This is a conference about religious freedom, not about church corruption. But I would like to suggest to you that at least in Russia corruption is becoming one of the most important forces in church-state relations. It has also become steadily more important as a barrier to internal church reform and as a poisonous element in relations between Orthodox and western Christians. Fifty years from now, historians will wonder why we spent so little time at the turn of century analyzing church corruption, especially in countries like Russia where corruption has become the dominant political, economic, and moral fact of life.

In fact, I would like to suggest that in and of itself the problem of corruption is a major additional reason why Christians should be for religious freedom--especially at the beginning of the 21st century. Just as the modern bureaucratic state has powers for ideological tyranny far beyond the worst evils of medieval kings and emperors, it also has mechanisms for systematic fraud and robbery that the tax collectors of the Roman Empire could never have imagined. The more closely the Church allows herself to get entangled with the modern bureaucratic state, the more likely she is to inject these poisons into her own bloodstream.

The 20th century, now mercifully nearing its end, has seen the state poisoning church life in three major ways. First, the state has tried to harness religious institutions to secular ideologies such as socialism or feminism. Second, the state has encouraged or forced religious believers to promote the national elements in their traditions at the expense of the universal elements. It has turned German Lutherans or Serbian Orthodox or Croatian Catholics into disciples of neo-pagan tribal cults rather than of Jesus Christ who is 'the same yesterday, today and forever'. Third, as I have already suggested, the state has created major new temptations and pressures for financial corruption.

Since I am going to talk mostly about Russia rather than about the rest of Europe, I can dispense fairly quickly with the first of these. The experience of 70 years of totalitarian atheism has quite effectively inoculated the Russian people against all forms of secular utopia. It's now in the west, not the east, that one sees the state imposing secular ideologies on religion; for example, the state Lutheran church of Norway was forced by that country's government to ordain women to the priesthood. In Latvia, the restoration of religious freedom has led to the election of a new Lutheran archbishop who openly opposes the ordination of women which was forced on his church during the Soviet occupation. Ideologies such as 'liberation theology' may still have appeal in the west, but not in countries that have concrete experience of life under Marxist rule. Indeed, at least in Russia the problem today is not excessive ideological enthusiasm but the opposite: massive cynicism about all political systems and political leaders. Unfortunately, in today's Russia such cynicism is largely justified.

Religious nationalism, the second source of poison, has surprised a lot of people with its durability. Social theorists have been talking about the 'global village' for most of the lives of most of the people in this room, but we keep getting surprised by the continued emergence of younger and newer thugs who manipulate national and religious identities to promote hatred. For us in the west it all seems impossibly archaic, as if major parts of the world simply were refusing to accept what to us seem like the obvious lessons of 1914 and 1939.

But I would suggest that it is a failure of imagination to think of religious nationalism as something archaic and old-fashioned. From the standpoint of 2,000 years of Christian tradition, nationalism is a relatively recent aberration; it dates back only a century or two. Nineteenth-century nationalism has more in common with 20th-century feminism than either does with the ancient Christian heritage. Religious leaders who allow themselves to be swept away by nationalist passions are not guilty of being too conservative or too traditionalist; the problem is that they are not traditionalist enough.

Let me tell you an experience I had in Russia five years ago, just after I started working for the Keston Institute. It was at an institution that many of you have probably visited, the Sergiev Posad monastery in the town of Zagorsk near Moscow. The monastery is one of the architectural glories of the Russian Church, a popular site for tourists. It is also the home of the Moscow Patriarchate's most important divinity school, which has been growing even more influential under the current Patriarch.

I was visiting the divinity school in order to interview one of its theology professors. By good luck my visit just happened to coincide with the visit of a candidate for parliament. This candidate was the only one of about a dozen rival candidates for the local seat in parliament who was invited to come speak to the students and faculty; in effect the divinity school was endorsing him. I sat in the auditorium, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, listening to his speech and to the questions and answers. It was one of the most revealing experiences of all the seven years during which I lived in Russia. If it had not been for the distinctive garb of the students and faculty, I would have thought that I was at a meeting of a Russian nationalist organization rather than a Christian theological institution. The very first thing the candidate said in introducing himself was that he was an Orthodox Christian, but there were hardly any questions about abortion or capital punishment or other political issues that one thinks of as having a peculiarly moral or spiritual dimension. Nearly all the questions were about issues like the expansion of NATO.

