Paper presented at the XXX International Educational Readings “Peter the Great at 350: A Secular World and Religiosity”, May 2022.

Video recording: YouTube

Tambov: Orthodox Christians Who Don’t Go to Church

Let me start with a specific study. In 2014, the Centre for Religious Studies at Tambov State University named after G.R. Derzhavin surveyed more than 1,500 students to identify the main patterns of religiosity among young people in Tambov and the Tambov region.

The results are interesting. Around 90% of respondents identified with Orthodoxy and said they were believers. The overwhelming majority were Orthodox Christians, with Muslims substantially fewer. One might think that is quite encouraging.

But then things get interesting. Only 4.9% attend church regularly. Only 6% regularly read religious literature.

This immediately raises the question: Orthodox in what sense exactly? Culturally Orthodox? Ideologically? When asked “what does Orthodoxy mean to you?”, students answered along these lines: Orthodoxy is our culture, it is Sergius of Radonezh, it is the great pages of our history. Almost no one mentioned anything connected with Orthodox doctrine as such.

For young people today — at least in the Tambov region — Orthodoxy is primarily something cultural. Something that unites everyone, something everyone has known since school. This is not fundamentally new, and it is in itself a fascinating phenomenon.

But what is truly striking is this: the researchers found that for many of these students, Orthodox practice carries features of magical thinking. It is hard to imagine anything further from genuine Orthodoxy. Lighting a candle before an exam, in their understanding, works mechanically: I light the candle, something happens. This is sympathetic magic in its pure form, what James Frazer wrote about. A complete failure to understand what distinguishes religion from magic. Plunging into an ice hole at Epiphany — also for health reasons, not for any religious experience.

Scholars call this a pragmatic type of religiosity: religious self-identification accompanied by precisely these kinds of manifestations, which — as far as I can tell — have very little to do with genuine Orthodoxy.

One more thing: the value hierarchy of Tambov students. First place: family, at 82%. Second: health. Third: material wellbeing. Fourth: love. Religious faith comes fifth, at 20%. Education is at the very bottom of the list, which I find personally dispiriting.

Hidden Catholics Among Orthodox Christians

Now for some data that genuinely astonished me when I first encountered them — and which have received remarkably little attention.

According to the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), around 69% of Orthodox Russians believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. This is the Catholic position — the filioque formula. This precise theological disagreement was at the heart of the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western churches in 1054. The Orthodox position is that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone.

Only around 10% of respondents gave the answer that corresponds to Orthodox teaching.

How to interpret this? I think it maps directly onto what I have just described: no inclination to read theological literature, no familiarity with doctrinal content. Orthodoxy is perceived as cultural belonging — Sergius of Radonezh, architecture, Easter — rather than as a system of specific theological convictions.

Russian Religiosity: The Overall Picture

Data from the Russian Academy of Sciences, VTsIOM, FOM, and the Levada Centre are broadly consistent and reproduce the same patterns year after year. Around 68–71% of Russians identify to some degree with Orthodoxy. Of these, only around 13% attend church regularly and participate in the sacraments. About 9% describe themselves as very religious.

And those 9% are the people who actually live their Orthodox faith in practice. The rest are the people who, when asked on the street “what religion are you?”, answer: “Well, probably Orthodox, I suppose.” There is even a theory that there is a kind of constant — a core of religiously active, committed people — that makes up roughly 9–11% in any given society.

Moscow Students

Let me turn to another study: research on the religiosity of Moscow students, conducted across several Moscow universities. The sample: ages 18 to 29 — the group with the lowest level of religious affiliation.

55% identify to some degree with a religion. Interestingly, there are more people who call themselves Orthodox than people who say they believe in God — and this is a pattern that Russian sociology has been recording for many years. Many people who identify as Orthodox simply do not believe in God. On some questions, non-believers make up as much as 30% of those who identify as Orthodox. Try fitting that into a coherent framework.

65% of Orthodox young people pray rarely — meaning less than once a month. Among Muslims, the same figure is only 21%. The gap is enormous.

29% of respondents observe religious prescriptions — and it matters enormously what “observe” means here. Turning up once a year for Easter or Christmas is one thing; actually living a religious life is quite another.

41% celebrate most religious holidays. 16% attend services frequently. 12% are engaged in reading religious books. 66% address requests to God — but that last one, as we all know, is something everyone does.

The bottom line of these studies matches what we saw in Tambov: religion functions primarily as a factor of cultural self-identification rather than as a doctrinal and behavioural system.

US Data

A brief look at Pew Research Center data from the United States — to situate all of this in a broader context.

The question: how important is religion in your life? Among Americans aged 18–29: 40%. Among 30–49 year olds: 51%.

This is not a dramatic gap. There is a myth — one that seems to go back roughly to the first written records we have — about young people being fundamentally less religious than their elders, who are wiser, more experienced, and more devout. The data do not support this myth.

If you combine those who say religion is “very important” and those who say it is “fairly important”, you get 68% among young Americans. That is two thirds. There is no dramatic generational chasm here.

The same is true for the “nones” — people who do not affiliate with any religion. Among Americans 18–29: 35%. Among 30–49: 37%. Again, almost no difference. This category is growing across all age groups, not only among the young.

The Myth of the Wayward Youth

I want to pause on this myth because it is remarkably persistent. Young people are less devout, less knowledgeable, less responsible — while the older generation is far more religious and informed.

The data do not support this. Ignorance of doctrinal content is not a problem of youth specifically — it is a problem of society as a whole. 69% of Orthodox Christians not knowing the basic theological distinction on filioque: that is not only young people. That is a representative sample of Orthodox citizens across all ages.

Religiosity is shaped by quite different factors: upbringing, cultural environment, the influence of reference groups. The generational gap exists, but it is not the catastrophe popular imagination supposes. In Russia it is further complicated by the post-Soviet context: the generation that lived through the 1980s and 90s and saw the Church in a suppressed position — and then saw its sudden restoration to public life — relates to religion differently from the generation born after 1991, which perceives the Church as a stable institution a thousand years old.

Conclusions

A few core points.

High levels of religious affiliation characterise our society as a whole: the majority of Russians identify to some degree with traditional religions — Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism. But actual religious engagement, in the case of Orthodoxy, remains very low.

Both young people and older generations frequently lack basic knowledge of doctrine — we have seen this with filioque, with belief in curses and the evil eye, with magical thinking around exam candles.

One cannot say that young people differ fundamentally from older generations. The religious landscape is relatively uniform, with a modest intergenerational gap.

And the main conclusion, which I consider essential: we live in a predominantly secular society. Whether this is good or bad is a value judgement — not my department. But it is a fact that all available data consistently confirm.