Careful What You Wish For: Vvedensky: A Case Study on the Dilemmas of Church and State

Alexander Vvedensky (1889–1946) was a priest, a reformer, a liberationist, and a tragic figure in the Russian Renovationist Church movement, also known as the Living Church. His life unfolded in the midst of the Russian Revolution when a shaky Bolshevik Party was finding its strength and then taking control of the state.

Vvedensky was one of those unique and charismatic priests who knew that Marxism held certain Christian qualities, such as its insistence on justice and its commitment to economic equality. Vvedensky called Marxism the “atheistic gospel,” meaning that it held the qualities of the Christian gospel for non-believers, and in this expression he might be considered one of the earliest liberation theologians.

The Russian Renovationist Movement

Vvedensky became the key figure in the Renovationist movement. He promoted liturgical reforms that remind us of the later Vatican II Council, for he believed that liturgy should be in the language of the people, that is, vernacular Russian not Old Church Slavonic. He promoted an ecumenical attitude, seeking dialogue with Protestants and Old Believers. He wanted clergy to work within the daily lives of parishioners, exiting the socially isolated positions of a dated hierarchy. He feared the church was becoming increasingly obsolete in the face of new science and advocated for progressive forms of theology to combat a largely literalist culture.

When the Bolsheviks came to power with their anti-religious agenda, what could Vvedensky do? Like many in history before him, he made the fateful choice to collaborate. Before the new atheistic state power, the Renovationists underlined their support for Marxism, for they did indeed support land reform and economic justice. They also backed policies for mass education and communal farming. By the mid-nineteen-twenties, with the reinforcement of the state, approximately two-thirds of the Russian churches had become Renovationist churches. A marriage between church and state was consecrated and seemed to be working.

However, collaboration of the church with a state is a risk, even when the church gaining power is progressive. The problem is that the relationship is fickle, and the state may engage in actions the church cannot truly defend. By 1929, after Joseph Stalin had gained full control of the Soviet Union, persecutions of all cultural minorities began. The church, too, was a target. There was no longer a safe place to hide. When the Second World War started, Stalin decided that the Russian Orthodox Church was a better fit for state propaganda than the Renovationists. In 1943, to gain popular support during the war, the state re-engaged the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Renovationists suddenly found themselves on the outside as the enemy of the people. Vvedensky died in 1946.

Religion and the Indifferent State

Today, it seems somewhat incredible that a leftist church movement based on Marxist principles of economic equality could have been supported by a state. True, the support was somewhat reluctant, and the brutalities of the state were not interrupted by the church’s progressive values. Then, just as quickly, a reversal of fortune occurred. The same government that supported progressives got behind traditionalists because the traditionalists were more convenient for achieving the state’s goals. It might be said that when the church plays into the hands of power, as Christian nationalism does today, its fate will be determined by the power of the state, not the integrity of the gospel.

A question a good theologian should raise is, what does it profit a faith tradition when it gains the power of political collaboration but loses its soul? Vvedensky could probably answer that question with the example of his life, for the answer is tragedy. A faith tradition gains tragedy as its story when its integrity is compromised to win political favor. Whether progressive or traditionalist, the same potential for betrayal by the state remains. Vvedensky rightly understood the social imperative of Christianity, which is the imperative of social and economic equality, but his initially welcomed voice was silenced and then violently repressed as soon as state power changed hands and ideologies. The Renovationist Church to which he committed his life was left behind in the wake of a political power shift, and its reformist voice was crushed under a new state ideology.

When a religious movement sells its soul to the state, inevitably the movement shares the fate of politics. When a new election cycle arrives, or a new regime takes control, the religious expression that had placed its wager on collaboration , as Vvedensky found out, is suddenly despised and left without merit. To put Seneca the Younger’s aphorism in reverse, what were once manners of the day are now vices.

The Sublime Madness of Religion

The inheritance from the Enlightenment is the wisdom to separate church and state, which is a benefit not only for a state but for a religion. The state needs to operate without religious prejudices, good or bad, guiding its ambitions, for the state is about a society, not a faith.

Meanwhile, the role of a religion is to be the critic of the state not because a religion knows better or because it seeks power but because the heart of religion is the divine insistence on justice. Like Reinhold Niebuhr indicated at the end of his famous Moral Man and Immoral Society, a state is spurred on to approximate justice in its practices by the impractically sublime madness of the soul. Religion, whether as the church or another form of spirituality, is the madness of the soul that dwells in and yet transcends social life. The madness necessarily critiques, but also necessarily avoids, the ideological games of politics.

It is the madness of religion that never gives up on the common heritage of our humanity and the common challenges of living together. The sublime madness falls flat, however, when the soul subordinates its identity to the power of the state, thus learning, as Vvedensky did and perhaps we need to again today, that however much a state may approach the values of equality, the human spirit is not a commodity any state should own.

About this Article

The views expressed are the author's theological reflections and do not constitute endorsement of any political candidate or political party.

Thumbnail Image: Margaret Bourke-White, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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