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In four regions, instruction in Orthodox Christianity will be mandatory

July 27, 2007

Russia is deep in the summer doldrums. But it's only a month until children return to school, and in some cases, to a new subject: "The Foundations of Orthodox Culture."

"I want to know about God," says Lyuda, a 6-year-old girl living in Kirov Oblast. "It's interesting for me."

"If someone has an interest, it should be allowed as an elective course," says 17-year-old Lera, another Kirov resident. "Otherwise, I don't think it's an important subject. It's more unnecessary work."

In Belgorod, Kaluga, Bryansk, and Smolensk oblasts, high-school instruction in Russian Orthodoxy has become mandatory. In more than 10 other regions, it will be offered as an optional course.

Religious Resurrection

It's a development that highlights the growing influence of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has come out from under 70 years of Soviet-era repression and ignominy to reclaim its former glory as the country's dominant religion

It also addresses the desire of many Russians to restore a lost sense of national identity and pride. Some -- but not all -- of Kirov's adult residents say the basics of Orthodox culture is a welcome addition to school curricula.

Academic Outcry

In other sectors of Russian society, however, the classes have set off distress signals.

This week, senior members of the Russian Academy of Sciences signed an open letter to President Vladimir Putin expressing concern that the separation between church and state was dissolving under the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The letter, which was published in a handful of national newspapers, lamented the "growing role of clerics in Russian society" and "the church's penetration into all facets of social life."

The signatories included two Nobel laureates, physicists Vitaly Ginzburg and Zhores Alferov.

Ginzburg told RFE/RL that offering classes on Orthodox culture skews the learning process for young students, and insults followers of Russia's other religions, including as many as 20 million Muslims.

"When someone is 15 or 16, then she or he can be taught the history of religion. But why do they need it in elementary school?" Ginzburg asks.

"Russia is a multiethnic, multifaith country, is it not? But they're not taking steps to introduce the basics of Muslim morality; they care only about Orthodoxy. Ten to 20 percent of the pupils in schools may be Tatar. Should they study Orthodox culture too?"

Information, Not Indoctrination?

A number of schools have responded to such concerns by opting to offer an alternative course that examines "world religions," and not only Orthodoxy.

Defendants of the Orthodoxy classes also hasten to add that it is the religion's history and culture that is being offered to students -- not doctrine.

And many schools -- like those in Tver Oblast, which will initiate Orthodox culture classes this autumn -- are making the optional coursework be either the first or the last class of the day, in order to minimize inconvenience for those parents who opt to keep their children out of the course.

"Some people don't really have a proper understanding of what this subject will be about," says Lyudmila Gorbacheva, the deputy director of the oblast's Institute of Advanced Teacher Training, which has helped teachers prepare to instruct the Foundations of Orthodox Culture class and recommended study materials and textbooks.

Church And State...

But critics worry that even architecture and literature will open the door to creeping clericalization in Russia's schools.

They point to recent assertions by Patriarch Aleksy II, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who said it was unacceptable to teach schoolchildren Darwin's theory of evolution.

This week's letter from the academicians also tacitly frowned on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s open religious devotion and strong support for the church as further blurring the division between church and state.

They also criticized the growing role of the church in the armed forces, and the growing trend in Orthodox christening of new ships, submarines, and buildings.

"The church wants to have state functions and, generally, to influence the development of society. Priests are in the armed forces now. When a new ship is launched, there's a priest christening it. When there's a new building, there's a priest christening it too.

...Theology And Science

Ginzburg and his fellow signatories also hotly dismissed a proposal that theology be recognized as a science. "One could wonder why on earth theology -- a set of religious dogmas -- should be regarded as a science," the letter read.

It's an argument that Deacon Andrei Kurayev, a professor at the Moscow Theological Academy and a well-known Orthodox theologian, rejects.

"All the universities of Western Europe have theological faculties," Kurayev says. "Theology isn't the study of dreams and apparitions. It's the study of texts. The methodology of theological research is the same as the methodology for any other kind of humanitarian study.

Members of a radical Orthodox movement quickly appealed to the Moscow Prosecutor's Office to open a criminal case against Ginzburg for making remarks that offend Orthodox sensibilities.

