Pedagogical traditions differ not only in the methods they espouse, but also in their desired outcomes, in the kinds of persons and communities they hope to create. One way to understand the different goals of secular and religious transformations is to look at the qualities each seeks to develop and promote, both in individuals as they go about their lives and in collectives. In late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, a term that was used across several secular and religious traditions to describe the ideal outcome of transformation was “spirituality” (dukhovnost'). Despite common roots in European theological and philosophical vocabulary, the term meant something different to each group that used it. The relationship between transformative goals and the qualities and behaviors that count as signs of spirituality becomes apparent when comparing the three traditions that elaborate the most on the concept: late Soviet atheism, Orthodox Christianity, and Charismatic Pentecostalism.
As a term that crosses religious and secular realms of meaning, “spirituality” is an important quality of the persons and social relations that each group imagines itself to be producing, be it through didactic spectacle or religious liturgy. The differences in what each side means by the term reveal various strategies of managing the risks of transformation. Manifesting in very different sights, sounds, and movements, Orthodox and Pentecostal spiritualities nonetheless both point toward a more-than-human end point of human learning, whereas late socialist spirituality affirms the value of an ordered human community.
The emerging scholarship on the Khrushchev Thaw and the subsequent years of “advanced” or “developed” socialism emphasizes the increased salience of various terms connected to spirituality as a departure from older, more militaristic and mechanistic, ways of imagining Soviet social relations. Under Khrushchev, campaigns for family and workplace morality and against drinking and “hooliganism” were often framed as being concerned with “spiritual values” (dukhovnye tsennosti; see Field 2007; LaPierre 2006).
The empirical social scientists who began to investigate Soviet society during those years also saw the “spiritual development” (dukhovnoe razvitie) of citizens as a major area in need of study and intervention. For instance, a large collaborative study conducted by the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Knowledge Society in the early 1960s included empirical materials from twenty-five Soviet factories to illuminate the “spiritual world” of workers in the transition from socialism to communism (Stepanian 1966). At a 1963 conference devoted to the book project, the managing editor, Tsolak Stepanjan, explained some of the rationale for this shift to the spiritual. Under conditions of the imminent transition to communism, he claimed, consciousness no longer merely reflected being, but could advance ahead of it—progressive workers in a socialist society could already have a “communist” consciousness. Obviously under the influence of the promise of the new Communist Party program to build communism by 1980, Stepanjan proclaimed the most pressing social task to be “the all-around development of personality and the final overcoming of survivals of the past.”1
Even as such hopes of imminent transition faded under Brezhnev, the focus on spiritual values remained. Sociologists such as Viktor Solov'ev saw the growth of the “spiritual needs” (dukhovnye potrebnosti) of Soviet citizens as an opportunity to convince them of the benefits of atheism, but warned that state failures to fulfill these needs were a major factor that was holding underserved populations back in religious attachments. “It is not enough to liberate a person from the captivity of religious ideas, it is necessary to provide for his all-around spiritual development,” Solov'ev commented on survey results on religious belief in the Mari ASSR (1977: 110). In the logic of these studies, such spiritual development was measured mainly in terms of participation in a humanistic culture of reading books, attending the cinema, and striving to enlarge one’s circle of friends and acquaintances. Being spiritual was thus almost the same as being a good Soviet citizen, or at least had the same outward manifestations.
Soviet methodicians saw themselves as standing in competition with religious institutions in providing for spiritual needs, and the renewed emphasis on secular festivals during the Brezhnev years was their attempt to hold their own in this competition (Smolkin 2009). But spirituality, in Soviet parlance, was squarely placed in the framework of human sociality, expressing itself in the need for entertainment, companionship, intellectual growth, and useful labor. Brezhnev era secular festivals focused on showcasing and rewarding labor productivity, and, as Caroline Humphrey observed, tended to take the form of official meetings, “almost as though people can think of no other ‘Soviet’ way of doing things” (Humphrey 1998: 399). The final measure of the effectiveness of cultural work in a given collective was always whether or not people fulfilled their work obligations: in the optic of party superiors, spiritual values and a state-centered work ethic amounted to the same thing.2
For Brezhnev era methodicians, a spiritually developed person was an economically productive member of society who also appreciated literature and art. Such appeals to spirituality may have been part of the wider attempt to tame change by paying routinized homage to it. As Dominic Boyer has shown, “spirit” in its Hegelian sense has provided citizens in a variety of political settings with an antithesis to structure, a way of talking about the forces of history that may move a society toward unknown outcomes (Boyer 2005). In Russian as in other European languages, the term for Hegel’s spirit, dukh, has a long, predominantly religious genealogy and a great deal of semantic overlap with the equally multivalent term dusha (soul). In literary and everyday speech, both are conceptualized as essential elements of being human that can grow or contract, acquire strength or wither at different times in life (Pesmen 2000). Having a soul and/or a spirit is thus an important part of what keeps a person open to change.
Though affirming the idea of working toward progress, Brezhnev era bureaucracies were wary of the unintended directions change might take. It could, for example, pull people into ideologically undesirable directions, exploring avenues of transformation that lay outside of Marxist secular frameworks. Since “spiritual” often meant “church-related” in the Russian language (dukhovnaja seminarija: a theological seminary; dukhovnaja muzyka: religious music), it must have been especially hard for Soviet methodicians to wrest the ideal of spiritual development away from connotations of religiously motivated practice. In casting improved human relationships of labor and pleasure as the ultimate aim of change, they also had to erase an important theological distinction within Orthodox Christian thought: the distinction between the soul as the seat of the human psyche and human needs, and the spirit as the potential for moving beyond those needs.
In Orthodox polemics about images, we have already encountered a discourse that opposes “soulfulness” (dushevnost') or “sensuality” (chuvstvennost') to spirituality (dukhovnost'). In Dukhanin’s writings about film, the opposition was applied to the contrast between Eastern Orthodox and Western Christian uses of sacred images; in Father Oleg Stenjaev’s apologetics, sensuality was embodied by secular visual culture. Both refer to a theory of the human psyche that traces itself back to the writings of St. Paul and the Greek church fathers. Here, intellect and emotions are not seen as end points of human possibilities, but as stepping-stones toward another kind of faculty. This faculty, labeled “spirituality” (dukhovnost'), is associated both with the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity and with an innate human potential to transcend the present fallen state and become reconnected to God through a life of Christian discipleship. In the writings of some of the desert ascetics whose counsels are collected in the Philokalia, an opposition between psychē (soul) and pneuma (spirit) from the epistles of St. Paul was elaborated into a theory of three life stages, labeled physicality, soulfulness, and spirituality (telesnost', dushevnost', and dukhovnost'), which are characterized by the increasing renunciation of bodily and emotional impulses.3 Feofan the Recluse, one of the nineteenth-century bishops who popularized these teachings among Russian laypeople, wrote: “The human soul makes us little higher than the animals, but the spirit reveals us as little less than the Angels” (Feofan 1991: 33).
Crucially, these ideals of spiritual life as a way of drawing closer to divinity were originally elaborated in monastic settings, where monks and nuns strove to attain them through withdrawal from all worldly relations. The original Greek edition of the Philokalia was compiled on Mount Athos, an important monastic center in northern Greece, in the eighteenth century, and the first translation was published in Russia in 1793 in Church Slavonic. Both versions were addressed to monastic audiences as part of a general revival of monastery-based spirituality (Florovsky 1991 [1937]: 175–177). It was only in 1877 that a modern Russian translation of the Philokalia made these teachings accessible to large numbers of lay readers, who faced very different issues of how spirituality might be practiced.
