The Vacant Churches of the Moscow Patriarchate

“CopyPaste”: Why are churches becoming empty, and is this connected with the special military operation?

 August 3, 2026

 

“Ye shall see the abomination of desolation <…> standing in the holy place…”

(Matthew 24:15)

 

The Numbers Don’t Lie

The Orthodox television channel “Soyuz,” which belongs to the Yekaterinburg Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, broadcasts the Liturgy live every day. Cameras are set up in different churches—most often in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but sometimes in provincial churches, even rural ones. Yet whatever the church may be, almost all broadcasts demonstrate a phenomenon distressing for the Russian Orthodox Church: the churches have emptied. As a rule, only a few people are present at the Liturgies. Even at solemn Patriarchal services in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, if it is not Christmas or Pascha, small groups of lay worshippers occupy only a modest part of the church space in front of the iconostasis.

At first glance, the sparse attendance at services in Russia appears paradoxical. In the atheistic USSR, functioning churches were overcrowded. In modern Russia, whose authorities have proclaimed themselves the “Katechon”—the restraining power that holds back the forces of the Antichrist, and the last guardian of a unique Orthodox spirituality and traditional values—the churches seem to have become largely unwanted.

Patriarch Alexy II is credited with the admission: “The people are leaving the Church.” In his report to a meeting of the Moscow clergy in 2004, he argued that what repels people most is “the greed of priests and church personnel.” The merging of the Church with the authorities and large state-owned capital has led to the ecclesiastical corporation becoming less and less dependent on the money of ordinary parishioners and increasingly integrated into budgets at various levels.

Special boards of trustees have been established at major cathedrals and monasteries, bringing together officials and representatives of business, who “make contributions” in exchange for guarantees of relative immunity—not from the Church, of course.

The outflow of parishioners only intensified during the patriarchate of Kirill. At first, attempts were made to combat this with Photoshop—the Patriarch’s press service would “paste in” the missing parishioners onto photographs posted on the Patriarchate’s website. They were jokingly called “kopipastvoy” [copy paste]. But this practice was quickly abandoned—it only damaged the already difficult reputation of the current Patriarch.

Official Russian sociology records a steady decline in “institutional” religiosity. According to a February study by the Levada Center*, the proportion of Russians who do not attend church services at all exceeded half for the first time since the 1990s, reaching 55%. In June of last year, this figure was only 44%. According to these data, only 16% of those surveyed can be considered relatively church-going, meaning that they attend church once a month or more often. Among young people under the age of 25, the proportion of those who never enter a church reached 68%, and among students, 71%. At the same time, 73% of Russians identify themselves “with Orthodoxy,” but, as numerous other studies show, such identification does not necessarily imply even belief in God.

For many Russians, “being Orthodox” means identifying oneself with a particular ethnoculture rather than with religion as such.

A more reliable picture of the level of religiosity is provided by measurements of church attendance on the principal feasts—Christmas and Pascha—conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Thus, in 2024, at the height of patriotic mobilization around the special military operation, Christmas services were attended by about 1.4 million Russians, that is, approximately 1 (one) percent of the population. Attendance at Paschal services is higher, which is connected with a change in the counting methodology insisted upon by Patriarch Kirill. Now the Paschal statistics include not only those praying at the service, but also those who come to have kulichi and eggs blessed. In 2023, there were approximately 2.8 million such people. According to a VTsIOM survey conducted in April 2024, only 12% of Gen Z respondents born in the twenty-first century and 18% of millennials born in the 1990s acknowledged the importance of Pascha. The Sreda research service, which is close to the Russian Orthodox Church, acknowledges that only 5% of Russians who call themselves Orthodox consider “spiritual, mystical life” in the Church important to them.

Factors Behind the Outflow

The decline of real, as opposed to professed, religiosity in Russia is taking place against the backdrop of the cynical use of the Church for the propaganda of state ideology and the special military operation. Church attendance, far more than millions of the most carefully chosen words, speaks to how such propaganda is actually perceived by the people.

