The Moralist International
Russia in the Global Culture Wars
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The Moralist International analyzes the role of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state in the global culture wars over gender and reproductive rights and religious freedom. It shows how the Russian Orthodox Church in the past thirty years first acquired knowledge about the dynamics, issues, and strategies of Right- Wing Christian groups; how the Moscow Patriarchate has shaped its traditionalist agenda accordingly; and how the close alliance between church and state has turned Russia into a norm entrepreneur for international moral conservativism. Including detailed case studies of the World Congress of Families, anti-abortion activism, and the global homeschooling movement, the book identifies the key factors, causes, and actors of this process. Kristina Stoeckl and Dmitry Uzlaner then develop the concept of conservative aggiornamento to describe Russian traditionalism as the result of conservative religious modernization and the globalization of Christian social conservatism.
The Moralist International continues a line of research on the globalization of the culture wars that challenges the widespread perception that it is only progressive actors who use the international human rights regime to achieve their goals by demonstrating that conservative actors do the same. The book offers a new, original perspective that firmly embeds the conservative turn of post-Soviet Russia in the transnational dynamics of the global culture wars.
The Moralist International is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.
In their short but in-depth book, Stoeckl and Uzlaner offer an interpretation of Russia's powerful shift toward moral conservatism and "traditional values" under President Vladimir Putin. . . [T]hey demonstrate the importance of transnational influences in Russia's embrace of conservatism and explore Russia's place in the global culture wars.—Foreign Affairs
The Moralist International tells the unique story of Russia's role in today's global culture wars. Moving away from media hype, Kristina Stoeckl and Dmitry Uzlaner rebuild the nuanced history of transnational links between Americans, Russians, and Europeans and their ideological underpinnings. This book sheds light on the driving role of the Russian Orthodox Church in leading the conservative struggle both at home and abroad. It is a must-read to understand one of the bedrocks of Russia's war in Ukraine.—Marlene Laruelle, Professor, Director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at the George Washington University.
Stoeckl and Uzlaner make a major contribution to understanding how and why the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state have made common cause with religious traditionalists in the West. The result has been significant expansion in today's globalized culture wars. Whether one believes that such cultural clashes contributed to the Ukraine war—or that NATO expansion played the major role—the interactions analyzed in The Moralist International are critical to understanding world politics today.—Clifford Bob, Duquesne University, author of The Global Right Wing and Rights as Weapons
This is the best study I know of the role of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church in the global culture wars. Now that Russian religious culture has become an instrumental weapon in a catastrophic war of aggression against Ukraine, it is of utmost importance that all publics understand the tragic sacrilegious dynamics of The Moralist International.—Jose Casanova, Emeritus Georgetown University
In a study that is both illuminating and infuriating, Kristina Stoeckl and Dmitry Uzlaner show how Russia’s Orthodox Church—historically, the heart of one of the world’s great religious communions—has wholeheartedly committed itself to an intimate alliance with an evil state and its deeply reactionary social positions.—The Christian Century
Anyone interested in the complicated relationship between society, politics, and religion will find a concise, thought-provoking, timely discussion in this volume.—Choice Reviews
. . . [A]n excellent research on the international contexts of the ROC’s ideological standpoint.—H-Net Reviews
Kristina Stoeckl is Professor of Sociology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. The most recent of her books are The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights (Routledge, 2014) and Russian Orthodoxy and Secularism (Brill, 2020).
Dmitry Uzlaner (Author)
Dmitry Uzlaner is research fellow at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, Russia. The most recent of his books are The Postsecular Turn: How to Think about Religion in the Twenty-First Century (in Russian, Izdatel’stvo instituta gaiidara, 2020), The End of Religion? A History of the Theory of Secularization (in Russian, Higher School of Economics Press, 2019), and Contemporary Russian Conservatism: Problems, Paradoxes, and Perspectives (Brill, 2019, co-edited with Mikhail Suslov).
Preface | vii
Introduction | 1
PART I: LEARNING THE CULTURE WARS
1 Religion: Conservative Aggiornamento and the Globalization of the Culture Wars | 17
2 History: The Sources of Russia’s Traditional-Values Conservatism | 29
3 Intellectual Roots: The Shared Legacy of Pitirim Sorokin | 50
4 Context: The Rise of Traditional-Values Conservatism inside Russia | 66
PART II: DOING THE CULTURE WARS
5 Ambitions: The Russian Orthodox Church and Its Transnational Conservative Alliances | 87
6 Networks: Civil Society and the Rise of the Russian Christian Right | 103
7 Strategies: The Russian Orthodox Anti-Abortion Discourse in a Transnational Context | 126
8 Leadership: Russian Traditional-Values Conservatism and State Diplomacy | 136
Epilogue | 153
Acknowledgments | 157
Bibliography | 159
Index | 193
