Belief over the eighteenth century; revitalization and standardization of Uniate
practice in the eighteenth century. These disparate efforts varied in their success.
Old Believers became a cohesive community, as did Uniates; Russian Orthodoxy
suffered from inadequate resources to change parish life significantly. We have also
seen that Judaism had a vibrant structure of representative institutions, rabbinical
control, and centers of religious learning; similarly, Islam had a tradition of learned
clerics and schools.
It is often said that confessionalization leads to modernity and sometimes, but
not always, to secularization. With confessionalization, church leaders standardize
liturgy and belief and disseminate that reformed faith through seminaries for clerics
and schools for laymen; they institute better administration and oversight over
clergy and faithful. Society benefits with increased literacy, more social welfare
work, greater parish cohesion. States benefit as well, from social disciplining, the
prosecuting of moral offenses, stamping out heresy, magic, and superstition. In
rising nation states in Europe, Church and state combined to create single national
churches, linking piety and political loyalty.
In a setting of empire, however, confessionalization served different purposes.
Such work enhanced social stability by creating more cohesive communities, and it
provided the state with administrative avenues into social control. While not
intending to create a single national Church, imperial centers can insist that all
religions of the empire preach and enforce a theology that includes loyalty to the
ruler, lawful behavior, and personal moral discipline. The better they did this, the
more the state benefited. In an empire in which the state lacked resources to provide
social welfare and education with secular administration, an active, reformed faith
could be of great value.
Thus, the Russian empire welcomed efforts in its subject religions to improve
their faiths, and pushed the process along when necessary. Catherine II’s creation of
clerical hierarchies for Islam and Buddhism enhanced her ability to interact with
thousands of new subjects. Herfirm policy of restricting the Vatican’sinfluence
in the Russian empire isolated Russia from feared external influence. But the
challenges of dealing with so many new religions took well into the next century
to be fully shaped. So we shall take a brief excursus beyond 1801, to show how
trends evident before then developed into imperial confessional policy.
Alexander I continued Catherine’s work of administrative organization of the
empire’s faiths by creating in 1810 a Main Administration for the Religious Affairs
of Foreign Confessions, assigned to arbitrate disputes within confessions and
to bolster the authority of the state-approved religious institutions and clerics.
Nicholas I (1825–55) marked a major turning point towards what Robert Crews
calls a“confessional state.”Orthodoxy was more aggressively declared the pre-
eminent faith of the land; the Russian Orthodox Church tightened its administrative
organization and embarked on more aggressive proselytizing. It asserted its presence
with new bishoprics and archdioceses in areas where there were also thriving
populations of Lutherans, Muslims, and Catholics (Olonets, Petrozavodsk, Saratov
and Tsaritsyn, the Don and Novocherkassk, Simbirsk, Ufa, Ekaterinburg, Vinnitsa
in Right Bank Ukraine, Riga, Staritsa, Kherson, Brest, Kovno, northern Caucasus).
Confessionalization in a Multi-ethnic Empire 407