Constructing Interreligious Consensus in the Post-Soviet Space: The Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations

Abstract

Interreligious conversation is a recent development within the post-Soviet space. While encounters across religious boundaries did occur even during the Soviet period, they were for the most part limited to contacts among dissidents of different faiths or to the officially sanctioned, and closely monitored, representations at international venues such as the World Council of Churches. Since the collapse of the USSR, the legislative and constitutional reforms in various states have produced a new climate of religious liberty, permitting traditional religious communities to reemerge and to embark upon a laborious path of resuming their place in society. In the process, they have found themselves in a wholly new environment—a religious marketplace of unprecedented diversity, connected globally through the Internet, and one in which newly arrived, nontraditional religious movements and organizations aspire to the same right of religious freedom as the historically rooted, “native” religious communities. Within this environment, the traditional religions have felt a need to join together and form interreligious coalitions that could articulate their shared concerns. In 1998, the Interreligious Council of Russia was established, comprising representatives of Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism. Two years earlier in Ukraine, a similar consortium was created—the Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations (UCCRO).