While in the monastic context the movement from one stage of spiritual development to the next was achieved primarily through ascetic contemplation, laypeople found ways to realize it through social service in brotherhoods and sisterhoods, as well as in public church rituals (Kenworthy 2008: 23). In that context, spirituality came to denote a piety that relied on divinely instituted sacraments rather than on the human sociality that was promoted in secular cultural work. During the Soviet period, prohibitions on charitable or other social initiatives by religious organizations left sacramental piety as the only avenue for those laypeople who wanted to pursue a spiritual life within the framework of the Orthodox Church. But during the later decades of the Soviet Union, the church was increasingly not the only place for spiritual development: at the same time as official policy sought to promote a secular discourse on spiritual values, many Soviet citizens began to experiment with the esoteric sides of yoga, psychic healing, and magical practices inspired by a range of sources (Lindquist 2006). Some healers and seers achieved popularity among Communist Party hierarchies in the Soviet Union and abroad, and their abilities even became objects of study at state-sponsored research institutes (Valtchinova 2004).
The common effect of these phenomena was to preserve a meaning of spirituality that could not be measured in terms of work ethics alone, allowing people to explore avenues of transformation that Soviet methodicians would have preferred to close off. Some alternative ways of pursuing spirituality could be dismissed as little more than individual hobbies, but some sustained communities designed to put spiritual dynamics into practice (H. Coleman 2005; Wanner 2007). Among Christian denominations outside of the Russian Orthodox Church, Pentecostalism places the most emphasis on the notion of the spirit. Pentecostal congregations took root in the western parts of the Russian Empire before the revolution, and small groups have been present in the Mari ASSR at least since the 1970s. With their ecstatic interpretation of spirituality, they departed as much from Brezhnev era routine as they did from Russian Orthodox notions of what was advisable during worship. Invigorated through Western missionary input since the early 1990s, Pentecostal and Charismatic communities continue to present a challenge to post-Soviet notions of public order.
Despite vast differences in their soteriology, social ethos, and ecclesiology, Pentecostalism and Eastern Orthodoxy share an idea that sets them apart from secular festival planners: the necessity of the presence of the Holy Spirit, evoked through proper liturgy, as a precondition for a human gathering to reach its transformative potential (Berzonsky 2004; Shaull and Cesar 2000: 145–159). The two denominations differ radically, however, in their ideas about the qualities of such a spirit-infused community and the practices that create it. As divergent ways of seeking spiritual development in a world shaped by secularist concerns, the forms of Orthodoxy and Pentecostalism that emerged from the Soviet era can be compared to the divergent religious movements in late twentieth-century Sri Lanka as described by Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere (1988). In their analysis of changes in urban Sri Lankan religiosity over the course of the twentieth century, these authors trace a process where monastic ideals of restraint and serenity spread among lay Buddhists and underwent a transformation reminiscent of post-Soviet rediscoveries of the nineteenth-century popularizers of Byzantine spirituality. Facing the problem of how to live out monastic values without detaching themselves from the secular bonds of kinship and professional life, middle-class Buddhists frequent short-term retreats and courses in meditation, events that often take on a more emotionally charged quality than their monastic models. For working-class migrants to the cities and others who are unable or unwilling to invest in such means of spiritual development, the ecstatic worship of various spirits that can possess people provides an alternative way of achieving out-of-the-ordinary experiences, comparable to that opened up by Pentecostal worship (cf. Meyer 1999).
Different from Brezhnev era attempts to equate spiritual development with good citizenship, religiously inspired spiritualities of the late twentieth century dramatized a tension between spiritual and social commitments.4 While the meditative response of Buddhism and Orthodoxy tries to recreate the “otherworldly individual” (Dumont 1983) of monasticism under this-worldly conditions, the ecstatic response of spirit religion and Pentecostalism aspires to a Durkheimian kind of “collective effervescence” (Durkheim 1998 [1914]) as a path beyond everyday experience. Each approach recognizes different markers to distinguish spiritual from secular communities, and allows for different linkages between personal and social change.
Orthodoxy and Pentecostalism are not the only Christian denominations to consider the presence of the Holy Spirit as a defining feature that sets apart an ecclesial from a secular gathering. German Lutheran liturgies start with an invocation of the Holy Spirit, and Quakers value silence to ensure that the few utterances made during worship have a properly “spiritual” source (Bauman 1983). Throughout the Christian world, ecclesiastic institutions claim to be guided by the activity of the Holy Spirit, which is identified with the “comforter” whose descent Jesus promised to the disciples in the Gospel of John (John 14:26).
A more specific commonality between Orthodoxy and Pentecostalism lies in the fact that both denominations have teachings on what liturgy must be like in order to be spirit-filled. While other denominations tend to take for granted that the Holy Spirit will be present wherever people gather in the name of Christ, both Eastern Orthodoxy and Pentecostalism identify particular liturgical conditions for such a presence (Meyer 1999: 142–143; Schmemann 1966 [1961]). Both groups also share a view of the human being as itself endowed with a spirit, which is capable, under the right conditions, of entering into contact with the Holy Spirit. Theologically, these “right conditions” create the distinction between a liturgical event and a social gathering. So for both groups, ensuring that a religious gathering has its intended effect involves a commitment to orthopraxis that is commonly noted for Orthodox churches, but has often been overlooked in discussions of Pentecostals that focus on the alleged individualism of their beliefs and spontaneity of their worship.5 In very different ways, both liturgical theologies deal with the problems of managing collective dynamics that Soviet secular methodicians were also intensely aware of.
Among Orthodox Christians in Marij El, judgments about spirituality and soulfulness were often made in a contrastive manner, comparing Orthodox worship to Western Christian and secular practices. Several priests and lay believers commented that Baptist and other Protestant services were “merely concerts,” because they revolved around the singing of songs without sacramental acts such as confession and communion. The judgment that Protestantism is more conducive to pleasant sociability than to spiritual growth was also made by a more sympathetic observer, a rather loosely practicing Orthodox woman who often visited the Lutheran church in Joshkar-Ola. She commented favorably on the atmosphere of that “comfortable, homey church” (ujutnaja, domashnjaja tserkov'). But the Protestant teaching of salvation by faith alone struck her as “a childish faith,” a desire for the instant joy of salvation that denied the responsibility to constantly work on oneself.
During the Protestant-Orthodox dispute in the Christian Center, Father Oleg Stenjaev presented a similar view of Protestant doctrine as not necessarily wrong, but representing a standstill at a low stage of development. Stenjaev identified the core Protestant virtue of “faith” as merely the first step of a Christian life, to be followed by the development of the other two Christian virtues of hope and charity (Russian: ljubov', which literally means “love”). The utmost goal was not just to gain forgiveness of sin, but to achieve the “reconstruction of the image of God” in oneself. Such reconstruction required personal prayer and participation in the sacraments of the church (cf. Zigon 2011).
