MEDVEDEV REDEFINES THE SECULAR STATE

ROPV CONTRIBUTORS

Medvedev Redefines the Secular State by Legalizing Courses About the Main Confessions

by Joera Mulders 

President Medvedev has approved experiments with courses about Russia’s ‘traditional’ confessions; Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism, as well as ‘secular ethics’ in 18 regions of the Russian Federation. Effectively, this means that he has started the process of legalization of civil initiatives, which have begun as early as 1999.

Based on online publications of local newspapers I collected during spring 2006, I found information that Russian-Orthodox courses were taught within the regional component in the Belgorod, Kaliningrad, Kaluga, Kursk, Smolensk, Tver and Vladimir regions. In the Lipetsk, Samara, Saratov, Stavropol, Sverdlovsk, Volgograd, Vologda and Voronezh regions this was not yet the case but training centers for future teachers of the course have been set up in cooperation with the local administration and universities. In many other regions courses are taught in individual schools.

Add the predominantly Islam Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Chuvasia and Caucasus republics plus the Buddhist Kalmykia, Buryatia or Tyva and you notice that finding 18 regions to conduct the announced experiments is not difficult.

It is important to note that the main push for ‘confessional’ courses has come out of the Russian-Orthodox community and has been advocated by the Moscow Patriarchate. While the first widely marketed textbook for courses about Russian Orthodox culture was published in 2003, it was 2006 before the regional administrations in Tatarstan and Chuvasia ordered the authoring of ‘their’ textbooks about ‘Muslim culture’. 

While researching Russian-Orthodox course for thesis in Cultural Anthropology in 2005 and 2006, I found out cannot be that the phenomenon could not be explained by the advocacy of the Moscow Patriarchate alone. There is even much to say for an opposite explanation. Over the past decade, the Church has been reacting to civil initiatives developing from bottom up. The next paragraphs consist of a few excerpts from my thesis about Russian-Orthodox courses written in 2006 as well as a short segment from an article written for Religion, State and Society published in March 2008.  

During the nineties strict oversight over public schools was abandoned giving room to individual schools to experiment with courses about Russian-Orthodox traditions. Lectures about local saints, churches and monasteries brought together clergy, local officials, academics and teachers. Within such circles networks formed consisting of priests, who gave evening classes to teachers or (illegally) taught pupils directly. Also part of these networks  were local officials who provided protection from the oversight of the regional and municipal education committees.

My thesis discerned three different motives for parents and teachers to organize the such courses: The first motive is the search for a national idea, a Russian identity. Not only the outspoken patriotic, but many common Russians, disillusioned with the liberal reforms and remembering that ‘alien concepts do not always grow well on Russian soil’ or perhaps  searching to replace the ‘national’ pride that they lost when the Soviet Union collapsed, are rediscovering their national history and cultural heritage.  Parents and teachers came to realize how much of the prerevolutionary past has been forgotten or distorted by the reinterpretations of Soviet history. These adults now wish that their children be given the chance to connect with their national history and also grow the national pride these parents themselves long for.

The second motive is the call for vospitaniye or upbringing and in this case perhaps best translated as socialization. In the Soviet Union, the socialization of the individual into the collective was not limited to the work environment, but also provided a system of values and behavioral patterns for community life outside the shop floor. Present-day education, so it seems to many parents, does prepare the pupils for the labor market, but doesn’t learn them how to become respected members of the community. To them religion foremost means a set of values.

The third motive is the desire for humanizatsiya. In the aftermath of the break up of the Soviet Union, humanizatsiya and liberalization were magic spells, summoning the new freedom, symbols for the eviction of the authoritarian past.  A few years later many Russians have become convinced that the liberal trends in education are but a continuation of the technocratic, that is materialistic, labor market oriented education predominant in the twentieth century. Humanizatsiya stands for an emphasis on the unique talents and traits of every child. Education, according to this view, should present the pupils with a diversity of opinions and worldviews, from which the children themselves may construct their own identity. Many teachers and parents who have lived through state atheism, now welcome the ability to teach Russian-Orthodox traditions not as a new ideology, but as a token of freedom of opinion.

Since 1999 the federal center and its Ministry of Education began to respond to the activities at the grassroots level. The Ministry found an ally in the Moscow Patriarchate that was equally concerned about the quality of these experimental classes. The Patriarchate knows that most priests were not properly educated themselves.  A coordinative council consisting of people from both the Ministry and the ROC gathered information and experience from the grassroots initiatives, stating that ‘Orthodox education was build by the efforts enthusiasts … but that on the basis of enthusiasm alone a system of education cannot exist’. 

In October 2002 the council sent a letter to all regional committees distributing material ‘to assist those who wish to work with Orthodox education.’  The letter was rejected or simply ignored for two reasons:     

First, the letter gave credence to alarming images of an ROC aspiring to dominate society, a ‘symphony of state and church’ and the ‘clericalization of education’, a concern felt by many liberal-minded persons, who fear the return of an authoritarian ideology. It should be added that ‘dogmatic’ atheism is very much alive, especially among these liberals.