After the speech I got the chance to interview the candidate one-on-one. I first asked him what it was like to be a Christian politician in post-Soviet Russia. He paused, then said, 'Well, actually I'm still making the transition from Communism to Christianity'. I then asked, 'Where do you go to church?' He said, 'I don't go to church.' I then said to him, 'In your speech you expressed your deep loyalty to two things: to Russia and to Orthodox Christianity. Could you tell me which of those two loyalties is the higher priority for you? If there were a conflict between them, which one would you choose?' He looked at me in complete astonishment, then said, 'How could there possibly be such a conflict? Russia and Orthodoxy are inseparable.'

That answer reflects a view which is widespread in today's Russia: it is what I call the Slavic version of Japanese Shintoism, a warped version of Orthodox Christianity in which the faith is no longer a world religion. It is no longer a source of universal moral norms by which one judges one's own government and one's own people, but simply a repository of symbols and slogans by which one proclaims the superiority of one's own tribe over other tribes. In spirit it is simply pagan.

Of course such a religion is highly convenient for the state; it leaves citizens with no source of moral authority that can effectively challenge the state itself. I think of a press release issued by Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk, the leading candidate to be Patriarch Aleksi's successor as head of the Russian Church, during the first Chechen war in 1995. Kirill's statement, which called on the young men of Russia not to dodge military conscription, could have been drafted by the Russian Ministry of Defense. He made no mention of the brutal hazing of new recruits, which has led to thousands of suicides. On military atrocities against civilians, he said that if a soldier receives an order that is immoral it is nevertheless his duty to obey that order; the moral responsibility lies with his superiors. In effect he repudiated the view proclaimed by the victors of World War II (including Soviet Russia) at the Nuremberg trials, that following orders is no excuse for war crimes.

Such tribalization of religion is not confined to the Russian Orthodox. I remember interviewing the editor of 'Protestant', a monthly newspaper published mainly for Baptists all over the former Soviet Union. I asked the editor if he and his colleagues were experiencing any threats of censorship or other interference from the secular authorities. He said that the state had not attempted in any way to restrict the contents or the circulation of the newspaper, with one exception; that exception was not in Russia but in Ukraine. Officials in that country, he said, had blocked the distribution of his newspaper because it is written in the Russian rather than the Ukrainian language.

A few years ago I visited a Roman Catholic parish in eastern Siberia, the congregation of which consists mostly of Russian citizens of Polish ancestry; some of their families have lived there since the mid-nineteenth century. The parish's priest was born in Poland itself, but moved to Russia in the 1990s in response to the shortage of qualified, Russian-born Catholic priests. The priest told me that he is determined that the parish should serve as a house of prayer for all people, regardless of ethnic background; he was even applying for Russian citizenship. He said that the greatest resistance to his plans came from within the congregation itself, from his fellow Poles who would prefer that the parish function essentially as a Polish ethnic club.

Of course it is not just Russian bishops but Russian secular officials who encourage nationalism. Not long ago Keston obtained a copy of an internal government memo warning of the dangers of American Protestant missionaries in the Russian Far East. The memo stated in all seriousness that American missionaries are part of a U.S. government plan to seize control of that region, from Vladivostok to the Arctic Ocean, and transfer it from Russian to American sovereignty. Having spent their whole lives in a system in which church leaders think and act like state bureaucrats, Russian officials have difficulty accepting that there can be societies in which the separation of church and state is not just an empty slogan.

But let me stress again that nationalism is not the only element at work here; in today's Russia nationalism is becoming less and less important relative to corruption. In 1997, as most of you know, Russia enacted a harsh law restoring state control over religious life. The rhetoric in the parliamentary debates that accompanied the passage of this law was explicitly xenophobic and nationalistic; so is the text of the law itself. If the law were enforced as it is written, foreign Protestant missionaries would have far less freedom to operate in Russia than do indigenous Russian Protestants. But in practice the result has been essentially the opposite. For most of the last three years the Russian bureaucracy has implemented the new law in such a way that it has fallen more severely on independent Baptist or Pentecostal congregations headed by native-born Russian pastors than on missions planted by visiting Americans. Under the new Putin regime the treatment of foreign missionaries has taken a turn for the worse--but overall it is still true that most often it is the indigenous pastor, not the foreigner, who is called into a provincial mayor's office and told that his congregation will not be allowed to rent a public meeting hall anywhere in the city. In practice, what has been decisive is not the text of the 1997 law but the age-old Russian custom of rolling out the red carpet for foreigners while trampling on one's own people.