An identification of Protestantism with sensual indulgence may be surprising to Western readers who associate Eastern Orthodoxy with lavishly decorated churches and beautiful music and Protestantism with grim austerity. But the ethnomusicologist Jeffers Engelhardt reports comparable judgments from Estonian Orthodox choir singers, many of whom converted from Lutheran backgrounds. These church musicians contrast the sentimental pleasure of Lutheran congregational singing to the more restrained, prayer-oriented styles of those Orthodox choirs that strive for a return to what they term Byzantine musical traditions. In Orthodox singing there is a subordination of musical to verbal formulas and a discouragement of ostentatious displays of skill that make worship into “something certain,” as one of the Estonian converts put it (Engelhardt 2009: 97).
The contrasts drawn by these Orthodox practitioners echo film critic Dukhanin’s accusation that “the spiritual was … replaced by the soulful” in Western Christendom (2005: 92). During the Soviet period, the same charge of soulfulness could be leveled against secular gatherings and the interpersonal relations they created. Lectures on pastoral theology by Archimandrite Veniamin (Milov, 1887–1955), given at the Moscow Spiritual Academy at Holy Trinity–St. Sergius Monastery in 1947–1948, provide a glimpse of Soviet era elaborations on the subject. Veniamin applies the diagnosis of soulfulness to erroneous ideas about priestly authority, but also to Soviet-style politics. Having left the foundation of divine grace bestowed through the apostolic tradition of sacraments and prayer, Catholic priests base their authority on merely human structures, while Protestants, revolting against this priestly authority, often replace it with an exalted faith “in the calling of [church leaders] through the Holy Spirit and their immediate divine ‘empowerment.’” In the most extreme cases, “blind followers deify [their presbyters and elders] for sentimental excitement of the soul [sentimental'noe dushevnoe vozbuzhdenie] and religious intoxication [morfinizatsiju], although in reality these only weaken any real spiritual love for God” (Veniamin 2002: 153). Among Orthodox priests the danger of replacing a grace-inspired spiritual influence on others with soulful human pressures also existed, for instance when priests placed all their hope in fiery sermons (155) or in measures for the “religious-moral enlightenment” of the laity (158). Ways of fighting the “temptation of soulfulness” (155) included humbling oneself before God and “remembering the true power of only the grace-filled [blagougodnykh] ways of influencing the believers,” i.e., through the sacraments (156).
At first glance, Veniamin’s emphasis on liturgy and personal asceticism rather than public sermons and educational or charitable initiatives seems very much in line with the restraints which the Communist Party placed on the Orthodox Church as a price for the end of the worst physical persecutions (Kolymagin 2004; Shkarovskii 1995). Delivered just a few years after the Spiritual Academy’s reopening as one of three institutions of Russian Orthodox higher learning in the Soviet Union, the lectures can appear as an example of political conformism. Such a reading would overlook, however, that Veniamin emphasizes the radical difference between the kind of community created by Orthodox liturgy and the community associated with the public events of Soviet life. For instance, he reminds his students of the antipathy of such famed preachers of the Byzantine church as St. John Chrysostom against applause in the churches, “suitable only for secular spectacles” (2002: 154), and of the fight of the apostle Paul in Corinth against the “soulful-fleshly party-mindedness of the local Christians” (148). Applying the Leninist term “party-mindedness” (partijnost') to the divisions among first-century Christians in Corinth, he gives this Soviet virtue a negative twist and suggests that it implies the same kind of “soulful” attachment to human leaders which he imputes to Protestants, “equal in effect to the service of idols and demons” (ibid.).
By identifying the cultural vehicles of Soviet modernization with emotional exaltation rather than rational control, Veniamin’s work foreshadows post-Soviet Orthodox discourses on the importance of keeping the spirituality of the church free from soulful influences. Reliance on canonically sanctioned sacraments assures priests that they are not merely influencing people with their own ideas. Proper liturgy, guided by the Holy Spirit, is thus also a safeguard of proper authority in the congregation. Pentecostal engagement with the spirit is also concerned with such liturgical safeguards, but assumes very different criteria for legitimate authority.
Although Pentecostals in Joshkar-Ola did not use the contrasting term soulful, they also thought of spiritual life as lying beyond the limitations of ordinary human possibilities. Pentecostal worship, in both its more traditional forms (going back to the early twentieth century) and its more recent Charismatic adaptations, is geared toward enabling members of the congregation to receive and exercise the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Without these gifts they will still go to heaven after death if they have accepted Christ as their savior, but they lack the capacity to fulfill the plan which God has for them in this life, which is to serve others and facilitate the coming of God’s kingdom. The tasks which the Holy Spirit helps Pentecostals accomplish are often just as mundane as those for which late Soviet spiritual education sought to mobilize people, but they encompass a wider range, from the intimately familial to behaviors which call human norms into question. One member of the Christian Center in Joshkar-Ola explained the strength6 of the Holy Spirit in terms of the dissatisfaction she started to feel a few years after having joined a Baptist church, which did not practice speaking in tongues, prophecy, or other spiritual gifts. Using a comparison of the recently born-again to infants that is common among evangelicals, she identified her need to move beyond Baptist teachings with the growing need for a kind of strength that she did not naturally have:
In the Bible it says that we should grow and go on from infants into the full age of Christ. We must always grow, grow, grow. If at first you guard and guard children, if there are scissors lying around, a needle, you say don’t take it, don’t touch, and then they grow a bit and they should already not touch it on their own. They have already learned something and should do it on their own. And the Lord also wants us to walk by ourselves, that is, to search for Him now. At first He was leading us, I went there, and He went there, I went here, and He went here, like a mother who walks and walks behind her little one, and then comes a point [when she says] how much walking around can one do, where is he going now? And the Lord is like that also: it’s necessary for us to walk on our own and look for Him now. And then, one could say, the necessity for strength has arrived.
From the Orthodox point of view, the most vivid expression of Pentecostal spiritual strength—praying in tongues—is the epitome of emotional exaltation. But for this woman, the spiritual nature of this strength lay in the fact that it expressed abilities that she did not naturally possess, causing her to act in unexpected ways. Her most poignant example came from the time when she had just converted to Pentecostalism, while her ten-year-old son was dying from leukemia. After receiving the baptism of the spirit with the help of two American women visitors, she was able to find comforting words for her son when he was in pain. In answer to his question if he was suffering for sin, she told him that he was suffering because God was preparing him to be a great preacher, like an eighteenth-century Protestant minister they had read about. Unexpectedly, the words she said gave her son visible joy, an effect she attributed to the new strength she had received:
These words, they carried this divine spirit, this strength in these words. If there had been no strength, I would have said ordinary words, and there wouldn’t have been this divine strength, I would just have put knowledge into them and would not have given him joy, would not have given him a glimpse of the love God has for him. In this situation, I on my own would not have thought of this and would not have dared to say such a thing. I would never have dared say such a thing to my own child. Well, how would I say something like that and he would feel better? Really, this just came and came, I don’t even know how it came and came out of me just like that. I wasn’t even thinking any of that. I wasn’t thinking, but whatever came out of the heart, I said. And afterwards, he wasn’t thinking any more why he was in such pain.
The caveat “I would never have dared say such a thing to my own child” suggests that without spiritual inspiration, this mother would have found her explanation either too prideful (you will be a great preacher) or too cruel (God is deliberately making you suffer). Like another parent of a dead son, described in Susan Harding’s well-known essay on her interview with a Baptist pastor (1987), this woman’s understanding of spiritual growth made her endow a devastating loss with a significance that went against her feelings as a parent. Where the Baptist pastor used the story of how he accidentally killed his son to remind Harding of the fragility of her own life, this Charismatic parishioner took our interview as an opportunity to “witness” to times when the task of tending to ordinary human responsibilities requires more-than-human strength. Different from the late Soviet equation of spiritual values with interpersonal and productive ethics, Pentecostal spirituality seems to thrive on the limits of what self and society can provide, sometimes requiring adherents to relativize cherished emotional attachments.
