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Religious Education in Russia: Inter-Faith Harmony or Neo-Imperial Toleration?
[journal article]
Abstract 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 democrac... view more
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)... view less
Keywords
Russia; religion; religious instruction; religious freedom; curriculum; right of self-determination; secularization; religious socialization; religious policy; religious community; religious group; Orthodox Church; power; dominance
Classification
Sociology of Religion
Political Process, Elections, Political Sociology, Political Culture
Document language
English
Publication Year
2016
Page/Pages
p. 117-132
Journal
Social Inclusion, 4 (2016) 2
Issue topic
Religious Diversity and Social Inclusion
ISSN
2183-2803
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed
Licence
Creative Commons - Attribution