Like a Rose Unfolding: the Soviet Union Opens to Religion
Episcopal News Service. August 7, 1990 [90195]
Jan Nunley, Freelance Writer
A staff officer of the Washington Office of the Episcopal Church said that "the religious lid is increasingly off" in the Soviet Union. After spending five days in Leningrad as a delegate to the 17th annual Dartmouth Conference, the Rev. Robert Brooks reported a remarkable new openness to religion on the part of Soviet officialdom.
"It is opening outward like a rose unfolding," said Brooks, one of only two religious leaders invited to the July 22 to July 28 conference sponsored by the Kettering Foundation. The conference is considered a model for "supplemental diplomacy" and is the longest-running forum for Soviet-American dialogue in history. "The participants are usually in or close to government in both societies, but this year the Soviets wanted for the first time to deal with the relationship of spiritual life to public policy," said Brooks, a theologian with extensive experience in governmental affairs in Washington.
The changes in Soviet-American relations were evidenced in the way this year's conference was organized. "The format is usually plenary sessions alternating with task forces, and in the past those task forces have dealt primarily with things like arms control, economics, and regional conflicts," remarked Brooks. "But this year a task force on domestic affairs was added, and everyone believes that is where the relationship between the two countries will go in the future. The arms control and regional conflicts task forces didn't use all of their allotted time; there's such consensus on those issues these days. It's a total shift from the old days of the two sides squaring off and screaming at each other like children; now there's cooperation."
And cooperation was the theme of the meetings of the task force on domestic affairs. "One issue that came up was the environment, and the Soviets remarked that it's a problem that transcends ideology and nationality, indeed all human boundaries," said Brooks. The possibility of doing foreign policy together emerged also, a change from what he called the "Reinhold Niebuhr approach of the 'evil empire versus the good.'" The emergence of democratic movements in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union predictably took up a major portion of the task force's attention. Brooks said it's a mistake to expect a duplication of the American model of government. "We talk about the enculturation of the Gospel, and the connection needs to be made with democracy as well: how does democracy enculturate itself so that it will put down deep roots in this soil? Soviet democracy will not necessarily look like American democracy."
And neither will Soviet religious life. Long suppressed and discouraged by a government that attempted to replace it with Marxist-Leninist dogma, the indigenous Russian Orthodox tradition never really went away. In fact, when the chips were down, said Brooks, even a Joseph Stalin wasn't adverse to it: "In 1941, when their backs were against the wall, Stalin restored the Moscow partiarchate, which had been suppressed by the czars 400 years before -- and put the man on the radio." Recently, the new patriarch of Moscow, previously the archbishop of Leningrad, returned to that city to celebrate a liturgy of thanksgiving in the cathedral there. "It had been a museum," Brooks said, "but with that act, he restored it as a cathedral. People like [Russian Republic President] Boris Yeltsin and Leningrad's Mayor Anatoly Subchok attended that liturgy, and it was so packed they had to broadcast it on screens outside." Another indication that a sea of change has occurred came at the end of the conference. "A member of the Soviet delegation who's an economist was chatting with us about how tough things are with their economy, and as we were parting, he grabbed my hand in his and looked very deeply into my eyes and said 'pray for us.' That kind of language is beginning to be allowed."
Brooks said the transnational nature of Orthodox Christianity may enable it to be the stabilizing force that replaces the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. That's badly needed, analysts have observed, who have said that old national and ethnic rivalries kept simmering under the Communist lid are already boiling over in Hungary and Romania. "They're going to have to reclaim the Russian Orthodox Church first," acknowledged Brooks, "since it's been treated since the days of the czars as a department of the state, and under the Soviets it's been loaded up with KGB."
While there are many positive things happening for religion in the region, negative things are turning up too. "Some of these countries have a rather unpleasant tradition of anti-Semitism," said Brooks, who cited the experience of a friend in Romania in a conversation with the Orthodox archbishop of Bucharest. "My friend asked what the archbishop saw as the main problem facing Romanians as they move toward democracy, and without batting an eye, the archbishop said, 'The Jewish problem. We have to do something about the Jews.' And my friend said, 'The last person who tried to do something about the Jewish problem ended up invading your country.' But there was no one there who could engage the archbishop in dialogue as a theologian." Resurgent and sometimes strident anti-Semitism is a problem in the Soviet Union, too, with extremist groups like Pamyat threatening the safety of Soviet Jews.
"I'm convinced that, just as we're sending business people and political experts to help the new democracies, we need to have a program among the deans of our seminaries to loan faculty to their seminaries for six months and get them up to speed on what has happened in Jewish-Christian ecumenical dialogue in the last half century or so. That's something we in the Anglican Communion can contribute, so that people who are coming back to the church won't be relearning this enculturated anti-Semitism all over again."