In this woman’s account, the process of gaining spiritual strength was a very personal experience, so that what she presented as outside inspiration might be interpreted as springing from some little-acknowledged part of her own self. Thus, Tanya Luhrmann explains born-again Christians’ sense of personal communication with God as their discovery, through redirected attention and new concentration practices, of the fragmentary, multivocal nature of ordinary self-experience (2004: 524). But solitary introspection is not the only way to experience and diagnose spiritual strength, and neither is personal transformation its intended end point. As we have seen, the church that this woman eventually joined, the Joshkar-Ola Christian Center, had very specific teachings on the need for collective learning and discipline as conditions for congregational growth. With such teachings, the Pentecostal search for spirituality goes beyond individual psychology and, like its Orthodox counterparts, intersects with liturgical theology.
That right liturgical action was as important among Charismatics as among the Orthodox was brought home to me when I noticed the great lengths to which the young pastor and his Moscow mentors went in order to teach the congregation proper ways of praising God through music and dance. Having heard frequent exhortations during services to dance harder and follow the lead of the band more enthusiastically, I began to ask church musicians about the significance of this practice of “praise” (proslavlenie). The bandleader of the Christian Center, a woman in her late twenties, prefaced her answer by identifying the ways of praising God as a central issue in interdenominational disputes:
Differences between denominations happen most of all because of praise [iz-za proslavlenija]. Remember in the Gospel according to John the fourth chapter, where Jesus talks to the Samaritan woman. She asks him a variety of questions—oh, I see that you are a prophet, this and that. But in the end, it all comes down to the question of how to worship [kak poklonjat'sja]. And he says, you [pl.] don’t know what you worship [chemu klanjaetes'], but we know. From here comes even the name of some confessions, that is, denominations. Ortho-dox [Pravo-slavnye]. Those who praise in the right way [Pravil'no slavjat].
Indeed, the Russian term for Orthodoxy, Pravoslavie, takes up the aspect of the Greek term which refers to “right praise” rather than “right doctrine,” and the Eastern churches have traditionally maintained that there is a unity between doctrine and doxology, between teachings on the faith and teachings on how to worship, meaning that doctrinal truths become part of lived experience through liturgy (Felmy 1984; Schmemann 1966 [1961]). For a Protestant denomination, by contrast, the Charismatic insistence on the centrality of questions of “how to worship” is unusual. A Russia-born Lutheran pastor, whom I interviewed in his capacity of director of a radio and television mission in Moscow, used the same story of the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman to make a point about the irrelevance of ritual to spiritual development. In answer to my question about the specific challenges of rural missionary work, he explained:
Of course the level of real knowledge of God among people is very low. You can compare it to the Gospel of John in the fourth chapter, when Jesus was talking to the Samaritan woman at the well. He talks to her about very spiritual things, very high ones, and she tells him what she knows. Yes, yes, yes, I remember, we are told that we have to worship [poklonjat'sja] on Mount Gerizim. He talks to her about very spiritual things, and she talks to him about what she knows. When we talk to such people from villages, they usually say to us: yes, we have icons at home too; yes, me too, I have holy water standing at home. You have to start from such very elementary things, gradually going on to somewhat deeper things.
The Gospel story to which both referred is in John 4:7–30, where Jesus rests near a well outside a Samaritan city and asks a woman for water. At the end of a long conversation, she comes to the question of right worship and the different teachings of Samaritans and Jews in this respect:
[The woman said,] “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:20–24)
The Charismatic bandleader and the Lutheran pastor offered very different interpretations of this passage. While the Lutheran interpreted the woman’s question about the proper place and way of worship as an expression of her ignorance of true spiritual issues, the bandleader stressed that knowing how to praise God is what “everything comes down to.” In the study materials she designed for musicians, she quotes the above passage to say that leading the congregation in worshiping God “in spirit and truth” is the purpose of the praise-and-worship band.7
For Pentecostals and Orthodox Christians, worshiping “in spirit and truth” involves bodily motions carried out to the rhythms of liturgical music. In the Russian Synodal Bible translation, Greek and Hebrew terms rendered as “worship” and “worshiper” in English correspond to terms like poklonjat'sja, poklonnik, etc., literally meaning “to bow down,” “one who bows down.” The Pentecostal and Orthodox liturgies translate these terms into quite different gestures and rhythms, but preserve their bodily connotations.
In her explanations the bandleader used terms related to “worship” (poklonenie) almost interchangeably with those denoting “praise” (proslavlenie). The link between the two has long been present in Jewish and Christian liturgical texts, for instance in the practice of blessing food offerings through giving thanks and praising God’s deeds over them (Felmy 1984: 196; Lang 1997: 29), and in the language of the Psalms, which treat public praise as the proper response to experiences of divine power (Assmann 2002: 166–170; Bornkamm 1968). Orthodox services stand in this tradition when they treat “praise” as one way of accomplishing “worship.” The vespers, for instance, start with a call to worship followed by a psalm of praise. The priest or a reader calls:
Come, let us worship God, our King.
Come, let us worship and fall down before Christ, our King and God.
Come, let us worship and fall down before the very Christ, our King and our God.
Come, let us worship and fall down before Him.8
In response, the choir or a reader chants verses from Psalm 104,9 “Bless the Lord, my soul,” which praises God for the works of creation. While praise is expressed verbally through prayers and hymnody, worship also involves bodily acts of bowing down, for instance when the gates of the iconostasis open to reveal the altar, or during the Gospel reading. In response to the prayer petitions read by a deacon or reader, people cross themselves and then either bow from the waist (pojasnyj poklon) or kneel and touch their head to the ground (zemnoj poklon), depending on their personal piety and the liturgical season—prostrations to the ground are a penitential practice more common during periods of fasting and are omitted during Easter week.
Pentecostal theologians are also fond of pointing out the many words for “praise” and “worship” in biblical Hebrew and Greek (Munroe 2000). But in the fashion of list making as a tool for teaching and dissemination, they arrange different terms into a sequence of stages, each with its own associated musical and bodily forms of expression. In the understanding that had circulated to the Christian Center through its North American and Ukrainian/Nigerian connections, “praise” (khvala or proslavlenie), calling the presence of God into the church with loud, fast music and dancing, preceded “worship” (poklonenie), a state of contemplative surrender to God by each worshiper. The latter found performative expression in people standing with both arms raised and face turned upward, eyes closed and body slightly swaying, sometimes singing softly or praying in tongues. Ideally, the sequence culminated in the “entry into the holiest of holies” (vkhod v svjatoe svjatykh), a state of close contact of every member with God that was the goal of each service, but was not always reached. This last stage seemed to have no physical signs, but looked and sounded much like “worship.” But people sometimes discussed after a service whether or not the congregation “got through” (probralis').
