The Globe and Mail (Canada)

26 June 1997

[for personal use only]

Editorial

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM COMES TO RUSSIA

THE news earlier this week that the Russian Duma had approved a law which would, in effect, turn that country's Protestant and Catholic minorities into second-class citizens has left us considering the modern meaning of what is sometimes described as the longest word in the English language: antidisestablishmentarianism.

In an act which one critic describes as "clerical bolshevism," the law grants full legal status only to what are characterized as the country's traditional religions: Russian Orthodox, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. To get full rights, other religions would have to show that they had existed for more than 50 years in half of Russia's provinces.

Sects of existing religions would have to get documents from local authorities indicating that they had existed for at least 15 years -- documentation which would be all but impossible for many denominations which during Russia's communist and atheistic past existed only as illicit underground groups.

Lacking official religion status, the Mormons, the Baptists, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Hare Krishnas and God knows who else won't be able to own churches, publish literature or worship in public places. Foreign missionaries will find themselves in what computer scientists sometimes describe as a negative feedback loop. They will be allowed in the country only if they are invited by recognized religious organizations. However, since most foreign missionaries will likely represent organizations which under the proposed law couldn't and wouldn't get recognized, the missionaries wouldn't be allowed into the country.

The pernicious new law replaces an earlier one which in effect "disestablished" atheism as the state-sanctioned religion and granted religious freedom to all denominations. Thus the re-establishment of a state-sanctioned religion quite literally represents Russia's new antidisestablishmentarian impulse.

There are various convoluted explanations given for what is going on. They variously categorize the law as being: another kick at the demon foreigners; a power grab on the part of the Russian Orthodox Church which is singled out for some as-yet-unclear special status; a nationalist ploy to use toleration of foreign religions as a way of painting Boris Yeltsin as both a too-Western and too-liberal head of state.

All this is frustratingly byzantine -- that is to say, traditionally Russian -- but what most saddens us is the clear evidence that the Russians don't understand why you don't want a state sanctioning of belief systems. In modern, democratic, technologically driven countries, religious tolerance transcends religion. Disestablishmentarianism tells people in the loudest voice possible that nobody owns the truth.

Environmentalism, feminism, the cult of the Internet and the Common Sense Revolution are all Canadian civic religions of a sort. We may embrace some, feel uncomfortable with others, and hate not a few, but as disestablishmentarianism democrats we have come to accept that as long as beliefs don't seek to actively destroy the state, they have something to say to us.

What a modern Russia most needs is a sense that its communal future is replete not with one truth but with competing truths. Boris Yeltsin should strike down the Duma's dictum and recite as he does so the wise words of U.S. jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes: "The ultimate good desired is better reached by a free trade of ideas -- the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market."

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Johnson's Russia List

27 June 1997

djohnson@cdi.org