The Abduction of Preaching. Priest's Speech in the Structure of a Political Myth

This article offers an analysis of hybrid forms of religiousness arising from the interaction between the orthodoxy discourse and the political discursive environment. These forms are the result of attempted redirecting of the secular politics' tasks to the clergy and the church audience, that is, attempted political secularization of the Church.

A precedent was the project to legitimize within the Russian Orthodox Church the so-called Maidan theology, which served as ideological accompaniment to the 2014 coup d'etat in Kiev. Since then, manifestations of political secularization have become regular.

In September 2019, several dozen Orthodox priests published an open letter on the topic of the detention of street rioters during the Moscow City Duma election campaign. The letter had an emphatically political nature, as it was aimed at supporting people who were not simply seeking to state their views, but provoked the police to use force, escalating the conflict. The signatories of the appeal willingly or unwillingly joined this position, which at that time and in those circumstances meant direct interference in the political conflict. They had one important thing in common: they saw their own social role outside the church as more important than their servitude at church.

The synthesis of Christian preaching and political propaganda is formed by stealing the language (in the sense established by Roland Barthes) of the Orthodox thought and is, therefore, doomed to create a hybrid, internally contradictory narrative that has nothing to do with authentic Christianity. This phenomenon can be characterized as the hijacking of the language of Christian preaching and the transfer of its sacred function into the sphere of the political. The most important task for Orthodox Christians is to purify, authenticate and naturalize the language of church mission, separating it from the influence of pseudo-Christian stylizations of secular politics and ideology.

1. Barth, R. (2008). Mifologii [Mythologies]. Moscow: Academic Project. [In Russian]

2. Vitaliy, hegumen (Utkin, I. N.). (2021). Politicheskie idei i politicheskaya bor'ba dorevolyutsionnogo russkogo dukhovenstva (na primere Ryazanskoy eparkhii) [Political Ideas and Political Struggle of the Pre-Revolutionary Russian Clergy (The Case of the Ryazan Diocese)]. Orthodoxia, (1). [Published in the present edition], 122-156. [In Russian]