Both Orthodox and Pentecostal theologians look to the Old Testament for instructions for correct, spirit-filled worship, but they draw diametrically opposed conclusions, most of all when it comes to the use of beautiful things and sounds in worship. During the Orthodox-Protestant debate in the Christian Center, representatives of the Orthodox Church defended the use of icons with reference to the images of cherubim which decorated the ark of the covenant and the walls of Solomon’s temple, counterbalancing the commandment against the making of images (Exodus 25:18–22; 2 Chronicles 3:7, 10). Descriptions of Solomon’s temple were also popular at the Christian Center, but its leaders interpreted them as saying that the presence of God during worship was hindered rather than enhanced by the beauty of earthly things. At the beginning of the first service during the Christian Center’s anniversary conference in September 2005, the male lead singer of the praise-and-worship band explained the necessity for enthusiastic praise with an example from the second book of Chronicles:
You know, the Holy Spirit reminded me of a passage in the Bible. It’s … Second Chronicles, the fifth chapter. We won’t read the whole chapter, but in this chapter it is written that when Solomon built the temple, it was marvelous. There was so much gold there, there were so many stones, there was so much of everything that just looking at it one could, well, I don’t know, trip over and fall, that’s how beautiful and marvelous everything was. But you know, in order for people to really experience something, for them to start seeing something unusual, something was still lacking. It was very beautiful, there was gold, there were stones, everything. But you know, in this temple, God wasn’t there yet. Everything was beautiful, everything was there, except for this. And you know, friends, I feel as if we’re in that temple…. There was a lot of gold, but something was missing [Laughter in congregation], although everything was just great. But then came the glory of God. Let us now seek this glory, let us now seek God. Let us in this praise, in this glorification [v etoj khvale, v etom proslavlenii], let us stand up now, let us pray, so that God, so that He may be found by us.
Part of the reason that Charismatics and Orthodox drew different conclusions from descriptions of the same temple was that they were reading biblical texts through the lenses of different musical practices. In both denominations, music is materially important for the practice of worship, but it is used to create very different dynamics. In Orthodox churches, only a cappella singing is permitted. Byzantine and old Russian choral works have variable meters that allow the rhythm of the text to determine the rhythm of the melody (Martynov 1997). In interviews with two lay conductors of church choirs and an Orthodox priest who was a former choir singer, I was told again and again that the purpose of church singing was to support the priest and the congregation in praying. In the words of one conductor, prayerful concentration depended on singing that did not “attract attention to itself,” but was uniform in style and tonality and enabled listeners to follow the liturgical texts. Western-influenced choral works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, said the priest, “attract attention by their musicality” and were therefore fit only for concerts, not for worship. “Prayer and aesthetic sentiment—spirituality and soulfulness—are after all somewhat different things.” As an example of how liturgical music could remain distinct from the “soulfulness” of secular settings, he pointed to a current trend among church choirs to return to harmonizations based on the Byzantine system of “eight tones” (Greek: oktoēchos; Slavonic: os'miglasie; a system of melodic phrases that succeed each other through the weeks of the church year; see Engelhardt 2009; Headley 2010).
Charismatic bandleaders in Joshkar-Ola and Moscow, by contrast, expressed the common Protestant position that any style of music is appropriate for worship, if performed for the glory of God. But in practice, music was almost always provided by a band with synthesizer, drums, and electric guitar, and its strong rhythmicality and variable tempo were crucial to leading the congregation on the progression from praise to worship. Internationally, contemporary Protestant praise music is known for its cyclical structure with short refrains and stanzas that can be repeated as long as necessary to allow congregations to reach the desired physical and emotional response (Hawn 2003: 233n21). In a discussion of the role of music in West African spirit possession, ethnomusicologist Veit Erlmann (1982) rejects the assertion that any particular musical rhythm or tempo physiologically causes trance, but notes the importance of an overall rhythmic structure quite similar to that of services at the Christian Center: alternation between slower and faster tempi, with an overall acceleration in the course of the ceremony.
During the opening service of the anniversary conference, the bandleader’s exhortation to search for God was followed by a lengthy appeal to be joyful against a backdrop of calm music, after which the band broke into a fast-paced song. As usual during services, the music became calmer after two or three fast songs involving clapping of hands and jumping. During the worship stage, slow, meditative songs (repeating lines such as “I want to touch you / I want to see your face” or “We are thirsting for you, Lord”) overlapped with scripture readings and prayers led by the pastor. This was usually the first time in the service when people started praying in tongues, forming the backdrop to the pastors praying, which often alternated between standard Russian and glossolalia. Sometimes, the praise-and-worship phase could go on for well over an hour before the start of the sermon. Sometimes, it continued after the sermon; at other times, the pastor asked members of the congregation to come forward with specific pledges or testimonies. Generally, the pace of the service slowed down toward the end, with an altar call for newcomers who wanted to commit themselves to Christ, a collection of money, prayers for the evangelization of the city, and announcements.
Different from the steady state of unperturbed concentration that is the ideal of Orthodox worship, Charismatic musicians aim for contrasts between moods of extreme excitation and relaxing calm. They achieve this through varying tempi, rhythms, volume, and harmonies in a technique reminiscent of a disk jockey who encourages dancers to switch between moments of faster and calmer movement. Indeed, many observers of Pentecostal or faith-theology-inspired churches have little to say about praise music except that it is rock music with Christian texts. Tanya Luhrmann remarks on the inward-turning effect of singing “songs to God, not about God” (2004: 523), and with that makes an important observation about the intimate nature of the relationship implied by the texts. But, at least according to the teachings which the Christian Center was receiving through Triumphant Zion and the Embassy of God,10 such an inward focusing of “emotional attention,” as Luhrmann puts it, was not the point of these lengthy and often physically exhausting exercises. Neither was it to attract rock music fans to Jesus. Rather than being aesthetic or emotional, music according to the Charismatic ideal was “spiritual,” in the sense that it helped both individuals and the collective transcend the bounds of natural emotions. But, different from Orthodox understandings, spirituality was not a state of calm concentration, but an overwhelming presence that could only be invoked through personal sacrifice.
In our interview, the bandleader emphasized discipline both in the band and in the congregation as a condition for effective praise. As leader of the praise band, it was her job to pass on the “vision” of the pastor to the musicians as well as to make sure that the band prepared the congregation to receive the words of the sermon: “Depending on how much praise there is, what the praise is like, its quality, that’s how open the heart of the person will be to accept the word.” In order to achieve this spiritual receptivity, it was important that people not just be present during praise, but actively participate through bodily motion, particularly in ways they found painful or embarrassing:
The one who offers the sacrifice of praise [zhertvu khvaly], it says in the Psalms, that person honors Me. That means God doesn’t need simply—ah, why do we lay ourselves open like that? Sometimes you have to shout, because you simply don’t know what else to do. So that it’ll be a sacrifice. So that there’ll be a sacrifice, and a sacrifice is something you don’t want to do. Something that is uncomfortable for yourself. Many people think that I am like that in real life. No! [Laughs] No, I am a very quiet person. I know what is a sacrifice for me, and I know on what sacrifice God will come: on that which I want to do least of all.
In some ways, the sacrifice of praise is a very individual affair, which each person has to carry out according to his or her particular fears and discomforts. The most important thing is to ask God “in the spirit” what the proper sacrifice is and then carry it out without delay:
You can’t tell God, during praise [vo vremja khvaly] you can’t say, God, let me shout to you tomorrow, when no one will hear. Or let me get on my knees before you tomorrow, when no one sees it. Let me do it later. When God prompts [pobuzhdaet] you to do something, you have to do it right then, or else it’s no longer a sacrifice.
