece and Eastern Europe.

Eastern Christianity and Politics

It has this year become obvious that one of the major themes to be developed within Orthodox theology in the coming years will be the relationship between Church and state, a relationship which has entered a new phase for much of Orthodoxy in the post-Soviet period. We have therefore started to see a number of books, most previously noted on here, emerge in the past few years on Church-state relations as well as related questions about, e.g., human rights. Set for release in May is a hefty tome that promises to take a wide-ranging look at these questions and relations in a wonderfully diverse array of contexts: Lucian Leustean, ed., Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2014), 864pp.

About this book the publisher provides us an overview as well as detailed table of contents thus:

This book provides an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of Eastern Christian churches in Europe, the Middle East, America, Africa, Asia and Australia. Written by leading international scholars in the field, it examines both Orthodox and Oriental churches from the end of the Cold War up to the present day. The book offers a unique insight into the myriad of church-state relations in Eastern Christianity and tackles contemporary concerns, opportunities and challenges, such as religious revival after the fall of communism; churches and democracy; relations between Orthodox, Catholic and Greek Catholic churches; religious education and monastic life; the size and structure of congregations; and the impact of migration, secularisation and globalisation on Eastern Christianity in the twenty-first century.

1. Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twenty-First Century. An Overview, Lucian N. Leustean Part I: Chalcedonian Churches 2. The Ecumenical Patriarchate, Lucian N. Leustean 3. The Russian Orthodox Church, Zoe Knox and Anastasia Mitrofanova 4. The Serbian Orthodox Church, Klaus Buchenau 5. The Romanian Orthodox Church, Lucian Turcescu and Lavinia Stan 6. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Daniela Kalkandjieva 7. The Georgian Orthodox Church, Paul Crego 8. The Orthodox Church of Cyprus, Victor Roudometof and Irene Dietzel 9. The Orthodox Church of Greece, Vasilios N. Makrides 10. The Polish Orthodox Church, Edward D. Wynot 11. The Orthodox Church of Albania, Nicolas Pano 12. The Orthodox Church in the Czech Lands and Slovakia, Tomáš Havlíček 13. Orthodox Churches in America, Alexei D. Krindatch and John H. Erickson 14. The Finnish Orthodox Church, Teuvo Laitila 15. Orthodox Churches in Estonia, Sebastian Rimestad 16. Orthodox Churches in Ukraine, Zenon V. Wasyliw 17. The Belarusian Orthodox Church, Sergei A. Mudrov 18. The Lithuanian Orthodox Church, Regina Laukaitytė 19. The Latvian Orthodox Church, Inese Runce and Jelena Avanesova 20. Orthodox Churches in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria, Kimitaka Matsuzato 21. Orthodox Churches in Moldova, Andrei Avram 22. The Macedonian Orthodox Church, Todor Cepreganov, Maja Angelovska-Panova and Dragan Zajkovski 23. Orthodox Churches in Japan, China and Korea, Kevin Baker 24. Orthodox Churches in Australia, James Jupp

Part II: Non-Chalcedonian Churches 25. The Armenian Apostolic Church, Hratch Tchilingirian 26. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Tewahedo Orthodox Church, Stéphane Ancel, Giulia Bonacci and Joachim Persoon 27. The Coptic Orthodox Church, Fiona McCallum 28. The Syrian Orthodox Church, Erica C. D. Hunter 29. Syrian Christian Churches in India, M. P. Joseph, Uday Balakrishnan and István Perczel

Part III: The Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East 30. The Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East, Erica C. D. Hunter Part IV: Greek Catholic Churches in Eastern Europe 31. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Natalia Shlikhta 32. The Romanian Greek Catholic Church, Ciprian Ghișa and Lucian N. Leustean 33. The Bulgarian Eastern Catholic Church, Daniela Kalkandjieva 34. The Hungarian Greek Catholic Church, Stéphanie Mahieu

Part V: Challenges in the Twenty-First Century 35. Orthodox Churches and Migration, Kristina Stoeckl 36. Catholic-Orthodox Relations in Post-War Europe, Thomas Bremer 37. Secularism without Liberalism: Orthodox Churches, Human Rights and American Foreign Policy in Southeastern Europe, Kristen Ghodsee 38. Orthodox Churches and Globalisation, Victor Roudometof

How Should Church and State Relate?

