Religious Education in Russia: Inter-Faith Harmony or Neo-Imperial Toleration?

Journal article | Zeitschriftenartikel

This paper explores the approach to religious education that has been instituted in Russia since 2012. The new policy's manifestly proclaimed goals seem convergent with the values of religious freedom, self-determination, tolerance, and inter-faith peace that are espoused by Western liberal democracies. Yet Russia’s hidden religious education curriculum is far more consistent with a neo-imperial model of ethno-religious (Russian Orthodox) hegemony and limited toleration of selected, other faiths whose reach is restricted to politically peripheral ethno-territorial entities. This model embodies and revitalizes Russia's imperial legacies. Yet the revitalization is, in itself, an outcome of strategic choices made by the country's religious and secular elites in the course of its desecularization. Building on discourse analysis of five Russian textbooks and a teacher’s manual, this article shows how the neo-imperial model manifests itself in the suppression of exogenous and endogenous pluralism, cultivation of the ideology of "ethnodoxy", and in essentially imperialist mythology. The paper concludes by predicting the new model's potential instability. (author's abstract)

Object Details

• ISSN: 2183-2803
• Extent: Seite(n): 117-132
• Language: Englisch
• Notes: Status: Veröffentlichungsversion; begutachtet (peer reviewed)

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Social Inclusion, 4(2)

Classification and Topics

• Subject: Politikwissenschaft ; Soziologie, Anthropologie ; Religionssoziologie ; politische Willensbildung, politische Soziologie, politische Kultur ; Russland ; Religion ; Religionsunterricht ; Glaubensfreiheit ; Curriculum ; Selbstbestimmungsrecht ; Säkularisierung ; religiöse Sozialisation ; Religionspolitik ; Religionsgemeinschaft ; religiöse Gruppe ; orthodoxe Kirche ; Macht ; Dominanz

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Lisovskaya, Elena
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (when): 2016

Further information

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v4i2.509
• Last update: 21.06.2024, 4:27 PM CEST