One purpose of the public framework of congregational praise was thus to enhance personal sacrifice, forcing people to go beyond their inhibitions. But public praise was necessary not just for the individual’s sake, but for the sake of the whole church, and this made it a requirement for all members, not just an optional exercise of personal piety. Successful praise brought on the presence of God, as it had in the story of Solomon’s temple. When this presence was strong, it could heal people, bring them to repent, and help everyone correctly understand the sermon.
For this reason, the bandleader was unforgiving toward people who said that they disliked the music of a particular church, but liked “the word,” i.e., the sermons. “I am not even sure if they correctly understand the word. Do they hear what is said, do they understand it correctly?” She found it equally unacceptable for people to just stand still with raised arms during the entire period of praise, saying, “I am at the stage of worship [u menja poklonenie idet], and everyone else is still at praise [khvala].” Stillness and raised arms were appropriate for the slow, advanced stage of worship, but one had to observe the order of “entering the courtyard, praise, [and then] worship in the holiest of holies.” It was like the order of body-soul-spirit, she explained, taking up the same Pauline distinction that is so important in Orthodox teachings.11
At the Christian Center, worshiping “in spirit and truth” thus entailed going beyond one’s own inhibitions and disregarding emotions such as shame, embarrassment, or fear. According to the congregation’s mentors at Triumphant Zion, it was the task of the people in authority within the church to encourage others to go beyond their emotional comfort zones. The leader of Triumphant Zion’s band found that the Christian Center suffered from a lack of “character” in its praise and linked this to a basic problem of authority common to many Protestant congregations in Russia:
They have a very good heart. There. Which is thirsting for God. They have a very good heart, which loves God. There. What they lack—their character is not trained [nevospitan kharakter]. Not the character of the people, but the general character, the collective character of the praise group. It is obvious that the praise group had no vision, and so failed to form a defined character [chetkij kharakter]…. I think that this is the basic problem: when there is a change in leadership…. From that follows a constant change or lack of vision; this does not form the character of the ministry. From that follows an insufficient number of ministers, an insufficient number of musicians, insufficiency and again insufficiency and again insufficiency. This is only because the spiritual goal [dukhovnaja tsel'] was lost at some point.
A “spiritual goal,” when it existed, enabled people to go beyond the natural goodness of their heart and form a disciplined group that could achieve the aims of effective evangelizing and church growth. The idea that relentless and consistent music and dancing were both a sign and a precondition for a successful church manifested in preachers verbally berating the congregation to be more outgoing. Musicians, who overlooked the auditorium from their place on stage, sometimes spoke privately to members of the congregation who were not jumping, dancing, and clapping actively enough. As the bandleader told me, she and her musicians would offer such reticent members a pact, saying: “Don’t close your eyes. Look at me and I will look at you, and we will dance together.”
These demanding teachings about praise met with mixed reactions within the congregation—some members ignored them, while some found them helpful for shutting out the thoughts of worldly obligations that might distract them from prayer. For example, the bereaved mother who interpreted spirit as strength also told me that she needed reminders to shout loudly during services, because otherwise unwelcome thoughts would “attack” her: at home, her two surviving daughters were hungry, her husband was angry (he remained a Baptist and was not completely happy with her choice of religious affiliation), she would accomplish nothing anyway, and the laundry wasn’t done. The liturgical creation of divine presence thus enabled the kind of tearing loose from ordinary, habitual attachments that Pentecostal spirituality requires. Achieved through musical and bodily practices of self-sacrifice, “spiritual” worship meant connecting the ideal of intimate spontaneity in relations with God to the value of collective discipline in a corporate body that could obtain “victory” (a key term in this and other Charismatic congregations) over the forces of evil that beset the world.
In some ways, Orthodox visual and musical forms—designed to help congregants concentrate on proper objects of worship as defined by the church—come closer to promoting the kind of inward-turning experience of personal change that Luhrmann ascribes to Pentecostal worship. An employee of the Orthodox diocese, who had attended some of the early meetings of the Christian Center in a culture palace in 1993, contrasted the pressure to conform to collective spatial arrangements there to the more individualized patterns in the Orthodox churches. Sitting in the back of the auditorium, she felt as if the music were placing a ring around the congregation, and she was uncomfortable when young ushers standing in the aisles asked her to move closer to the front. In an Orthodox church no one tried to stand behind a worshiper, and if someone wanted to leave, no one persuaded them to stay, she pointed out.
Although Orthodox piety also calls for acts of intercession and service to others, expansive evangelizing is problematic because salvation is not assured by a simple act of conversion, but must be won through a slow process of working on oneself (Kenworthy 2008). In the theology of “spiritual warfare” (O’Neill 2010: 88–90) espoused by the Christian Center, by contrast, the ultimate purpose of liturgical gatherings was to reclaim the city from the spiritual forces of evil. Church members performed liturgical acts oriented toward transforming Joshkar-Ola, such as prayers over a city map (Luehrmann 2010) or nighttime prayer patrols during which small groups of church members spread out through areas where the church planned evangelizing concerts, softly praying in tongues to reduce the impact of demonic forces. During an evening service in which the pastor scolded the congregation for not dancing enough, he went on to talk about the necessity of “pumping your spirit” (kachat' dukh, as one would say about muscles in body-building; cf. S. Coleman 2000) so that God could entrust the church with the great things it was destined to do. “God sees us as people who solve the problems of the state” was the message that summarized the ultimate purpose of divine election and spiritual fitness.
In this idea of spirituality as a perpetual, aggressive struggle, the point of the similarity between praise music and secular rock may be to conquer a prominent site of secular culture through incorporation. Orthodox spiritual practices, by contrast, maintain a deliberate distance from secular cultural forms, along with skepticism about the instant transition from a secular to a spiritual lifestyle that evangelical conversion promises.
Table 3. Markers of Spirituality in Russian Orthodox and Charismatic Worship
The spiritual is perhaps best thought of as a style (Gell 1998: 167) that involves very different qualities in late Soviet, Orthodox, and Pentecostal contexts. One commonality between the two Christian denominations is that some modification makes an object, action, or person different from what are considered to be its “natural” characteristics (see table 3). But while Pentecostal worship is made spiritual by ecstatic effervescence, an Orthodox gathering becomes spirit-filled when there is a commonality of aesthetics and purpose that unites individual worshipers in an unobtrusive fashion. In line with the idea that the material world is included in the divine plan of redemption (Goltz 1979), Orthodox worship quite unapologetically fashions stylistic coherence from ordinary materials, such as wood, paint, and human voices. Pentecostals, famously aspiring to a “complete break with the past” (Meyer 1998), distrust even the desire for beautiful things and sounds in worship. But neither side can escape the need for theological ideas to take on recognizable form, and this “inescapable materiality” (Keane 2007: 41) makes religious styles available for secular activists to imitate or measure themselves against, creating both dilemmas and creative possibilities.
When Soviet atheists turned toward ritual as a means for promoting their own understanding of spiritual development, they took it to be a form of didactic spectacle. Similar to their didactic understanding of icons, Soviet atheists described religious rituals as tools used by religious organizations to persuade people to follow their doctrines. To distinguish religious and secular rituals, they generally emphasized the rationality of secular didacticism, as opposed to the false emotional pressure exerted by religious activists. But atheist planners also came to argue that some degree of emotional appeal was necessary to make ritual effective. This is where the debate over which features of religious gatherings to imitate and which ones to shun joined ongoing Soviet concerns with the role of collective emotions.
