ABSTRACT
Introduction Discussing modernity as a distinct civilisation and referring to ‘multiple modernities’ (as theorised by Eisenstadt 2001) is one of the most significant tendencies in political sociology. In this chapter, I am putting the latest developments of Russian church-state connections to this framework. While focusing on rhetorical manifestations of ideal collaboration between sacred and secular authorities, contextualised by the latest church-state developments, the chapter is linked with the multiple modernities’ discourse discussed by Mikhail Maslovskii, with Kåre Johan Mjør’s discussion on civilisational turn, as well as with the long perspective of Russian idealistic tradition, discussed by Vesa Oittinen, all three in this volume. In today’s public sphere of life, secular and sacred, or non-religious and religious domains, seem often blurred and intertwined, sometimes in an unexpected way. Accordingly, differentiated state administrative representatives’ and civil society actors’ rhetoric, actions, statements and choices consist of a nexus of religious as well as non-religious components. Moreover, the use of religion in the public sphere is growing. There is an increasing in-between territory, where Orthodox symbols, references and allusions to pre-1917 imperial history of statechurch relations are brought back into modern public discussion. There is also an ongoing debate on choices of the Russian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate (ROC MP) hierarchs, i.e. leaders of the Church, in today’s conflicted political situation, peaked by the 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula to Russia and internecine war in Eastern Ukraine. What is the contemporary domain of the ROC hierarchs? Can the hierarchs make choices and formulate their positions independently from the Kremlin?