Other Orthodox believers, however, find some common cause with the Ginzburg group. "Of course, clericalization is very bad," says Yakov Krotov, an Orthodox priest and a commentator on religion for RFE/RL. "But I believe there is a broader context in which I strongly oppose this letter. The problem is not whether a nuclear submarine should be christened or not... The problem is that there shouldn't be a nuclear submarine at all."

"Our country is wildly militarized," Krotov adds. "The Academy of Sciences, our physics and chemists, 90 percent of all scientists, work for war, and they are only competing for state money so that [scientists], not the church, get that money. That is the root of the problem."

Young Consumers

Beneath the heated rhetoric of the country's academic and religious elite, there is a purely practical question: How will children as young as 6 years old take to lessons about Russian Orthodox history and culture?

Not well, says Krotov, who says the church should openly acknowledge the doctrinal nature of the class and call it "God's Law," the name given to pre-1917 Russian Orthodox religious school courses.

While Krotov sees the advantage of including religion as part of world culture and civilization classes, he says there's a limit to how much school children, especially young ones, can understand or appreciate.

"In elementary school, this should be meted out in minute doses," Krotov says. "Otherwise it will provoke a nauseated reaction and have the opposite effect."

Vladimir, a history graduate student living in Kirov, takes an even more extreme view.

"Children will skip this class, or they'll barely pass it, without understanding much of anything," he says. "If there's another mandatory course, especially such an ideological one, I think it will create a generation of revolutionaries like Stalin, who also studied 'God's Law.'"

(RFE/RL Russian Service correspondents Mikhail Salenkov and Lyubov Chizhov in Moscow, Yevgeny Novikov in Tver, and Yekaterina Luzhnikova in Kirov Oblast contributed to this report.)

Labels: Christianity, church, education, Lyubov Chizhov, Mikhail Salenkov, orthodoxy, religion, Russia, theology, Yekaterina Luzhnikova, Yevgeny Novikov

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Monday, March 12, 2007

Religion's Generation Gap Growing

March 2- Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll used to be the Big Three of rebellion. Some families are adding religion to that list.

An increasing number of teens and young adults who were raised in nonreligious or nominally religious families are getting swept up in religious fervor. This is creating a complicated and sometimes painful family dynamic.

The parents of 16-year-old Kevin Ellstrand are self-described secular humanists who shun organized religion. Two years ago, Kevin says, he "started following Christ with all my heart." He has taken a missionary trip to Mexico and participates in a weekly Bible study group.

In a time when many teens are having sex and taking drugs, his parents mostly consider his piety a blessing. They get upset, however, when Kevin explains that he doesn't believe in evolution. "To me, this is appalling," says his mother, Karen Byers, who has a doctorate in strategic management and was raised a Methodist. "We get into arguments, and voices get a little louder than they should."

While parents of newly devout offspring often consider religion a benign if not positive influence, some say they are disappointed that their children have chosen a lifestyle so different from their own. Some of these teens and young adults are forgoing secular careers in favor of the ministry, moving away from home to religious enclaves, skipping family celebrations and changing their given names.

Clergy are in the difficult position of trying to guide young people toward devoutness without dishonoring their families. The reluctance of parents to accept their children's choices can be a source of frustration for some youths and their pastors. "My joke is, they liked them better when they were on drugs," says Pastor Peter La Joy, who directs the student ministry at Calvary Chapel in Tucson, Ariz.

While statistics on the number of devout young people are hard to come by, some groups that minister to the young report big gains. Young Life, an evangelical Christian ministry that focuses on children "disinterested" in religion, says more than 106,000 teens attended its programs on a weekly basis during the 2005-2006 school year, up from 66,362 12 years ago. "Mecca and Main Street," a new book by Geneive Abdo, a senior analyst at the Gallup Organization's Center for Muslim Studies, argues that a significant number of young U.S. Muslims are becoming substantially more devoted to Islam than their parents.

In the Jewish community, a growing number of formerly secular young people are embracing an Orthodox lifestyle.