The Soviet attempt to secularize spirituality by placing it firmly within the bounds of ordinary human intellectual achievement went along with a strong suspicion of agitated affective states. Abhorring Pentecostal ritual, late Soviet methodicians seemed to have an easier time understanding Orthodox aesthetic preferences. However, they also recognized similarities between their own didactic networks and evangelical forms of organization, similarities that both troubled and fascinated them.
When describing Orthodox ritual, the attitude of atheist propagandists was often straightforward envy and competition, focusing most of all on the perceived beauty of Orthodox liturgy. For instance, discussing the results of a survey of Russian Orthodox peasants in selected regions of the Mari republic carried out in 1967–1968, Nikolaj Sofronov, an instructor of philosophy at the technical college in Joshkar-Ola and a member of the atheist section of the Knowledge Society, found that over 50 percent of respondents who admitted to attending church named the beauty of the singing and of church interiors as a reason. This led Sofronov to a reflection on the process by which church art helped turn a casual visitor into a committed believer:
Having been to church, having heard the polyphonic singing, having felt the influence of church art, the person returns to the temple again and again, in order to experience himself [oshchutit'sja] again and again in unusual surroundings. Gradually he begins to take an interest not only in the music and the paintings, but also to listen [prislushivat'sja] to the words of the preacher and, without noticing, becomes a believer. Receiving satisfaction from choral singing, paintings and church architecture, the person counts their effects to the credit of religion and finally begins to argue with conviction for the beneficial influence on himself not of art, but of religion. (1973: 29)
Like analogous Soviet understandings of the impact of icons in the home, this passage probably exaggerates the impression that the sights and sounds of impoverished and ill-attended rural churches could have made on visitors. But what is interesting is the mechanism by which beauty is said to affect its audience. Perhaps influenced by Pavlovian ideas about conditioned reflexes (Todes 2001: 244–248), Sofronov understands beauty as satisfaction derived from stimuli that are themselves ideologically neutral, but that become linked to particular messages through association with words, in this case, the sermon. Through habitual association with beautiful sights and sounds, verbal messages receive positive emotional reinforcement. Being content neutral, the use of beauty in the church can be appropriated for Soviet propaganda, even though the mood of the art must be changed from “pessimism” to “optimism”:
In order to end the influence on people of church art, pessimistic in its foundations, it is necessary to significantly improve the work of aesthetic enrichment of rural toilers: take all measures to develop folk amateur art [narodnoe samodejatel'noe iskusstvo], help the works of the best masters of music, painting, sculpture, and graphics take broader root in everyday life. (Sofronov 1973: 29–30)
Both Orthodox and Pentecostal musicians would reject this mechanistic understanding of liturgical beauty, though for different reasons. Orthodox faithful indeed often pointed to the beauty of services as something that should immediately convince all visitors of the correctness of Orthodoxy. But practitioners understood this effect to be brought about not by coincidental association, but by a unity of purpose between the music, the text, and the prayerful concentration of all involved. One choir conductor spoke of a feeling of “grace,” which was created not through melodic beauty alone, but by its correspondence to the intentional state of choir and clergy:
[And people say:] grace filled the church. This is because that person [the reader] himself was praying, or the choir was praying, and this immediately spread [peredalos'] to everyone. It spreads to the priest in the altar, and his prayer also spreads, because the priest is already praying himself, and when the choir sings, it must help him in his prayer.
Beautiful music “gives wings to the soul,” and singers in church become like angels, explained the priest whom I interviewed on liturgical singing. His statement points to the tradition of Greek theology that accords transformative power to human encounters with beauty far beyond the simple enhancement of ideological messages that Soviet methodicians sought (Pelikan 1993: 286).
For musicians from the Christian Center, by contrast, beauty detracted from opportunities for spiritual growth. During a meeting of her cell group, the bandleader discussed a former church member who had moved to Moscow and was having difficulty accepting Triumphant Zion because she found it “too loud.” Her husband was Orthodox, and she had also attended Orthodox churches: “there she filled her ears [naslyshalas'], they have harmony, ideal sound, while in Triumphant Zion there is noise, shouting.” As a consequence of her attachment to beautiful sound, this woman was unable to “graft herself onto the grace” of a spiritually strong church.
Rejecting any idea of spiritual possibilities beyond the play of human attachments and habits, Soviet methodicians failed to grasp these different ways of thinking about beauty. As we have seen in discussions about the Evenings of Miracles without Miracles, their worry was more about the legitimacy of cultural enlightenment work relying on the same methods of emotional pressure that religious groups were allegedly using. But they also acknowledged that positive emotional appeal could help rituals connect with intimate aspects of people’s lives. When methodicians in the 1960s and ’70s compared religious ritual to Soviet propaganda, it was often to note the emotional deficit of the latter. In the published version of a lecture on “Reasons for the vitality of religious survivals in the USSR,” a member of the Knowledge Society stated: “The weakness of the emotional impact [emotsional'nogo vozdejstvija] of scientific atheist propaganda significantly lowers the effectiveness [rezul'tativnost'] of all this work, leads people to dissatisfaction and a cold, indifferent attitude toward the events carried out” (Ignatov 1963: 211). The task now was to reach both “feelings and mind [chuvstva i razum]” (ibid.), and the answer was a return to the strategy of secularizing folk traditions, which had begun in the 1920s, combined with admonitions that Soviet ritual should be “more beautiful, more interesting, more content-laden than old traditions” (Anonymous 1963: 60). The religious distinction between “soul” and “spirit,” between inciting emotional responses and transcending them through a common focus on a nonhuman presence, has no place in this model, but neither is it pure behaviorism. People’s emotional responses are assumed to be governed by rationality, and legitimate propaganda must address them as beings with both “feelings and mind.” The accusation against religion is that it fails to respect this duality by overwhelming people’s rational faculties and presenting what is actually an aesthetic effect as dogmatic truth.
Reservations against religious aesthetics highlight the ambivalent relationship of Soviet methodicians to the potential emotional impact of their own mass spectacles. Anxiety about the use of emotion in public gatherings was expressed in occasional comments about the “theatricality” of Orthodox ritual (A. A. Osipov 1963: 71), but more often in visceral reactions against the worship styles of Pentecostals and other Protestant “sects.” Ironically, these were the very groups whose structures Soviet observers had long recognized as akin to their own (H. Coleman 2005).
When discussing organizational strategies, atheist propagandists had to acknowledge the uncanny affinities between evangelical groups and the Soviet apparatus. “Each sectarian is a propagandist according to the rule book [po ustavu],” said a participant in a 1959 seminar in Moscow, noting the parallels to Soviet cultural work that are used by Baptists to attract new members:
They organize artistic evenings, organize evenings of leisure, excursions, outings to the countryside, but everywhere deliver sermons on themes of everyday life and morals [propovedi na bytovye i nravstvennye temy]. They have their mutual aid fund, give material aid. They assign [prikrepljajut] each sectarian [to potential converts] according to the principle of personal acquaintance for the purpose of catching souls [dlja lovli dush]. They distribute handwritten flyers, sometimes even put them into mailboxes in Moscow.12
If one changes the word “sermons” to “lectures,” the only expression that is not in line with describing the activities of a party cell would be “for the purpose of catching souls.” Which raises the question that probably made this parallel disconcerting for Soviet methodicians: what were their own artistic evenings, excursions, and lectures for? What distinguished the way they “caught” people from the illegitimate pressure used by religious groups?
