There’s been some discussion in the previous thread over whether or not Russian religiosity has increased since the end of the USSR, when for obvious reasons people weren’t polled on these questions.
It’s quite obvious to me that religiosity has increased.
- Personal observations: Church services in provincial Russia 15 years ago – almost all elderly woman; today – still mostly elderly woman, but now joined by elderly men, middle-aged women, some families.
Commenters such as jbwilson24 and Big Red Scary concur so I don’t think I’m imagining things.
- More and more churches are getting built.
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The rise of Russian religiosity has been observed in many sociological works. It is not exactly a controversial theory.
Still, I agree that we need hard numbers.
Fortunately, the World Values Survey does “waves” of opinion polls once every five years across a broad swathe of the world’s countries on all sorts of questions.
Here are Russia’s results in comparative perspective.
Belief in God
| 1992 | 1997 | 2002 | 2007 | 2012 | |
| Belarus | 36.4% | 67.9% | 84.9% | ||
| Poland | 92.2% | ||||
| Romania | 92.3% | 92.3% | |||
| Russia | 35.2% | 60.1% | 73.3% | ||
| Sweden | 48.2% | 46.6% | 50.3% | ||
| Ukraine | 64.7% | 87.8% | |||
| UK | |||||
| USA | 93.8% | 94.2% | 87.7% |
Percentage of Russians believing in God has more than doubled since the early 1990s.
Importance of God in your life (/10)
| 1992 | 1997 | 2002 | 2007 | 2012 | |
| Belarus | 4.15 | 5.97 | 6.51 | ||
| Poland | 8.73 | 7.95 | |||
| Romania | 8.03 | 9.17 | 8.93 | ||
| Russia | 4.00 | 5.39 | 6.12 | 6.68 | |
| Sweden | 3.94 | 4.10 | 3.91 | 3.65 | |
| Ukraine | 5.96 | 7.23 | 7.18 | ||
| UK | 5.26 | 5.59 | |||
| USA | 8.78 | 8.14 | 8.47 | 8.22 | 7.77 |
On average, Russians went from rating the importance of God from 4.0/10 to 6.7/10 from 1992 to 2012, an almost three point increase. In contrast, the United States – which has become markedly more secular in the past decade according to both my observations and opinion polls – only dropped by one point between 1992 and 2012 (though I suspect the fall has continued and maybe even accelerated since 2012).
In the longterm, I expect Russia’s figures to converge with Poland’s, which is to the contrary secularizing (and becoming more socially liberal).
Anyhow, I think we can consider this question answered.
It’ll be interesting to see whether Poland or India legalises gay marriage first. The Indian supreme court (re)legalised gay sex one week ago, after the Delhi High Court initially did it in 2009. This time it was done on an unanimous basis. The ruling Hindu nationalist party didn’t object. India is converging with the West a lot faster culturally than it is economically.
https://i.imgur.com/l4qUyyg.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/fAHpHVS.jpg
It’s worthwhile pointing out that India legalised transsexuals as a ‘third gender’ already back in 2014, long before the current trans craze in the West really got going.
While we conceive the West as more liberal than the Orient, this is a historical inversion. Homosexuality was not always frowned upon in these socities before European contact, and many of the anti-homosexuality laws were often the result of either European colonisation or cultural influence. So, it isn’t necessarily the case that India is doing this purely to ape the West. Same can be said of Poland. We never had any laws under a free and sovereign rule restricting your sexuality or using the monopoly of state violence to regulate what people could or couldn’t do in the bedroom.
OT
My great-grandfather was a POW somewhere in Siberia. He married a local girl there. My grandmother was born there, in a village called Poperechnaya (Поперечная), which she claimed belonged to Tomsk. (I thought Tomsk oblast, but it was probably Tomsk governorate.) After a lot of futile searches, I managed to locate a place which is called Poperechnoye (Поперечное): https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B5_(%D0%9D%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%B8%D1%80%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C)
My mom thinks that it’s the same, because Poperechnaya is feminine, while Poperechnoye is neutral, and after some thinking my mom determined that the Russian word for “village” (деревня – according to my mom) is a feminine word, while the word for “place” (место – according to my mom, she can speak some Russian, I can’t) is neutral, and so maybe they changed the name when it was made part of another (bigger) village. (So it’s now merely a locality part of a bigger village, and not a separate village.)
Is there a way to find it out if it really happened, i.e. if it really was called the feminine version before?
I don’t know what the next steps should be, but it’d be nice if I could perhaps locate a few relatives there. (Maybe some of them could speak some English..? At least the younger ones.)
Do you think it is inevitable that tolerance of homosexuality must lead to Gay Marriage? To me Gay Marriage is one of those crazy Western fads, such as Diversity! or the Holocaust. Perhaps, India is reverting to norm, but without adopting Western craziness?
Meanwhile in Russia:
https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1039455821866913792
My favourite part of the ruling;
The globohomo cargo-cultism in the document as a whole is stunning.
WTF
Are these people Indians or Europeans?
https://m.dailyhunt.in/news/india/english/deccan+herald-epaper-deccan/sec+377+judges+delve+into+world+history+philosophy-newsid-96312250
Presumably, you never had laws to stop someone from raping geese to death or eating boiled cow turds either.
