Russian Federation

The Religious “Map” of the Russian Federation in a Globalized World

The Moscow Patriarchate lists 27,393 parishes under its jurisdiction; of these, approximately half are in the Russian Federation. Various Protestant groups have the second largest number of registered communities, at approximately 5,000; of these, the Baptist and Pentecostal communities constitute at least half. By far the largest growth can be seen in the number of registered Pentecostal parishes: Between 1991 and 2003, they expanded at an astonishing rate of 2,000%. There are perhaps 3,500 Islamic communities; the Jewish, Buddhist, Old Believer, and Roman Catholic communities number in the hundreds.

Even though the Russian Orthodox Church appears to dominate, the reality speaks otherwise. Most Russians identify themselves as “Orthodox”—through the 1990s and 2000s, this number has vacillated between 60% and 80% of respondents. However, of this same majority, nearly 20% do not believe in God. Surprising numbers are not aware of the basic tenets of Orthodox Christianity. Even more significantly, even the most optimistic assessments acknowledge that only at most 10% of Russia's population actually attend Orthodox services on a regular basis (most estimates place this number at 3%–5%). Ostensibly, most of the Russian Orthodox population attends at parishes under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, but even here, the numbers are questionable. Even assuming that each of the approximately 15,000 parishes in the Russian Federation were able to accommodate 10,000 people at a liturgy (which, given the size of Russia's churches, is extremely unlikely) and were full to capacity each Sunday (again an unlikely scenario), this would account for at most 1,500,000 active Orthodox Christians.

Thus, the reality on the ground in the Russian Federation does not fit the image of a predominantly Orthodox country. This is further underscored by the fact that in the other religious communities, self-identification appears to more clearly correspond to actual practice; thus, it has been said that in Russia the majority of practicing Christians are not Orthodox but rather Protestant. Though not usually interpreted as such in the literature on the subject, the expansion of religious missions—from the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East—in the Russian Federation throughout the 1990s can be considered to fit into the broader globalization process, in the sense of transnational movement of people and ideas. While some of the Protestant communities trace their roots to the pre-perestroika and even pre-Revolution era, many of them—in particular the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Pentecostals—arrived in the Russian Federation primarily after 1991. Especially in the beginning, Protestant missionaries brought with them the full material and moral support of their home organizations (this concerns, e.g., the Mormons and the Methodists). Across the North Caucasus, Islamic communities dealt with the lack of educated clergy by either sending their own members to the Middle East to study or inviting Islamic teachers from outside countries such as Saudi Arabia. Many of the new religious [Page 1103]movements that flourished across Russia during this time period—for example, Scientology—had discernible foreign sponsorship.

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