Second, the recipients of the letter, the regional educational committees, perceived the letter as an attempt from the federal center to seize the regions unwritten rights to cultural autonomy.

The liberal-minded and atheist critics of education unleashed a press campaign discrediting Russian-Orthodox courses and appealed to the government to ban any experiments with such classes. The advocates of Russian-Orthodox courses joined them in a public mudslinging debate which has erupted time by time during the past seven years.

A textbook for Russian-Orthodox courses written by Alla Borodina is unacceptable to the proponent s of strict secular education and liberal minded human rights activists for they read too much of an exaltation of the Russian-Orthodox faith and intolerance towards other faiths and world-views in the book. The Russian Orthodox Church on the other hand refuses to accept a textbook for a course about world religions written by Aleksandr Chubaryan, because it finds too much traces of soviet atheist sociology in its pages. 

The regional education committees play a different role. Some of them have drawn a line in the sand, claiming it is their right to decide the cultural aspects of public education. Within the curriculum there is room for them to do so. There is a regional and a schools component which content is decided by respectively the regional education committee and the school’s administration.

Above I already mentioned a group of seven regions that in 2006 actively promoted Russian-Orthodox within the regional component. In such cases 50% to 90% of the schools teach such courses. In 8 other regions the infrastructure was being created to prepare teachers for give such a course. Today, three years later, I cannot but conclude that when it comes to the Russian-Orthodox courses the so called experiments are very much the legalization of ongoing practice.

The inability to find a compromise on the federal level between the Russian-Orthodox Community, its Patriarchate and several predominantly Russian-Orthodox regions on one hand, and on the other hand the supporters of a multi-confessional course and a secular state in the sense of an a-religious state, created a deadlock that lasted for years. In the meantime the experiments gathered pace.

When I wrote my thesis in 2006, it was hard to imagine that a Russian president would take sides. The prevailing trend at the time was one of nationalization, forging one national identity and keeping multinational Russia together. Not being able to decide what Russia was; a secular state or a predominantly Russian-Orthodox state with Islamic and Buddhist enclaves, the Ministry of Education acted as being paralyzed. Putin kept silent.

Medvedev’s sudden decisiveness is extremely interesting for several reasons. (1) He has redefined the secular state as a multi-confessional state in which ‘secular ethics’ is also seen as a confession. (2) He has chosen a policy of free choice. Yes, this free choice will take place at the school or even regional administration level and will have little regard for families who adhere a different faith than one of the ‘traditional’ confessions of the Russian Federation. Nevertheless, he chooses to empower, not to dictate.  (3) This policy of free choice will result in a deepening of cultural fault lines. In some regions the majority of the schools will teach courses in Russian-Orthodox education. In others a similar percentage will teach courses about Islam or Buddhism (4) Especially point 3 means that the president must believe that Russia has other unifying conditions  to offer to its citizens than common traditions.

The future is uncertain. There are so many open questions related to teaching a religion, let alone different confessions within one country. For certain is that processes within a sphere as important as education and nation building which for years operated in the shadows are now coming into the open.

When a student or researcher from a ‘western’ university is interested in monitoring these experiments and the change ahead, I’d be more than happy to give him or her my materials. 

Joera Mulders studied Cultural Anthropoly and Russian language at the University of Amsterdam. Now he is an Internet entrepreneur and editor of EUNIS.   

Comments

[Righteous Advocate]

Given its name "Russia Other Points of View," one expects some critical assessment of the flawed English language mass media coverage of Patriarch Kirill's visit to Ukraine. Is this maybe too hot for some to handle? If so, this a reflection of what is wrong with the attempt some make to improve things. If not, then there is little if any basis to leave out such a critical overview.

Here is a link to one of the better articles on the subject of Kirill's visit to Ukraine:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/28/kirill-ukraine-russia-orthodox

As good as the above Guardian piece is, it does not specifically go after the slanted anti-Moscow Patriarchate commentary.

The above ROPV piece does not slur like some of the other commentary out there.

With religion in mind, Russia is overcoming an era of a dictatorship which restricted religion. The idea of returning to a historic and spiritual past in sync with modern realities is not such an easy task. Judging from what I have seen and what has been communicated to me by people of ROCOR/ROC and other faiths involved with Russia, an ongoing process is evident. The 1990s saw some non-ROC attempts to seek a greater religious presence in Russia. At times, this was done in a rather disrespectful and heavy handed manner. Such behavior doesn't serve to improve things.

[Righteous Advocate]

Forwarded to me by a friend, this might be of some interest:

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:h101MBqxNtAJ:www.georgefox.edu/academics/undergrad/departments/soc-swk/ree/raikin_bk.html+obnovlentsi&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

[Walton34HESTER]

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