For the last two months there has been a raging conflict inside the Jewish community, with two rivals claiming the post of chief rabbi of Russia. One of the two is a native-born Siberian Jew who has lived in Russia all his life. The other is an Italian-born U.S. citizen who moved to Russia in the 1990s, who became a Russian citizen only recently, and who does not even speak the Russian language well. You might expect the Kremlin to be supporting the native-born Russian, but in fact the Putin administration has thrown its weight behind the newcomer from America. Less important than nationalism is the fact that the Russian-born rabbi is an ally of Vladimir Gusinsky, the owner of Russia's only independent television network; the Kremlin has clearly decided to cut Gusinsky down to size, even arresting him briefly in early June.

The Putin administration has portrayed its assault on Gusinsky as part of a new struggle against corruption, but most observers in Moscow are highly skeptical of this claim. Overall the new administration has simply failed to take the steps that one would expect if it were going to wage a serious campaign against corruption. The key positions in the Cabinet and in the Kremlin staff are still controlled by the same individuals who presided over the transfer of Russia's most valuable economic assets to well-connected robber barons during the Yeltsin years. During these years the Moscow Patriarchate itself has emerged as what one Russian scholar aptly calls a gigantic 'offshore' economic zone inside the country. In 1996 a major scandal erupted when the Patriarchate was caught importing millions of dollars worth of cigarettes which were disguised as humanitarian aid and hence shielded from customs duties. Patriarch Aleksi promised to implement reforms to stop this sort of thing, for example by making the Church's economic activities 'transparent' to outside scrutiny, but in fact these activities to this date remain as opaque as ever.

Last year I spent a week in the province of Kostroma, about 200 miles northeast of Moscow, researching one of these shady economic activities. Kostroma is the source of a well-known brand of mineral water called 'Saint Springs', sold all over Russia and abroad. It is the only consumer product in Russia that advertises the personal endorsement of the Patriarch of Moscow. On the bottle is a picture of an Orthodox Church, Patriarch Aleksi's written blessing, and a signed statement from the Archbishop of Kostroma declaring that the proceeds from the sale of this water go to restoration of Orthodox churches. In a week of traveling around Kostroma province and visiting local parish priests, I could not find one who had actually received any of this revenue for restoring his church building. Meanwhile the archbishop is building a lavish new episcopal palace for himself.

One of the most interesting aspects of this story is that St Springs is an American company in both ownership and operation, not a Russian one. Again, the situation is the opposite of what you would expect if church life today were being shaped primarily by Russian nationalism.

Unlike nationalism, corruption is a game that western newcomers can play just as well as the natives--or even better since they have money. The 1997 law, with its complicated and obscure provisions giving secular officials huge room for discretion in deciding whether to register religious organizations, provides golden opportunities for both direct and indirect forms of bribery. In 1998 I had several conversations with the unusually candid official in charge of church-state relations in the province of Khakassia in southwestern Siberia; he complained that his colleagues in other provinces were happy to accept bribes such as free trips abroad in return for favorable treatment of foreign missionaries.

Last year I spoke at a conference on religious freedom at Brigham Young University in Utah. To my astonishment I found that among my fellow speakers was one of Russia's most repressive provincial officials specializing in church-state relations--the first one to succeed in expelling altogether an American missionary, a Baptist from Oregon. This official was being given a free trip to America, several days' stay in a luxury hotel, and a platform to defend the 1997 law as if he were an independent scholar. His Mormon hosts have close contacts with congressional staffers and State Department officials involved in the case of the Baptist missionary, but they did not even inform these contacts that they were inviting this Russian official, much less seek advice on how to influence his behavior toward the Baptists.

Needless to say, that official has not created any problems since then for the Mormons in his province; instead he has been reinforced in his conviction that he can use tactics of 'divide and rule' against religious minorities.

What makes this episode especially striking is that in some ways the Mormons have performed more responsibly than other confessions in Russia. For example, I have never met a Mormon missionary there who was not a serious student of the Russian language - in sharp contrast to many other western missionaries. But unfortunately an episode like this sends powerful signals to Russian officials. The phenomenon of buying special treatment for one's own religious denomination is the most extreme version of a wider problem. Not always, but all too often, western religious bodies have acted as if they cared about religious freedom only for their own co-religionists in Russia, or even only for the specific organizations with which they have joint projects.