Cannibalism is never mentioned in the Bible. That doesn’t mean it is sanctioned by God, only that the idea is so marginal and disgusting that there’s no point to even talk about it.
typo alert
AK: Thanks
I haven’t read answers in the other post yet.
But we have official statements (whether to believe or not) each year on church attendance for any services Easter and Christmas. Easter is the most important data, for church attendance in general, as the most important one.
Official numbers in a general decline each year over the decade, but with a large regional variation. Overall, for Easter, it was 2.7% across the country this year attend any service.
For example, in Chelyabinsk region only 0,8% people attend at church during Easter. But in Sverdlovsk region, it’s 2.7%. And in North Ossetia (I can’t remember number exactly) it was many times higher).
2.7% looks like a lot of people if you see tens of thousands of people, but not when you compare them to the number of people totally.
Attendance for Christmas services this year was around 1.7%.
Everyone should go one time in their life, especially as children.
During 1990s this was a phenomenon. In the boom year of 1992, for example.
Now, amongst self-identifying orthodox, monthly communion attendance around 1.2%.
https://takiedela.ru/2017/04/takaya-rossiya-cerkov/
I would say this is quite a separate topic to anything with church.
If you give me this questionnaire. My answers for “belief in afterlife?” – it would be “certain” (but without rational knowledge, just intuitive knowledge).
My answer for “belief in God?” – it would also be “strong, but rationally unsure”.
–
But my answers are not indication I support the church doctrines or doctrines of an organized religion.
On the contrary, I would say their doctrines are distant from the reality of the world, and of God for those who are believing. God is of course something far stranger, sublime (in Kant’s conception) and much more alien to human ordinary conception, than they – apart from the religious mystics – show their parishioners.
At the same time, church is useful consolation and psychological help for people especially, after they experience disasters in their life.
It can also be aesthetically good to give you an certain atmosphere.
? https://takiedela.ru/2017/04/takaya-rossiya-cerkov/
Maybe Tasha can opine (requesting reinforcements), but without theistic arguments, the secular arguments around such sexual taboos like homosexuality, bisexuality among males,
and incest, basically revolve around the yuck factor right? Thing is liberals have been very good at picking apart these arguments as being emotional in nature, and thus irrational. People may disagree, but the polling numbers seem to indicate otherwise, and yes you may complain about the powers that be and their propaganda, but at the end of the day no one is putting a gun to people’s heads and forcing them to watch sexually degenerate media right? So something about how the way that liberals package their message must be effective, especially since there are no shortage of socially conservative media in the US to watch over the years, and yet people still choose to watch media that endorses pro-LGBT values.
How much of this is due to Muslim demographic changes in Russia? And I’m not including Litvinenko, piss be upon him, because he converted to Islam on his deathbed. In the 90’s there were 300 mosques in Russia. Today there are 8000 mosques in Russia. Today there are more Muslims in Moscow than the total inhabitants of Boston or D.C.
Let’s hope the return to region in Russia is to the only true religion of Christianity. Islam is merely a revolutionary movement by you-know-who.
Do secular conservatives have anything better than the it is icky argument? Because that seems to be falling flat on its face Vs. Liberal propaganda, now you do not have to like it, but you cannot deny it’s persuasive power Vs. Conservative discourse. Basically why have liberals been so much better at packing their arguments, in a way that is psychologically palatable to people, Vs. Conservatives? Why are liberals so much better at understanding basic human psychology conservatives, otherwise the liberal message would not have been as successful as they as it is now? I mean even Sweden had a disfavorable view of homosexuality until the end of the 80s, what are the core reasons why conservatives lost the battle for hearts and minds Vs. Liberals?
Holy shit, if this is the kind of clown in leadership in the Russian military, Russia had better acquiesce to any commands of the U.S. military in Syria because I think U.S. military commanders would make quick and punishing work of this kind of stooge. It’d be like the current UFC heavyweight champ fighting a kid in a wheelchair with cerebral palsy. Is this the military Martyanov could stand up to U.S.??
Does this come before or after they prance about in high heels?
Doesn’t Russia have pretty significant overrepresentation among UFC championships?
It has absolutely zero to do with arguments and everything to do with (((who))) controls the megaphone. You can blare basically ANY narrative long enough and eventually people will conform to it, any by ANY I include cannibalism, incest, pedophillia, human sacrifice, genocide, eating shit, anything you can possibly think of.
I’m not secular and I’m not “conservative”. Nobody with half a brain is “conservative”. (As everybody knows, “conservative” means “conserving the progressive values of when I was 25”.)
Values we see as “progressive” appeal to the autonomy seeking desire of humans; however that appetite, like other appetites, can be harmful in excess. Pushing back is merely the need to demonstrate that gluttony both of the caloric and demotic varieties is sinful as well as maladaptive.
That’s a bit too strong. People will conform if there are penalties, but when no one is listening, they will grumble about these things among close friends or family members.
