Krasikov Anatoly

№ 4, 1997

• Church – State – Society

  Today we witness the emergence of two rather influential trends that determine the style of the religious life and that of the state-church relations in the free Russia. The first of them was I formed in the political structures of post-communism and was aimed at making Russia a clerical state (transforming the state from secular to confessional Jnational-Orthodox in form and totalitarian by nature). The second trend came from the Church itself, uniting the clerics and the laymen of Church of the majority who were seeking for Orthodoxy the status of a state religion – if not I de-jure, them de facto. Are those trends dangerous f and if yes to what extent are they dangerous? There is no doubt they are dangerous but it is possible to bar them, and the best time to do it is just now, before they merge into one flow and while on there way there is still a) the Constitution and the rule-of-the-law that guarantee ideological and religious divergence in the society, b) principled position of the ROC, reflected in official documents of the Hierarchy that declared the independence of the Church from the State c) the readiness of a substantial part of the population — believers in general and Orthodox believers in particular included - to stand up for the equality of everybody before the Law that for the first time in history had been acquired by the people.

  DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-1997-6-4-52-59

  Pages: 52-59