COVID also contributed to the outflow of parishioners: first came the active campaigning by the Patriarch and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church against attending churches, with references to ancient saints who attained salvation even without churches; then came the spread of the virus among the most conservative clergy and parishioners, who demonstrated the strength of their faith by refusing to observe anti-virus measures. Several bishops, hundreds of priests, and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of laypeople who had made up the old core of active parishioners fell victim to the pandemic within the Russian Orthodox Church.

Growing public dissatisfaction with the Russian Orthodox Church is being restrained by repressive practices, including the more active application of Article 148 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“offending the feelings of believers”). It has begun to be applied frequently and on increasingly trivial grounds. For example, this Pascha, Ksenia Belousova, an employee of one of Moscow’s bars, was detained after she made a “hookah on a kulich.” Despite publicly repenting, she was sentenced to three years in a penal colony, although she has now been released. Recently, a case was opened under the same article against Omsk artist Nikita Pozdnyakov, who was denounced by the “Sorok Sorokov” movement, which is affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church. One of Pozdnyakov’s paintings depicts a police officer in the image of Christ with a halo. The purely “secular,” militaristic propaganda pouring forth from the church ambo, especially when accompanied by repression against those who disagree with it, creates an impression of ideological diktat from which one wants to protect oneself, to hide.

Coinciding with this factor was a “change of generations”—the pool of post-Soviet converts “from the 1990s” began to dwindle, while no new generation of converts arose to replace them.

The neophyte movement of the 1990s was in many respects situational and opportunistic: the slogan of rejecting state ideology and embracing absolute pluralism was put forward in Russia, but was never fully realized. The Soviet type of ideological conditioning was fairly quickly replaced by a pseudo-traditionalist one, embodied by the Russian Orthodox Church and the other “traditional confessions” that recognize the primacy of the Russian Orthodox Church. More precisely, the old Soviet matrix was quickly filled with new—though in fact long-forgotten old—quasi-religious content.

The dissident writer and philosopher Alexander Zinoviev described the “depth” of the religious conversion of the neophytes of the 1990s as follows:

“Convinced atheists from the Party apparatus and the intelligentsia were transformed overnight into equally convinced believers and made their contribution to church-building with the same enthusiasm with which their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s had contributed to church-destruction.”

For many of those who came into the Church, such “conviction” went no further than the elementary impulse, cultivated by the experience of Soviet life, to keep in step with the authorities, bending along with the “Party line.”

The head of the Department of Sociology at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Academician Zhan Toshchenko, divides post-Soviet Orthodox converts into five categories: ordinary careerist officials; hypocritical imitators, who actively filled the ranks of the clergy where there were shortages; “Orthodox atheists” of the Luzhkov or Lukashenko type, who paradoxically combine their old and new identities; professional “advocates” of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose incomes are tied to working for the corporation; and radical extremists.

If the first four categories can hardly be described as “deeply religious,” the last became disillusioned with the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church fairly quickly—already in the 2000s, and especially under Kirill—replenishing the ranks of the numerous jurisdictions of “alternative” Orthodoxy or the “non-commemorators,” “Tsar-worshippers,” “anti-vaxxers,” and the like, who constitute a muted opposition within the Russian Orthodox Church.

“Divine” Ideology and “Civil” Religion

Konstantin Kharchev, chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs under the USSR Council of Ministers during the Gorbachev era, claimed that the broad and pompous celebration of the anniversary of Russian Orthodoxy in 1988 had been initiated by the authorities—that part of the Party (and KGB) nomenklatura which realized that, in place of a communism that had lost its value, the people had to be “given” a new ideology.

This ideology matured gradually, absorbing various elements, and today it is called “traditional values” or “spiritual bonds.”

No one knows the complete list of these values or bonds, but at every opportunity it is emphasized that they are opposed to everything “Western”—individualism, liberalism, human rights, and so on.

So opposed, in fact, that, in the words of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, “when it became clear that there was no longer anything in common [between us and the West], this led to military confrontation.”