Families in which the children are more religious than the parents aren't the norm. In "Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers," University of Notre Dame professor Christian Smith reports that a child's religious beliefs generally will closely reflect his parents'. And not all religious fervor among the children of secular families has a solely spiritual basis. At times, "it's a part of teenage rebellion," says Azeem Khan, the former national coordinator of Young Muslims, a group that runs summer camps and other youth-oriented religious programs.

Overall, American's religious devotion seems to have remained fairly constant over the past 10 years. In a 2006 Gallup poll, 63 percent of respondents said they were members of a church or synagogue, down slightly from 65 percent in 1996. When asked how important they considered religion in their own lives, 57 percent said it was very important, the same as in 1996.

The embrace of Islam by young people can be confounding to secular Muslim-Americans who immigrated to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. "Our parents were more culturally Muslim than religious," says Farhan Latif, the former president of the Muslim Students Association at the University of Michigan's Dearborn campus and the alumni adviser to the chapter. But in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks - and the racial profiling of Muslims that ensued - some young people have gravitated toward their religion as a show of ancestral pride and an act of defiance against a society they see as discriminatory. Young Muslims, for example, says it has seen participation double since 2000 to more than 1,000 people.

Young people gravitating toward orthodoxy is also an emergent issue in the Orthodox Jewish community. There is even a minilexicon of terms to characterize the movement. Baal Teshuva (Hebrew for "master of return") is the name Orthodox Jews give to secular Jews who are changing their lives to live like and among the frum - a Yiddish word describing observant Jews. Strict Orthodox Jews tend to live in close-knit communities, dress in a conservative fashion and strive to observe all of the Torah's 613 laws. There's even an Orthodox shorthand that includes terms like "BT" (Baal Teshuva) "FFB" (frum from birth).

Few issues create more tension for families comprised of people with different religious commitments than religious holidays and family celebrations. Last year, Philip Ackerman of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., and his wife wanted to take their three children and all of their grandchildren on a cruise to celebrate his 70th birthday. Among Mr. Ackerman's children is Azriela Jaffe, who is a BT and the author of a book about how newly observant Jews can get along with their less-observant relatives, "What Do You Mean, You Can't Eat in My Home?" Because the cruise ship didn't offer kosher food, and the itinerary would require travel on the Jewish Sabbath, Mrs. Jaffe and her family declined the invitation.

In some instances, of course, a child's embrace of religion can create stronger family bonds. When Ian Matyjewicz and his twin brother became observant Jews, their mother (a secular Jew) and father (a lapsed Catholic) felt some anxieties. In some ways, Phyllis Matyjewicz says, she and her husband, George, felt like their boys were "going into another world" and wondered if each of her sons would remain "the same person." They decided to investigate the lifestyle their sons were embracing - and then decided to join in. Phyllis had to adjust to the strict rules of Orthodoxy. For George, it was a more complex proposition: He had to go through a lengthy conversion process.

For Giti Egan, her 15-year-old daughter's decision to become an Orthodox Jew brought up a range of emotions. Ms. Egan, a 36-year-old mother of three, was raised Orthodox - and left the religion after deciding that she simply didn't believe the stories in the Torah. Now her eldest child, Kara Lieberman, is embracing that world.

At Kara's request, her parents send her to an Orthodox girls school. She keeps kosher within her mom's and stepfather's non-kosher kitchen. (They bought her separate plates, silverware, pots and pans - and have turned over for her exclusive use a refrigerator, dishwasher and oven.) Kara spends nearly every weekend away from home because she finds it easier to maintain the rules of the Sabbath by staying with observant relatives. "That," says her mother, "is a bummer."

But whenever Ms. Egan gets annoyed by the recordings of rabbis' lectures blaring from Kara's room or disappointed by the lack of weekend time together, she considers the benefits of her daughter's religious devotion. "She's a much happier kid now," she says.

Labels: Gallup Poll, holidays, orthodoxy, religion, teenagers

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Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Survey Finds Link Between Decline in Values, Waning Belief

Payton Hoegh
Correspondent

(CNSNews.com) - A majority of Americans believe the nation's moral values are declining, according to a survey gauging the state of American culture. It also found a correlation between the shift in values and a reduced emphasis on religion.

