Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies

Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies. Mark D. Steinberg and Catherine Wanner, ed. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there has been a new prominence of religion throughout Eurasia in ethno-national identification, social practices, and public policies. Mark D. Steinberg’s and Catherine Wanner’s edited volume seeks to explore the role of religion in the post-Soviet socialist system from an interdisciplinary perspective that employs a wide range of methodologies, such as extensive interviews, long-term field work, and analytical studies of archival material. Unlike some edited volumes, Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies contains three major themes which unites these disparate and diverse chapters, thereby creating a cohesiveness in the volume’s content about the role of religion in post-Soviet societies.

One of the common concerns of the volume is the relationship between religion and democracy: does the state permit religious toleration and pluralism; and, if so, do religious believers reciprocate in their support for democratic norms and values? Three contributors focus on this particular topic: Irina Papkova’s and Zoe Knox’s examinations of the Russian Orthodox Church and Russell Zanca’s study of Islam in Uzbekistan. The conclusions reached by these contributors is that democracies need to support religious liberty as a fundamental human right, that violations of this right is a strong indication of wider abuses in civil liberties, and that religious intolerance poses a serious threat to democratic government.

Knox looks at the Russian state’s discriminatory treatment of non-Orthodox groups and practices, particularly Roman Catholics and Jehovah Witnesses, during the Putin’s years. What we discover is that the 1997 Russian Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Association, on the one hand, guarantees the freedom of religious choice for all people, while, on the other hand, provides a special place for Russian Orthodoxy. This duality of the law allows the state to discriminate against religious minorities as it proclaims at the same time to guarantee religious liberty.

However, in her exploration of the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and democratic norms like religious liberty, Papkova contends that criticisms of the Church as an obstacle to democracy are too simplistic. The Church has been and continues to be divided into several factions – a small, nationalist fundamentalist party; a liberal-democratic, reformist one; and the currently-dominant conservative and pragmatic group – so the real question scholars should ask is what type of Orthodoxy will emerge in post-Soviet society. Although the Church has sought a special role in society, the state has limited its political influence and the Church leadership has acted within civil society, tolerating to a certain extent religious and social pluralism.

Zanca’s study of Islam in Uzbekistan provides a comparative contrast to the role played by Christianity in Russia, where the revival of Islam has neither been extremist nor political. For most Uzbeks, Islam is a moral and ethical concern rather than a political one. However, the state’s repressive policies, especially after 9/11 when the state took advantage of the fear of Islamic terrorism, increased the danger of a radicalized Islam. The lesson for U.S. policy-makers is that human rights, such as religious freedom, should be incorporated in our relations with Islamic states to prevent the spread of religious extremism.

A second theme of the volume is the relationship between religion and economic inequality in societies where the state’s welfare system has collapsed. Why do some communities engage in charitable work while others withdraw in religious contemplation? Scott M. Kenworthy, Melissa L. Caldwell, and Douglas Rogers all explore the reasons for these differing responses among post-Soviet religious organizations.

For Kenworthy, the Russian Orthodox Church refrains from social work is a result of a tradition that emphasizes individual as opposed to institutional charity. As a result, foreign missionaries have filled this void left both by the Church and the state, as Caldwell documents. These foreign missionaries provide positive examples of civic engagement but also are criticized for taking advantage of a society’s social and economic hardship to increase their organizations’ membership.

Religious organizations can also be complicit in legitimatizing and institutionalizing social and economic inequalities. In Sepych, a small town in the Russian Urals, Rogers traces how membership of the Old Believers (a seventeenth-century schismatic group of the Russian Orthodox Church) became revived with former communist party leaders. The consequence was religious and political elites became re-aligned to create new kinds of inequalities and subordination in post-Soviet society.

The third and final topic of the volume is the role of religion in community formation after the collapse of the Soviet socialist system. To what extent has religion replaced socialist ideology for individual and group identity? Jarrett Zigon, Sascha Goluboff, and Katherine Metzo investigate how people have integrated religion with other sources – whether past Soviet ideology or modern technology – into their own personal and group identity.

In a series of conversation, Zigon is able to show how the social and cultural experience of a newly-discovered faith in Orthodoxy has shaped the evolving morality of a single, middle-aged Russian woman who grew up in the Soviet Union. Metzo also illustrates how religion plays a role in individual and group identity with her study of contemporary shamanism that promises the power of healing to compensate for the lack of adequate health care. Finally, Goluboff records the Azeri Mountain Jewish experience of loss and mourning where Jews still wish to be buried in their home village, although they may have left it many years ago.

Besides the uniformly excellent chapters, the volume also has a superb introduction and conclusion. One of the great strengths of this volume is not only do the contributors write about the main themes of the volume, but they also refer to each other works, which makes the volume  more of a cohesive whole than a set of scattered chapters. Simply put, Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies is a required read for scholars interested in the roles of religion, democracy, and community in post-soviet societies.

This review was originally published in the journal, Politics and Religion 3: 2 (2010): 408-10.

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