Thus, in Russia, Christianity—and Orthodoxy in particular—was replaced by a “civil” religion, which gradually became a “political” one. The difference between them is that the former ostensibly rests upon a Higher, religious sanction, while the latter proclaims itself to be the primary source of Truth and itself grants sanction to institutions, including the Church. Putin’s “prophetic” phrases, such as “We will go to paradise as martyrs, while they will simply croak,” are quoted from church ambons without being questioned, while the Patriarch declares that Putin’s rule should continue until the end of time. In Christian eschatology, the teaching concerning the end times, “political” religion is embodied in the figure of the Antichrist—a totalitarian ruler “who exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped” (2 Thess. 2:4)…

The New Atheism and the New Faith

And yet, in proclaiming the complete incompatibility of the “Russian world” with the West, Patriarch Kirill is presenting wishful thinking as reality. The process of parishioners drifting away from traditional churches and the onset of an era of “individual spiritual do-it-yourself constructions” are unfolding simultaneously in both worlds.

Approximately 20 years ago, the term “New Atheism” (NA) entered the scholarly vocabulary of Western religious studies. This phenomenon is described as a secular response to the challenges of religious fundamentalism, primarily Islamic fundamentalism, with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 serving as its point of departure.

The American publicist and popularizer of science Sam Harris published the “programmatic” book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason in 2004, which became a manifesto of the New Atheism. It was followed by Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion; Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon; Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis; and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. All of them were translated into Russian and published in Moscow between 2008 and 2013, something that is difficult to imagine under present conditions.

The “New Atheism” differs from classical atheism, especially militant atheism, in that it opposes totalitarianism from liberal positions while entering into dialogue with “reasonable forms of religiosity.”

Some researchers call it “intheism”—a doctrine that does not categorically deny the existence of God, but rejects dogmas and opposes all forms of coercion in matters of choosing one’s worldview.

Like the “New Atheism,” a “new religiosity” is also gradually taking shape, which is described as “post-secular.” Its adherents find the confines of traditional religions too restrictive and assemble personal spiritual constructs from elements of different traditions that they find useful or simply interesting.

The fertile ground for such construction within the Western Christian milieu was prepared by Ecumenism—the movement for Christian unity across confessional and theological boundaries. By the end of the twentieth century, this movement had grown to the scale of super-Ecumenism, postulating unity with believers even beyond the bounds of Christianity. The basic—and perhaps only—“dogma” of super-Ecumenism is the recognition that all religions are different paths to one and the same Higher Principle. The Parliament of the World’s Religions is engaged in developing this doctrine. Within the syncretistic “New Age” movement, even this doctrinal minimum is not required; spiritual practices are considered equally accessible to believers and nonbelievers alike.

“New Atheism” and “post-secularism” have helped Western society travel an enormous distance from the head-on collision between religious fundamentalism and secular culture, about which Samuel Huntington warned, toward a pluralism of individual spiritual constructs. No religious tradition, even one that only recently seemed dangerous or hostile, is rejected or dismissed out of hand. It is regarded as a resource for adding to the storehouse of “spiritual knowledge” and for seeking new “practices of self-purification.”

Professor Jürgen Habermas of the University of Frankfurt sees the essence of “post-secularism” in the fact that the question of philosophical truth is bracketed out of the political process.

The state and its institutions recognize the equal standing of the religious and the secular, since absolutizing either of these principles carries the danger of totalitarianism. In other words, if the state or a powerful political leader begins to “philosophize,” they are close to sliding into totalitarianism.

A leader has the right to “preach the truth” only in his free time, outside the performance of his official duties.

…But this is an ideal of religious studies and philosophy. In the specific historical conditions of the Russian Federation, New Atheism functions as one of the few permitted forms of legal protest, albeit one confined to the private sphere. Most often, it is a social position, an indicator of group identity, rather than the fruit of a serious choice of worldview or a rejection of a religious tradition that “protest” atheists, as a rule, have never properly studied. For many, the Russian Orthodox Church itself has blocked the path to such study. Under conditions in which the free competition of ideas and teachings, including religious ones, is effectively prohibited, it is hardly possible to speak of a responsible choice of worldview. Everything becomes far too black-and-white.

 

* Designated a “foreign agent” by the authorities of the Russian Federation.

 

Russian source: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/08/03/kopipastva