In the survey by the Culture and Media Institute, 74 percent of respondents, including a majority in each major demographic, said moral values in America are weaker than they were 20 years ago.

Forty-eight percent felt moral values were much weaker than two decades ago.

Using the data, the CMI classified American adults into one of three value groups -- Orthodox, Progressive, and Independent.

"Orthodox" Americans, comprising one-third of the adult public, are those who believe in God, think religious values should be reflected in government, and see moral issues in black and white, the survey said.

"Progressives" represent the one-sixth of adults who are fundamentally secular, opposed to religious values in government, and see moral issues in shades of gray.

"Independents" -- about half the adult population -- did not fully accept the values of the other two categories.

Ninety-one percent of the "Independent" respondents were found to believe in God and to be more "Orthodox" in questions of politics and sexual morality. But they also tend to be more "situational" in viewing moral issues and to side with "Progressives" in questions of right and wrong.

__At a press conference Wednesday launching the survey, CMI Director Bob Knight said the organization "wanted to take a snapshot of America and show [the culture] for what it is - good or bad."

The results showed that religion played a large role in the morality of the nation, he said.

Knight noted that although 87 percent of all respondents said they believe in God and a significant majority showed a commitment to classical virtues such as integrity and honesty, their actual decisions in particular situations did not always reflect it.

"In reality, there are three groups out there. The group we call the Orthodox believes in obeying God above all ... the Progressives want to write their own moral rules [and] ... the Independents respect God and tradition, but still like to do things their own way."

Using the results of its survey, CMI argues that "attitudes toward God and religion" is the crux of the conflict over culture in America.

CMI argued that if more Americans adopt "Progressive" values, the country could "expect to experience even greater moral confusion."

"The battlefield in America's culture war is the hearts and the minds of the Independents ... reversing America's moral decline will require a renewed acceptance of Orthodox values which implies increased acceptance of God's authority."

CMI said Americans should demand that the media "strive to more fairly represent all views, including those of the Orthodox."

CMI is a division of the Media Research Center, the parent organization of Cybercast News Service. Its mission is to "preserve and help restore America's culture, character, traditional values, and morals against the assault of the liberal media elite."

'No worse than any other time'

Lori Brown of the Atheist Coalition for America challenged the conclusions of the study, saying it incorrectly implied that if two things happen at the same time, then one must have caused the other.

"This shows how much misunderstanding there is of the morality of those of us who don't hold a God belief," Brown told Cybercast News Service . "If a person believes that this is the only life we have and this is the only world there is, than there will be great impetus to make it the best world possible.

"Those of us who don't believe in those concepts [of God] feel a tremendous obligation to live moral, ethical lives and to help people less fortunate then ourselves," she said.

Brown noted that when Christians gather on May 3 for the National Day of Prayer, atheists plan to observe a "Gift of Life Day," when they will donate blood rather than pray.

She also argued that the idea of a nation in moral decline is nothing new and could probably be said of any decade.

"I find people all over the country who are loving, kind, generous, and help each other, so I don't think the nation is in any worse of a decline than at other times ... people just notice this particular moment and don't put it into perspective," Brown said.

Carrie Gordon Earll of Focus on the Family welcomed the report, saying, "I don't think any American could look at the culture today and not agree with the conclusion of this study."

"Whether it is abortion, out-of-wedlock birth, the divorce rate, sexuality in media, or destructive embryo research it is across the board, and I agree with their conclusion," she said.

"If you don't have -- as they are phrasing it -- God's morality then all you have is man's opinion and that is leading us into death and destruction."

Earll conceded, however, that Christians could cooperate with people of other faiths, or no faith, when there is agreement on "core principals of morality."

"There are some basics that we can agree without having to quote a scripture verse."

Ultimately, however, she said the country does need to return to God. "Morality is based in recognizing that there is a God that created the universe and that we are subject to him ... God's standard is supreme and as humans we are held accountable to that," Earll said.

Labels: Americans, Culture and Media Institute, God, government, independent, morality, orthodoxy, Payton Hoegh, progressive, religion