All too often I read newsletters from American Protestant groups which create the impression that the only Protestants in Russia are those who belong to the Baptist Union. That body is the best-connected and least independent-minded of Russia's nationwide Protestant organizations; it was established during the Stalin years in part as an instrument of state control over Protestant life. All too often American Protestants seem indifferent to the rights of Russia's independent 'initsiativniki' Baptists, who refused to make compromises with the Soviet or post-Soviet state, who lack political influence in Moscow, and who are less 'useful' to American visitors than the mainline Baptist Union.

Of course I would concede that the smaller and more marginal a religious body is, the more excuse it has for concentrating on defending its own rights rather than campaigning for religious freedom for everyone. Conversely, I would suggest that large and powerful religious bodies have a special duty to look beyond their own interests and to help their smaller and weaker counterparts. Of course Protestants are a small minority in Russia - fewer than one percent of the population - but American Protestant groups have considerable leverage in Washington. They should be encouraging the U.S. government to influence the Kremlin on behalf of religious freedom for all bona fide believers, not just U.S. Protestant missionaries.

Roman Catholics are just as small a minority in today's Russian Federation as the Protestants, but theirs is unquestionably the world's most powerful religious institution. The number of governments with which Moscow desires good relations and which the Vatican has the power to influence is unmatched. Thus I was especially disappointed in 1997 and 1998 that Rome failed to make optimal use of that influence. As the Keston Institute representative in Moscow at that time I was in an ideal position to observe which western embassies were interested in lobbying the Kremlin against the repressive new law on religion. Diplomats seeking detailed briefings on the proposed law often contacted Keston; I repeatedly met with representatives of the Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Canadian, British and U.S. embassies. There seemed to be something about northwest European Protestant monarchies that made them especially interested in this subject; I did not get one request for information or analysis from any embassy of any country bordering the Mediterranean Sea. The only embassy of a traditionally Roman Catholic country that expressed interest was that of Guatemala, whose ambassador was extremely active on the issue.

I was also disappointed in the letter that Pope John Paul sent to Boris Yeltsin in June of 1997. Though the Pope urged that President Yeltsin veto the proposed law on religion, he put undue emphasis on just one point: the law's failure to classify Roman Catholicism as one of Russia's 'traditional religions' along with Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism. The letter created the impression that Rome was not seeking religious freedom for all, but simply to have Roman Catholicism added to the list of confessions receiving special privileges from the state.

I often tell my Protestant friends that they should learn from the modern Roman Catholic example in developing a specifically Christian theology of religious freedom. 'Dignitatis Humanae' is one of the 20th century's most magnificent texts on the subject; I tell Baptists and Calvinists that if they like they can just ignore that document's origins in the Second Vatican Council and study it as an essay in political theory. Similarly, I would suggest that Roman Catholics should learn not so much from Protestant theory as from Protestant practice. If I were looking for a political environment friendly to my rights as a member of a religious minority, I would rather be a Roman Catholic living in Norway than a Protestant living in Latin America.

But fortunately, all the major Christian confessions have produced inspiring examples of leaders who have defended religious freedom across the board. I think of practicing Orthodox Christians such as Valeri Borshchov, who took the lead in the fight against the 1997 law within the Russian parliament. I think of Karen Lord, legal counsel for the Helsinki Commission in Washington, who works just as tirelessly for Roman Catholics as for her fellow Protestants.

Last month I stood amidst the ruins of a Protestant church in Ashgabat, capital of the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan. This church had been torn down by deliberate state action, by bulldozers under the orders of the KGB--not twenty years or even ten years ago, but just ten months ago in November 1999. Soon after watching his church be destroyed the Protestant pastor received a visit from the local Roman Catholic priest, who asked him for permission to take one of the building stones from the rubble. The priest said that someday he hopes to get permission to build a Catholic church in Ashgabat, and that when he does he will use that piece of rubble as its cornerstone. I would suggest to you that there is a priest who has truly absorbed the meaning of 'Dignitatis Humanae'. Let us all learn from his example.

© 2000 The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
all rights reserved

This paper was presented at a conference entitled "Religious Liberty and the Ideology of the State," in Prague, Czech Republic, in August, 2000. It will be edited for publication. Do not quote without written permission of The Becket Fund.