Episcopal Press and News
Russia in the Middle of Grassroots Religious Revival
Episcopal News Service. June 8, 1995 [95-1136]
Martha Capwell, Writer for Diocesan Life, the newspaper of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem.
(ENS) To most of us in the West, Russia may look like it's careening headlong into corruption and anarchy. But during this tumultuous "time of troubles" Russia is in the process of recapturing its soul, said Librarian of Congress James Billington at a May 11 dinner in the Diocese of Bethlehem (Pennsylvania).
And if the forces for moderation and modernization in the Russian Orthodox Church prevail, he said he believes a peaceful, democratic, Christian future for Russia will be much more certain.
About 120 people gathered at the Cathedral Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to share a Russian Pascha dinner and hear Billington, a former professor of history at Princeton University and a long-time expert on the former Soviet Union, describe the strength and pervasiveness of Russia's grassroots spiritual revival. "It's very important that this has happened with individuals. Under the Soviets, everyone's answer for almost everything was 'It doesn't depend on me,"' he said. "That attitude relieved each person of the moral responsibility for what was happening in Soviet society as a whole."
Now the Russians realize that they are paying the price for living in that ethical vacuum, facing increases in corruption and crime, terrible pollution, primitive health care and crumbling buildings and roads. "The Russian people know that they have to recover their responsibility, not just for their own behavior, but for their society. This is happening at the parish level, where the churches have become the safety net, taking care of the social services that don't come from the government any more," Billington said.
Billington described education programs for children and adults, such as the one sponsored by the cathedral's partner parish, St. Nikolai Kuznetsky, springing up as new parishes form spontaneously all over the country. Health care is another former state service which is being increasingly provided by the church, though the level of medicine is very low compared with ours, he said.
Partnerships between congregations in the United States and Russia are the best way for Americans to aid Christians in Russia, said Billington. "That person-to-person contact, at the 'precinct' level is not only what Russian Christians need, it's what they want," he said. "They know that bureaucracy and institutional approaches don't work."
Americans aren't doing enough, however, to promote reconciliation between our former enemies and ourselves, Billington believes. One problem is that most American Christians don't realize that the spiritual revival is going on in Russia, just as the decades of persecution went largely unnoticed and unprotested in the West.
"As a Christian, I think it's enormously important to note that Western Jews have been much better at recognizing the plight of Soviet Jews than Western Christian churches have been at seeing what happened to the church," he said. "Possibly the worst persecution of Christians in all of history happened in the Soviet Union in the past 70 years. This wasn't just a Stalinist aberration. It was continuous, from Lenin's time through to Brezhnev's. It was mass martyrdom, the same kind of genocide as the Holocaust."
American churches are unaware of "the greatest Christian conversion of the 20th century, largely because it's being ignored by the Western media," he said. "A University of Chicago survey estimated that 30 percent of the Russians between the ages of 18 and 35 have converted to Christianity in the past five years, and it's unreported here."
Those conversions are "deeply significant for us, because if most of these younger people embrace the progressive ideas that appear to be prevalent among the younger priests, the Russian Orthodox Church is going to shift from being a state institution to being the conscience of the nation," Billington said. "And that will be important in determining whether Russia can discover a new democratic and civil culture, or fall back into authoritarianism."
Billington added that "I often think about what a woman I met on the street in Moscow the morning after the coup in August, 1991 said to me: 'We kept alive faith and love all these years. At last now we have hope.'"
Billington would like to see many more churches take up the kinds of activities that the Diocese of Bethlehem and St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox church have been doing for the past three years -- including supporting seminarians in Russia and raising money to buy desktop publishing and printing equipment. "This is the sort of aid that lets the Russian people help themselves," he said. "It's also immensely valuable because of the links it forges between people in our society and theirs.
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