The Patriarch and the President: Religion and Political Choice in Russia

Vicki L Hesli; Ebru Erdem; William Reisinger; Arthur Miller

In this article, we argue that the political attitudes and electoral behavior of Orthodox adherents in Russia today exemplify the traditional symphonic ideal of church-state relations. As supporters of President Yeltsin, Orthodox believers are carrying forward the idea of sobornost, whereby subjects, while devoted to the church, submit freely to just rulers. In addition, following the tradition of a Christian citizen, believers have the obligation and responsibility to go to the polls and participate in voting. To test our hypothesis that religion is an important factor that influences individual political behavior in Russia, we provide evidence of the effect through personal interviews. We evaluate the responses to our survey questions and identify the points of contact between religious identity and political behavior in the following focal areas: voter turnout, presidential vote choice, and institutional support/distrust. We are able to demonstrate that traditional religious identities, still strong after decades of suppression, are among the major determining factors in vote choice. We find that the religious faithful in Russia are dubious of government institutions, yet concurrently, the faithful support the president and participate in voting at higher rates than nonbelievers. Under the old theoretical paradigm, religion was to be weakened with modernization. A more recent thesis is that the modern world is witnessing the "deprivatization" of religion--meaning that religions are refusing to accept the marginal and privatized roles that theories of modernity and secularization had reserved for them. Thus, religions are (re)entering the public sphere not only to "defend their traditional tuff," but also to "participate in the very struggles to define ... private and public spheres."(1) The Russian Orthodox Church is one such religion that is re-entering the public sphere. The Orthodox Church is participating in the collective construction and affirmation of new institutional structures. As we shall show, Orthodoxy in Russia today is serving to legitimate the current regime, yet that support is reserved and skeptical. The relationship between religion and politics is, therefore, complex, as the church plays a dual role of legitimator and critic. Given the complexity of these roles, even conflicting roles, the untangling of these interactions will only be started here.(2) Theoretical Considerations If we see the 1990s as the historical epoch when Russian voters first received the democratic franchise (arguing that until recently their votes meant little), then it is our responsibility as scholars to identify the major societal cleavages of this era, as they will have a defining impact on the future alignments of parties and voters. According to the Lipset and Rokkan tradition, Russian politics is being built on the major lines of cleavage characteristic of that society today.(3) Because Russia is well along in the modernization process, one might think that the Lipset and Rokkan framework has less applicability for this new democracy, but the historical struggle for power between the church and advocates of a secular state has not yet been played out in Russia. To further specify the foundations of political behavior in post-Soviet societies, one question that must be addressed is whether religious influences can be separated from those of class or economic interest. If religious differences simply mask a clash of economic or class interest, we can think of "religion as surrogate." In Kenneth Wald's conceptualization of this idea, "religion is relevant to politics only as a surrogate for some other form of `real' social conflict. For example, the religion of a low status group may simply reflect the correlation between the pattern of religious affiliation and socio-economic status."(4) Another application of this idea would be that higher-status individuals are more likely to adopt regime-supportive interpretations of the shared symbols than are lower-status people. …

The Patriarch and the President: Religion and Political Choice in Russia

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