Mikhail Prokhorov proposes adopting a Religious Code regulating church-state relations due to the Pussy Riot scandal and Orthodox patrols

· Baptists, Denominations, Pentecostals, Russia, Russian Orthodox Church, Contemporary Persecution, Subbotniks, Church

Mikhail Prokhorov

A Platform for a Secular State
Relations among the state, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), and citizens are becoming increasingly conflictual, and the search for compromise is hampered by old prejudices and new insults. In this article written specially for Kommersant, the leader of the Civic Platform party and former presidential candidate MIKHAIL PROKHOROV proposes a solution to the problem.

From my first days in politics, I preferred not to comment on matters related to the life of the Church, since I have always believed that faith and one’s attitude toward the Church are strictly private affairs. Yet even in my rare statements, my position has never been based on a biased attitude toward the ROC (not one of my pronouncements contains even a hint of a desire to offend the Church), but only on a sense of the growing threat to secular society in our country. The fact that relations among citizens, the state, and the Church in recent months have already led to a split in society and threaten Russian culture compels me to address this issue.

What is especially unexpected is that the ROC has found itself at the center of the upheaval. The Pussy Riot case, their provocative action in Christ the Savior Cathedral, and the harsh sentence were, of course, the spark of the upheaval, but not its cause.

Like any modern secular person, I live in Russia, in a multi-confessional country, among believers and non-believers alike. Today, a storm of accusations and even insults is raging among us, preventing a normal dialogue. People who earlier chose their words carefully have now thrown all restraint aside. But no matter who launches these poisoned arrows or why, most of them strike the ROC.

Voices calling for reconciliation and tolerance are, unfortunately, few and sound too academic. To my relief, the leadership of the ROC, not immediately but in the end, did ask for mercy. Yet no mercy was shown. Are we truly as irreconcilably opposed as it appears to anyone who visits social networks today? Or does our politics lack some important political “vitamin” that allows people to coexist peacefully even when they disagree?

The answer to this question is clear to me. In our debates “for or against the authorities,” we overlook the main point—the deficit of secular politics and secular public ethics. Of secular statehood as such.

Secular Politics: The Choice of Successful Nations

In this, we are not a rare exception. All of today’s developed and successful societies and states went through similarly dramatic processes in their time. During the religious wars, the futures of France and Germany hung by a thread. Only the form of secular consensus they found opened the way to religious and civil peace. It became the key condition for their modern success. Those who are trying to push Russia off this path are depriving us of the most important thing—Russia’s chance for national success.

The relations among the Church, the state, and society in our country are declared but not fundamentally clarified. Article 14 of the Russian Constitution consists of only two clauses: “1. The Russian Federation is a secular state. No religion may be established as the state or mandatory religion. 2. Religious associations are separated from the state and are equal before the law.” These are excellent, vitally important norms. Yet they are only a framework, not filled with real content—legal, political, and, most importantly, cultural.

The choice Russia made, enshrined in Article 13 of our Constitution (“No ideology may be established as the state or mandatory ideology”), is our choice of a path to national success, not to division and defeat. Regrettably, today the majority of politicians, including the leaders of parliamentary parties, have betrayed their Constitution and chosen to forget what is written there. Flirtations with the Church, often of a populist nature, are undermining the foundations of the nation’s main document. All this creates many threats.

People, Not “Forces”

It is a mistake to see in the Church only the hierarchy of the highest clergy, whatever they may be. The mutual frenzy that we witness (whether the word is meant literally or figuratively) has gripped not the Church and not society, but specific individuals.

There are, alas, many such people; some of them hold high positions in their hierarchies; they are united in various alliances and clans. But none of them can monopolize the right to speak on our behalf. Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin is not the whole Church, Prosecutor Alexander Nikiforov is not the state, and attorney Mark Feygin is not Russian civil society.

