United Liberty

As the United States moves towards a “post-Christian American”, Russia seems to be experiencing a religious renaissance. Jon Meacham reports:

According to the American Religious Identification Survey… the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008—roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States.)

In postcommunist Russia, the tide seems to be moving in the other direction. Medvedev makes public appearances with the Russian Orthodox church leaders quite regularly. Church historian Andrei Zubov has an explanation for the new ties between politicians and religious leaders:

“In Communist times, authorities completely lacked human, moral principles….Now that many politicians are religious, they relate their lives to moral principles.”

The Russian Orthodox Church, like its American evangelical counterparts, seems to be doing quite well financially:

The glittering Christ the Savior Cathedral, a pale-white marble structure decorated with bronze statuary and swaths of gold leaf, is more than just Moscow’s grandest and most opulent place of worship.

Built in the 1990s as a replica of a church dynamited by Communists in 1931, the cathedral symbolizes the Moscow Patriarchate’s rising political influence _ which may be greater today than at any time since the 17th century. It also serves as global headquarters of vast and expanding business operations that experts say are worth several billion dollars.