Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic by Sonja Luehrmann

Author:Sonja Luehrmann [Luehrmann, Sonja]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Religion, Atheism, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9780253356987
Google: ZjO_swEACAAJ
Publisher: IndianaUP
Published: 2011-09-15T20:47:47+00:00

Disillusioned Nostalgia

Work on Turkish secularism has emphasized nostalgia for the hopes inspired by a strong developmental state as a motivation for abiding secularist attachments (Navaro-Yashin 2002; Özyürek 2006). Religious actors in post-Soviet Russia can be susceptible to the same nostalgia as they seek to recreate familiar structures of Soviet mobilizations. But people who came of age during the last decades of the Soviet Union have already lived through a number of disappointments as transformative energies died down and mobilizations failed to deliver on their promises of change. Rural people, in the experience of Shorun'zha’s collective farm chairman, had always been low on the list of priorities of Soviet administrations, no matter what goals were proclaimed for a modernized countryside. And even in the city, successive waves of reconstruction had never brought about the promised communist future, in which all shortages of housing and goods would be solved.

For religious groups seeking to take over where secularist mobilizations left off, there are two options. One is to emulate the dynamics of secular didacticism, injecting them with the promise of divine agency. This is the model that has made global Pentecostalism attractive to the marginalized (Dombrowski 2001; D. Martin 1990), whose sense of precariousness and desire for change can come from poverty, but also from a sense of moral alienation. Larry Stockstill, the wealthy pastor of a megachurch, received God’s call to reenergize his church through cell groups the night after Bill Clinton was elected president, apparently in anticipation of moral and political uncertainties (Stockstill 2001 [1998]: 13). Arising out of yet another kind of marginality, Chimarij trainings are a more sober expression of the hope that a didactic framework can create the momentum for directed change in a neglected countryside.

The other option for postsecular religion is to propose a different view of what transformation means. If the Russian Orthodox Church takes care to distinguish itself from didactic institutions, this is only partly because it recognizes their fading importance. Another reason is that Orthodox responses to modernization have foregrounded those theological resources for thinking about change that stand in tension with the search for standardized curricula. Though all sides share the idea that larger social change is brought about through deliberate personal transformation, they differ on the means by which such transformation can occur, and the ends which it should achieve.

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