The Intertwining of Religion and Nation: The Russian Administration’s Approach to Religious Life and National Identity

Excerpt: The relationship between religion and nation that is promoted by a state will have tremendous effects on religious minority groups. For religious minorities in Russia, the forms that are most utilized by the state are exclusion and strong internalism. The former leads the state to cherry-pick troublesome religious groups for exclusion, for failing to be ‘Russian’ enough, leading to serious impairment for religious groups that are singled out by the state as threats to the nation. With regards to the latter formulation, the Russian Orthodox Church is the basis for a strong internalist mechanism, determining who is in and who is out: those who are Russian are assumed to be Russian Orthodox (at least notionally); those who are Russian Orthodox are assumed to be Russian (or Russian kin and Russian controlled). It is the case, however, that this relationship will matter for other citizens, as well. Recall the Russian punk band Pussy Riot: while not typically paired with religious faithful in Russia, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Said Nursi, this band violates a central tenet of Russian life today—that Russian Orthodoxy is a critical identity for the nation, and those who ridicule this relationship will be quickly and decisively disciplined. For now, the Russian national identity is a tightly controlled identity, of chief importance to the current administration

Editorial

We hope you, our readers, find these reflections on the 30-year anniversary of the Great Transformation to be both edifying and fulfillin

Book Review: The Unknown Europe: How Eastern Europe Got That Way, by James R. Payton Jr.

A review of James R. Payton, Jr., The Unknown Europe: How Eastern Europe Got That Way, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021, 297 pp, paperback. ISBN: 979-1-6667-0475-

Book Review: Orthodox and Greek Catholics in Transylvania (1867-1916): Convergences and Divergences

A review of Marcarie Drăgoi, Orthodox and Greek Catholics in Transylvania (1867-1916): Convergences and Divergences, Translated by Carmen-Veronica Borbely, Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2015, 289 pp, hardback. ISBN: 979-088141-507-0

Foreword to this Special Issue

The door that opens up to religious freedom does not always lead to expected places. Our contributors, reflecting on the past thirty years for religion in Romania, note both the joys and tribulations of freedom

Human Rights in Postcommunism: Discourse and Parties in the Development of Religious Freedom

210 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.Most accounts of religious life in the region rest on the consensus that religion, where it is infused with a national character, is an institution that can be linked by elites to the nation (and prop up an 'established' church model of church-state relations) or be divested of its national prestige (to allow for a pluralist or separation model of church-state relations). However, if we conceive of the nation as a type of appeal with practical and eventful qualities, bounded only by an imprecise conception of the membership of the nation and the grounds for membership, the relationship between religion and the nation becomes much more complex. The normative component of the concept of 'nation' yields an external, internal and strong internal models of church-state relations in which, respectively, elites postulate a significant, necessary or sufficient relationship between church and nation. The multiplicity of these models allows us to identify types of postcommunist elite discourse and indicate, to a degree, why elite discourse is volatile. Second, the human rights literature fails to account for the institutional prerequisites for human rights development in procedural democracies. Particularly, the political party system must be competitive for religious discourses to become consistent. A competitive party system plays two important functions in elite rhetoric and action: it grounds elites into consistent positions by forcing Habermasian discourse and, in a presidential or semi-presidential system, it helps overcome the paucity of opposition. In an ironic twist, then, some democratic configurations, most significantly, weak party systems in presidential systems, foster human rights violations.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD