‘The Free Sale of Opium’: The Reaction of Russian Orthodox Churchmen to Freedom of Conscience, 1864–1905

Abstract

This article examines discussions of freedom of conscience and other religious liberties in the Orthodox ecclesiastical press between the Great Reforms of the 1860s and the first Russian Revolution in 1905. Avoiding highly influential and well-known religious thinkers, this piece instead focuses on forgotten ordained and lay writers who used their positions in the Church's hierarchy and educational establishments to reach a wide audience. At the heart of their views was a paradox: while frequently defining Christ as freedom and rejecting coercion in religious matters, these churchmen assailed freedom of conscience as morally dangerous and socially destructive. To explain this paradox and reveal why freedom of conscience allegedly posed such a threat, the article situates the writers in the institutional, intellectual, and political contexts of both the Church and the Russian Empire. Examining this is useful not only because it provides an example of how Russian Orthodox churchmen theologically justified the status quo of the empire's religious policy but also because it demonstrates how members of a state church perceived the shift of religion away from collective confessional ascription towards the individual, private sphere.

Church and State and the Marital Rights of Old Believers in Latvia: From Illegality to Secularization

“…Recent publications on the Old Belief are based largely on materials from Russia and its neighboring territories, analyzing field research data or archival documents obtained by individual scholars in Old Believer communities. Scholars are most interested in the history of the early Old Believer movement and the doctrine or development of the Old Believers after the 1905 revolution, when there was a mass exodus of Old Believers from the territory of the Russian Empire to North and South American territories (Beliajeff 1977;Scheffel 1991a;Michels 1992aMichels , 1992bMichels , 1992cMichels , 2001Crummey 1993;Robson 1993Robson , 2004Robson , 2014Robson , 2015Ulianova 1998;Clay 2008;Rogers 2009;Kain 2011;Humphrey 2014;Perrie 2016Perrie , 2020Martin 2018;White 2019). The Russian historiography includes several studies dedicated to the issues of the Russian Orthodox Church and its role in the domestic policy of the empire, including the empire's attitude towards minority religions and the Old Belief, in particular (Polunov 1996;Alekseeva 2000;Firsov 2002;Bendin 2003;Fedorov 2003;Beglov 2014).…”