I talked to an owner of a cottage in a tourist destination who rents it out to tourists, and told me that all the German tourists were complaining about the refugees and the idiocy of their own government and media. Which is similar to what you see in German language anonymous comment sections. On the other hand, when among people they don’t trust (among each other in public settings), they don’t say anything against it, nor do they vote against it. That’s pretty similar to what they did during the holocaust, when they knew something terrible was going on, and according to the Gestapo, kept complaining about it, but they did nothing and outwardly conformed to the official ideology.
Its because the Liberal message is fundamentally and basically correct and appeals to all our spiritual and moral intuitions. It is also old as mankind. All the great religions are Liberal.
Conservatism, Right Wingism, is basically wrong, and appeals to our small minded, selfish, and stupid animal selves.
The problem is today’s Liberalism is a heavily corrupted version of the Great Message.
Conservatism, right wingism, etc – has never historically succeeded anywhere except for brief periods. It is based on short term animal selfishness.
The sensibility of people on this blog will be a mere footnote in history, if that.
What will eventually happen is a faction will arise within Liberalism itself, young intelligent men and women of an idealistic bent – i.e by definition not Right Wingers – and will “repair” Liberalism – which is nothing more than the Perennial Tradition in heavily corrupted form – purify it, and restore to its its proper foundation in supernaturalism.
Pot isn’t a basis for society.
Society is not an ultimate value.
In proper historical context…there is no escaping conclusion.
Note to Mr. Karlin; thanks for looking up the stats on the important questions that were raised in the previous thread. Much appreciated.
Peace.
I was disgusted by homosexuality even when I used to be a liberal individualist but I would say “consenting adults should have the right to do what they want in the privacy of their homes.”
Increasingly, this is not good enough and you are completely wrong if you think that liberals are winning on the homosexual question. No, it’s modern Red Guards taking over now and they think that liberals are just as bad as conservatives. My individualist liberalism was good enough ten years ago but now you can’t just say that you’re willing to tolerate homosexuals without risking your job. We’re heading towards obligatory participation in gay pride and liberalism is dying.
I increasingly believe that history is a cycle. As generations pass, people forget the reasons why traditions and institutions were set up the way they originally were and conservatives are increasingly stuck just defending tradition for the sake of defending it without being able to paint a plausible picture of the consequences of choosing liberalism and dismantling tradition and institutions. Conservative eras turn into liberal eras as time passes.
People growing up under conservative eras have a poor grasp of just how far the radicalism would go if the traditional and institutional restraints were dismantled. Liberal eras allow radicalism to grow unchecked and even once liberal leaders start realizing what is happening they’re unable to resist since they’re committed to the idea that “authoritarian” measures are unnecessary. Liberal eras turn into radical eras as time passes.
Radical eras are a struggle over the political direction and the right to control the discourse to the point where the next generation won’t even remember that there used to be differing opinions. One faction eventually wins, imposes its system on society by creating a set of institutions and traditions that cancel the liberalism and kick away the ladder that allowed them to climb to the top so that no one else can do the same. Radical eras turn into conservative eras and the cycle begins again.
Leninists and Bioleninists: https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/leninism-and-bioleninism/
This is for the Hijra, an age-old group of eunuchs that exists in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Yes, eunuchs are still made today by illegal home operations. They’re rejected by society and reduced to beggar life, but somehow also considered sacred, giving blessings at weddings and births – that’s all really bizarre stuff.
https://youtu.be/F36ht-Iujx0
“I expect Russia’s figures to converge with Poland’s”
Doubtful. In 2017 about 37% of Poland’s Catholics went to mass regularly
(Poland is 93% Catholic). Attendance at Christmas and Easter would be
much higher. This is to be compared with Dmitry’s figures of 2-3%.
Because of its strength the Catholic Church was effectively the opposition
party under Communism (1945-1989). No wonder that the overthrow
of Marxism-Leninism began in Poland, first with the Solidarity movement
in 1980-81, and then with the Round Table talks in early 1989. The most obvious
Marxist lie was its materialism. I’d say that Poland is more spiritual than
religious. If you are spiritual, then you perceive the Divine radiance
indwelling in all things around you. But then Aldous Huxley already said
that in The Doors of Perception. He needed psychedelics to realize this
truth but that’s better than nothing.
What is striking is Poland’s extremely low rates of social dysfunction
(murder, abortion, rape, drug addiction, HIV, school shootings, etc),
even compared to Western Europe. I think there is a correlation here
with Poland’s spirituality. For example, many people believe that the
dead are observing us and praying for us, maybe not continuously but
often. So it’s not just Jesus Christ who is observing us and guiding us
but our ancestors as well. This is known as the Communion of the
Saints. Poland’s social dysfunction rates are so low they approach
the Japanese levels, which is gratifying because as a pragmatist I believe
that the main function of religion is to reduce social dysfunction.
I am speaking of the percentage of people who believe in God. I expect those figures will converge with time. In fact, I would not be surprised if they are already equal between young Poles and Russians.
Attending regular Orthodox services is much more demanding than attending Catholic ones, so they are not too comparable.
Ethnic Russian dysfunction is primarily a function of the sovok era alcoholization epidemic, which is fading away.