One solution for methodicians after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin was to displace such parallels onto the “personality cult” of the recent past. In the words of the same speaker, sects were built “according to the principle of a political party” with particular practices of intimidation: “During the obligatory candidacy stage for each member there is a full-fledged investigation [slezhka], they constantly threaten them, down to physical threats. They prescribe who should live with whom, which profession to choose.”13 Since this was said at the height of the Communist Party’s efforts to de-Stalinize, it may not be too far-fetched to assume that a speaker in 1959 might have intended a parallel to now-condemned practices of his own ruling party when he criticized the “investigation” of members and interference with their family and professional lives.
If Soviet propagandists thus recognized a certain kind of uncanny double in how sects behaved, the sharpness of their reaction also shows some real differences between late Soviet and evangelical Protestant understandings of the value of rational control. While evangelicals recognized liturgical conditions under which such control might be relinquished to spiritual forces, Soviet ideas of human development included no extrahuman force such as the Christian Holy Spirit to maintain a unity of purpose even after rational restraints are abandoned. This may explain why, for all of the experimentation with multisensory pedagogy, the lecture always remained the dominant form of cultural enlightenment work, and the verbal report of the newspaper remained the model for other mass media (Sherel’ 2004: 84).
In the 1960s and ’70s, the visceral force of the commitment to rational control was most apparent in reactions against Pentecostal worship. Soviet law prohibited the registration of religious organizations whose rituals were “harmful to the health of citizens” or whose teachings discouraged the fulfillment of the duties of a Soviet citizen (Barinskaia and Savel'ev 1973: 24). Pentecostals fell under the first provision unless they pledged to refrain from speaking in tongues during worship. The second provision referred to organizations that encouraged their members to refuse military service, including some Pentecostal, Baptist, and Seventh-day Adventist groups.14 The rationale for why glossolalia was considered a health risk is apparent from notes included in the file on a Pentecostal group that came to the attention of authorities in Krasnogorsk, a railroad settlement in the Mari ASSR, in 1975. On a sheet of paper evidently containing notes from a conversation with members of the group, the commissioner for religious affairs, Savel'ev, had jotted down:
On Pentecostals or Christian believers of evangelical faith:
Speaking in an incomprehensible language (glossolalia)
So-called “angelical tongue” in which a person converses with god—wild shouts [dikie vykriki], etc.
Prayer gatherings are carried out under circumstances of extreme nervous excitation, religious exaltation and fanaticism. People prepare for such gatherings over long periods of time, exerting themselves through prayers and fasts. As a result of being in the sect, “P[entecostals]” turn into mentally and psychically unfit people. There are known cases of severe psychiatric illness, [and] cases of murder on the grounds of religious fanaticism.15
These notes, probably copied from instructional materials received from Moscow, reiterated rumors about unregistered sects, which had faced increasing ostracism since the 1961 split among Soviet Baptists over the issue of whether to accept state registration (Iarygin 2004: 119–120). The notes also expressed a special abhorrence of ecstatic worship practices, which would not have been an issue in an encounter with Baptists. Accusations of ritual murder among Pentecostals were a staple of the anti-sectarian campaigns of the 1960s and were dramatized in the film Clouds over Borsk (Tuchi nad Borskom, 1960, directed by Vasilij Ordynskij), which tells the story of a Komsomol girl who is drawn into a Pentecostal congregation and eventually crucified.
Further down in the notes, Savel'ev stated that the group in the Mari ASSR could register if they “renounce[d] the perverse [izuverskogo] character of their cult.” The concept of perverse cults comes from Russian imperial law, where it applied to groups such as the Skoptsy, who practiced self-castration as a way to escape the sinful bonds of sexual reproduction (Engelstein 1999). In its suspicion of uncontrolled crowds, the secularist Soviet state was thus continuing to make distinctions among religious groups that favored the routinized, highly clerically controlled worship style of Russian Orthodoxy.
In Savel'ev’s description, nothing about Pentecostal worship seems to recall Soviet cultural events—“wild shouts,” “incomprehensible language,” and “exaltation” are not among the standard descriptions of any Soviet gathering. In fact, such behavior seemed so un-Soviet that enthusiasts of rock music in the 1970s also encountered accusations that their practices were detrimental to mental health and incompatible with Soviet society, as becomes clear from some private correspondence between teenagers quoted by Alexei Yurchak. In the same year in which Savel'ev had his argument with the Pentecostals in Krasnogorsk, a Siberian university student named Aleksandr and a friend in Leningrad corresponded about the resistance to rock music they met among their teachers and Komsomol leaders. Rejecting such criticism, Aleksandr wrote about the “psycho-aesthetic pleasure” afforded by rock, which takes the listener “beyond his morals or beliefs—in short, beyond his intellect,” in contrast to the mere “aesthetic pleasure” provided by classical music (Yurchak 2006: 231). In its improvements upon the classics, rock music was “an unprecedented phenomenon of our life that in its impact on the human mind is, perhaps, comparable with the space flights and nuclear physics” (234).
As Yurchak points out, these students were creatively using the interpretive possibilities opened to them by official Soviet discourse. In its positive orientation to the future, Marxist historical narrative endowed the communist future with untold possibilities, so why not include new aesthetics and new mental and emotional capacities? Similar points have been made about Soviet science fiction as both growing out of Soviet enthusiasm for science and threatening to destabilize its claims to rationality (Kats 2004 [1986]). In this sense, transformative outcomes that went beyond present human boundaries remained possible even in the routinized world of late Soviet secularism. If such epitomes of Soviet progress as space flights could incite dreams of mind-altering effects, and if religious methods of orchestrating group dynamics could appear indistinguishable from Soviet ones, then dealing in change remained risky business throughout the Soviet era.
For all the insistence on human limits, the critical relationship of Soviet methodical work to what it saw as religious competition recalls a core meaning of “affinity” in the Volga region: the interdependence of neighbors who belong to distinct communities but who have contributed so much to each other’s existence that none would be imaginable without the others. In the biographies of methodicians, the boundaries between secular and religious sensibilities appear even more fluid, subject to the rhythms of human life rather than once-and-for-all commitments.
Preparing bread and other food offerings before a prayer ceremony, Novyj Tor"jal district, November 2005. The preparatory work of local methodicians is evident in the painted sign with the names of the gods worshiped at this tree and in the fresh wooden bar placed to hang cloth offerings. [Photograph by Sonja Luehrmann]
On the way to Shorun'zha. A folklore group from Morki meets a delegation of onaeng (in white hats) and cultural workers at the district’s boundary during the seminar on Chimarij ritual described in chapter 4. [Photograph by Sonja Luehrmann]
Resurrection Church, Joshkar-Ola, viewed from the west during the interlude between its reopening in 1944 and its destruction in 1960. The razed bell tower is visible to the right of the entrance. The tips of the fence in the foreground belong to the Lenin Park across the street. [Photo from Starikov and Levenshtein 2001, courtesy of the authors]
The new Resurrection Church under construction, September 2008. [Photograph by Sonja Luehrmann]
Icon corner in a Mari household in Bajsa village, Kirov region, June 2005. Barely visible behind the embroidered curtain are small icons, Easter eggs, and twigs blessed on Palm Sunday. [Photograph by Sonja Luehrmann]
“Worship”—a time of quiet prayer during the service in the Charismatic Christian Center, September 2005. [Photograph by Sonja Luehrmann]