For Eastern Christians, the question of how Church and state should relate, and even how they have or have not related in the past, is by no means settled. As I've noted before, two important scholars have both recently taken up this issue in different ways: Aristotle Papanikolaou of Fordham and John McGuckin of Columbia.

Set for release later this fall is a new book that looks at Church-state relations in Catholic (France), Protestant (Germany) and Orthodox (Russia) contexts: Stephen Strehle, The Dark Side of Church/State Separation: The French Revolution, Nazi Germany, and International Communism (Transaction, 2013), 415pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The Dark Side of Church/State Separation analyzes the Enlightenment’s attack upon the Judeo-Christian tradition and its impact upon the development of secular regimes in France, Germany, and Russia. Such regimes followed the anti-Semitic/anti-Christian agenda of the French Enlightenment in blaming the Judeo-Christian tradition for all the ills of European society and believing that human beings can develop their own set of values and purposes through rational means, apart from any revelation from God or Scripture.

Stephen Strehle’s analysis extends our understanding of church/state relations and its history. He confirms the spiritual roots of modern anti-Semitism within the ideology of the Enlightenment and recognizes the intimate relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Christianity. Strehle questions the absolute doctrine of church/state separation, given its background in the bigotries of the philosophes. He notes the nefarious motives of subsequent regimes, which used the French doctrine to replace the religious community with the state and its secular ideology. This detailed historical analysis of original sources and secondary literature is woven together with special appreciation for the philosophical and theological ideas that contributed to the emergence of political institutions. Readers will gain an understanding of the most influential ideas shaping the modern world and present-day culture.

Church and State in Europe

Lavinia Stan, a political scientist, is married to Lucian Turcescu, a Romanian Orthodox theologian and patrologist. Together they have collaborated on past books of considerable importance, including Religion and Politics in Post-Communist Romania, which was favorably reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. Now, again from Oxford and in the same series, the couple have just published Church, State, and Democracy in Expanding Europe (Religion and Global Politics) (Oxford University Press, 2011, 304pp). 

About this book, the publisher tells us:

Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu examine the relationship between religion and politics in ten former communist Eastern European countries. Contrary to widespread theories of increasing secularization, Stan and Turcescu argue that in most of these countries, the populations have shown themselves to remain religious even as they embrace modernization and democratization.

Church-state relations in the new EU member states can be seen in political representation for church leaders, governmental subsidies, registration of religions by the state, and religious instruction in public schools. Stan and Turcescu outline three major models: the Czech church-state separation model, in which religion is private and the government secular; the pluralist model of Hungary, Bulgaria and Latvia, which views society as a group of complementary but autonomous spheres - for example, education, the family, and religion - each of which is worthy of recognition and support from the state; and the dominant religion model that exists in Poland, Romania, Estonia, and Lithuania, in which the government maintains informal ties to the religious majority.
Church, State, and Democracy in Expanding Europe offers critical tools for understanding church-state relations in an increasingly modern and democratic Eastern Europe.

Orthodoxy and Russian Politics

Judging by the number of books that have appeared in the last five years alone, and a number still to come in the next twelve to eighteen months, Church-state relations in Russia continue to fascinate many people and attract a great deal of attention, including in this new book:

Irina Papkova, The Orthodox Church and Russian Politics (Oxford UP, 2011), 265pp. 

About this book, the publisher tells us:

This in-depth case study examines the Russian Orthodox Church’s influence on federal level policy in the Russian Federation since the fall of communism. By far more comprehensive than competing works, The Orthodox Church and Russian Politics is based on interviews, close readings of documents—including official state and ecclesiastical publications—and survey work conducted by the author. The analysis balances the Church as an institutional political actor with the government’s response to Church demands. Papkova ultimately concludes that the reciprocal relationship between the Church and state is far weaker and less politically important than Western analysts usually believe.

Papkova traces the Church’s relative failure in mobilizing parishioners, influencing political parties, and lobbying the state, citing the 1997 law limiting religious freedoms as its only significant political win. She attributes much of this weakness to the informal division of the Church into liberal, traditionalist, and fundamentalist factions, which prevent it from presenting a unified front. The book provides a fresh insight into the role of the Church in post-Soviet Russia that can be appreciated by people interested in numerous fields. While written from a political science perspective, the book speaks across disciplines to sociology, anthropology, history, and religious studies.

I look forward to having this expertly reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies next year.