Political orthodoxy and secular society. Compatibility issues

Abstract

The article deals with the issues of the religion politicization in a secular society on the example of Orthodox radical activism. The growth of conservative political attitudes among active Orthodox citizens is analyzed as a reaction to the acceleration of the secularization process of Russian society, which creates a threat of marginalization of religious identity. The influence of Western European Christian fundamentalists on the Russian communities of Orthodox radicals is noted. There is a relationship between the spread of radical conservative ideas and values in modern Russian society and catastrophic socio-political changes after the collapse of the USSR, which were accompanied by serious transformations of the collective (national) identity. The article studies specifics of the new nationalreligious identity, formed by modern mass media with extensive borrowings from the legacy of Russian conservative philosophy of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Particular attention is paid to the “roots” of modern Orthodox activism, its close connection with Russian nationalism and international anti-globalism. The collision of the values of a secular society with its cult of freedom and anticlerical attitudes with a conservative-religious picture of the world, in which conspiracy theories and the rejection of liberal ideas play a significant role, is considered by the authors of the article as a result of the collapse of the former socio-political system, where atheism and communist ideology were the main semantic dominants in society.