Religious Education in Russia: Inter-Faith Harmony or Neo-Imperial Toleration?

Abstract

This paper explores the approach to religious education that has been instituted in Russia since 2012. The new policy's manifestly proclaimed goals seem convergent with the values of religious freedom, self-determination, tolerance, and inter-faith peace that are espoused by Western liberal democracies. Yet Russia's hidden religious education curriculum is far more consistent with a neo-imperial model of ethno-religious (Russian Orthodox) hegemony and limited toleration of selected, other faiths whose reach is restricted to politically peripheral ethno-territorial entities. This model embodies and revitalizes Russia's imperial legacies. Yet the revitalization is, in itself, an outcome of strategic choices made by the country's religious and secular elites in the course of its desecularization. Building on discourse analysis of five Russian textbooks and a teacher's manual, this article shows how the neo-imperial model manifests itself in the suppression of exogenous and endogenous pluralism, cultivation of the ideology of "ethnodoxy", and in essentially imperialist mythology. The paper concludes by predicting the new model's potential instability.

"Spiritual and Moral Education" in Russian Public Schools: Constructing a Neo-traditionalist Identity

“…I agree with the authors who suggested that teaching religion is conducive to creating a very specific state ideology, which can be characterized as neotraditionalist, the main components of which are great-power ambitions, ethno-nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy (Willems, 2007;Lisovskaya, 2016Lisovskaya, , 2017. My study is a continuation of this research tradition.…”

“…The ideology of teaching religion in the post-Soviet Russian public schools have been already examined by a number of researchers (Mitrokhin, 2000(Mitrokhin, , 2004(Mitrokhin, , 2005Glanzer, 2005;Halstead, 1994;Willems, 2007;Lisovskaya and Karpov, 2010;Shnirelman, 2011Shnirelman, , 2012Shnirelman, , 2017Köllner, 2016;Lisovskaya, 2016;Lisovskaya, 2017). It was shown that the introduction of religion-related courses is considered a visible embodiment of church-state relations, when the attempt to implement a model of church-state separation ultimately failed and "the regime increasingly drew upon the country's traditional religion not only as a source of legitimacy, but also for political support" (Marsh 2013: 20).…”

“…The speakers seemed to articulate the views expressed by the leaders of the educational and religious establishments in Russia who have often linked national security and teaching religion as a form of spiritual security (Danilyuk, Kondakov, & Tishkov, 2009:17;Patriarch Kirill, 2016). Lisovskaya (2016Lisovskaya ( , 2017 has already noticed this close connection between security and teaching religion in the discourse of representatives of the Russian authorities.…”

Religion and Education in Romania: Social Mobilization and the “Shadow” of the European Court of Human Rights

“…The presence or absence of religious education classes as well as their content and who teaches them have been topics of contention in very diverse times and places for groups interested in influencing the dynamics of secularization (see, e.g., Jackson 1992 on the UK, Lisovskaya 2016 on the Russian Federation). Romania in the past decades has been no exception, especially as educational standards concerning professionalism, inclusion, and pluralism—such as those in OSCE's Toledo Guiding Principles on teaching about religion and beliefs 12 —have only gradually made their way into the curriculum.…”