Authors

Discussion

Western scholars have often underestimated the soft-power potential of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Instrumentalized for political purposes, supported by an identitarian populism, the ROC has served in the post-Soviet period as a crucial mnemonic agent of the public memory production. It represents a critical civil society actor with its brand of neo-traditionalism finding a ready market among certain societies abroad, including Serbia. Both the Serbian Orthodox Church and the ROC view society as a communal organism and they are equally skeptical of individualism promoted by liberal thought. They are also highly conservative in their social values and very sensitive to perceived encroachments on their spiritual turfs by foreign religious groups. Religious populism is most often an ‘identitarian’ populism, whereby ‘Orthodox values’ are accommodated to the ethno–national ideals and mythologies of the Serbian and Russian people. In that context, the Orthodox Church has become a significant center of political and social power, dependent on the two autocratic regimes. In turn, both governments contribute to such a hybridization and thus infringe the separation between church and state. I tend to call this religious-political syncretism – political Orthodoxy.

Some of the key concepts discussed in this paper are: neo-traditionalism, religious populism, russkiy mir, political Orthodoxy, civil religion.