What is the cause of today’s frenzy? I think it is fear. The fear of losing the last firm anchors and values, of finding oneself surrounded by enemies. In my student years, I once saw a film called “Fear Eats the Soul.” I remembered this because those words very precisely characterize today’s situation. It is precisely because of fear that our political life is rapidly and artificially being pushed toward the question of “who will get whom.” Everyone feels unsafe, without being, in reality, each other’s enemies. What a foolish situation!

About Foolishness

One of the main mistakes made by the participants in these current discussions is the view of the Church, the state, and society as irreconcilable antagonists.

It is foolish to set society against the Church. Even in the darkest centuries of history, the Church as an institution served as an alternative to inequality and despotism, preserved and nurtured the ideals of love, compassion, and forgiveness, often against a backdrop of universal savagery and cruelty. In history, the Church has not infrequently taken upon itself the function of the nation’s collective conscience, defending the weak before the strong, the persecuted before the persecutors, thereby contributing to the formation of a more humane society. The martyrdom of Metropolitan Philip Kolychev, who dared to challenge Tsar Ivan the Terrible, demonstrated that when it comes to the eternal values of compassion and mercy, people of firm faith can rise above the fear of death.

To use the language of Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, one could say that secular and religious culture are the two lungs with which our civilization breathes. Secular culture (and especially secular politics) stands as the defender of freedom of religious choice, the protection of each person’s right to believe or not to believe according to the dictates of the heart, not at the command of superiors. The defense of religion and the church today consists, above all, in defending the secular character of our politics and our state.

It is rather strange that I, a person known to be secular, have to remind everyone of this. But I must.

I cannot but be alarmed by what I consider a dangerous trend: the attempt to push church life into schools. As soon as we abandon the constitutional norm of separating church and state, we introduce discord where none existed before. Lessons on the fundamentals of Orthodox culture naturally gave rise to lessons on the fundamentals of Islamic culture. Schoolchildren are forced to make choices where there was no problem of choice at all. What some might have seen as the “churching” of young people and their religious upbringing has in fact divided children into hostile groups along religious lines. Religion as a pretext for school fights — where is the “fundamentals of religious culture” in that? And what then should be called blasphemy?

So isn’t it time for those who believe in reason and in life in a shared state to move toward a secular political initiative? We have no secular politics, and I want to propose it for Russia.

What can be done

I receive many proposals to “get together and calmly discuss everything.” That is right, but today it is not enough. In an atmosphere of intolerance, talk does little good. A political goal is needed.

There is one thing we can only do together: the resumption of joint work by church, state, and society to overcome the pernicious vestiges of the Soviet regime, which affected both society and the church. The Soviet ideocracy, which replaced the state Orthodoxy of the pre‑revolutionary era, left no room for secular politics.

Both the low competitiveness of our economy, our blind paternalism, our disbelief in the force of law, and the substitution of real cultural and educational work with window‑dressing and formalities — all this comes from our unexpired Soviet experience.

I call for the immediate start of a broad dialogue on regulating relations between the church (meaning, of course, all churches and denominations, religion as a whole), the state, and society. This can be done on the basis of the “Civil Platform” using crowdsourcing tools and public discussion.

The aim of this initiative should be to develop a concept for a Code of Churches and Religions of the Russian Federation, or a Religious Code — analogous to the Civil or Family Codes. Then lawyers will take over, turning the concept into a full‑fledged legal document. In parallel, the Civil Platform party will begin forming a genuine civic and political coalition capable of securing the adoption of this document by the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation and its entry into legal force. Thus, a solid secular foundation will be laid for the full cooperation of the Russian state, Russian society, and all Russian confessions in the unfinished work of building a renewed and healed Russia.

I am ready, by all means available to me, to support the work of this assembly and the implementation of its proposals. At present, I see no more important task for myself. We need to choose the most effective strategy for future change as soon as possible.

But for any choice, we need peace right now. Civil peace, that is, secular peace.
More details: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc-y/2020351

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