Russian Orthodox Christians and Their Orientation toward Church and State

Abstract

As the Soviet Union began to experiment with policies of liberal ization under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, the church one of the first social institutions to benefit from the Kremlin's new policies. By 1988, Gorbachev had agreed to grant the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) the status of a legitimate public institution, thus ending the policy of militant atheism that had stood for almost seventy years. From that point on, official persecution came to an end and religion in Russia underwent a renaissance.1 The new religious environment soon codified with the 1990 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Belief, a very liberal document that introduced legal religious equality and the separation of church and state for the first time in Russian history. As Derek H. Davis points out, however, the 1990 law was perhaps an idealized vision of wnat Russia might be in theory, but nevertheless an overestimate of what Russia prepared to be in practice.2 As Western religious organizations