Kremlin’s Promotion Of ‘Civic Religion’ Emptying Out Orthodox Churches – OpEd
Despite being at war, something that usually drives up church attendance, Russian Orthodox Churches are drawing ever fewer attendees at services, the result, Aleksandr Soldatov says, of Kremlin’s promotion of Orthodoxy as a “civic religion” with ever less religious content or concern about church attendance.
As a result, the Novaya Gazeta commentator who specializes on religious questions says, this year for the first time since the end of the Soviet Union, a majority of Russians say they never attend religious services, and supermajorities of young people say the same thing (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/08/03/kopipastva).
Initially, Patriarch Kirill tried to hide this development by photoshopping pictures of church services that appeared to be overfilled with worshippers; but that began an embarrassment as the parishioners shown came to be known as “copies.” But his concern has diminished as the church has become increasingly funded by the state.
Consequently, the fact that attendance is down so far doesn’t appear to worry him as much as it did a decade ago; and such photo-shopping has come to an end, Soldatov says. And the empty churches are there for all to see, especially as government television channels routinely broadcast pictures of services at major and some minor churches.
According to Soldatov, there are three major reasons why church attendance in Russia has fallen so far. First, for many Russians, Orthodoxy is now a civic identity rather than a religious commitment, the result of the Kremlin’s promotion of the church as one of the ties linking Russians together but not doing the same for the faith behind such churches.
As a result, many Russians who don’t believe in Orthodoxy or even in God but who came to churches in the 1990s as a kind of protest against Soviet atheism say they are Orthodox but don’t attend services, something that has transformed Orthodoxy from a religion in many cases to a political marker alone.
Second, the covid pandemic got Russians used to not attending church and many who did so up to that point have not gone back even when one might think that likely given the travails brought on by Putin’s war in Ukraine and the traditional choice of a people at war to seek solace in the church.
And third, Soldatov adds, there is an international trend away from traditional religiosity and church attendance, one that Russia has been affected by not least by the decision of the powers that be to publish translations of books published in the West that have sought to explain or even promote that trend.
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