Vsevolod Chaplin on The Elections

Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Synod department for relations between the church and society about the elections of 2012 The number of the religious civic activists is increasing. Not only experts and journalists are writing on religious issues, but the entire society is starting to understand that a religious person is not only a person who prays and thinks about God, but also a person with an active civic position, it is not necessarily a monk, it can be a politician, a sportsman, a writer, an artist, a soldier, etc. This person works for some sphere of life of society and tries to implement the moral values of his religion in his professional activity. To live according to your faith means to act according to your faith in your own sphere. There are religious people among the politicians and voters and among the candidates for certain positions. This is what the Patriarch said, congratulating Vladimir Putin: “The massive support given to you by the Russian voters, including priests and many faithful members of the Russian Orthodox Church, confirmed your image as a national leader.” It was added that “your success is greatly connected to your vision of the solution to the problems that face the country in this difficult modern world.” It was also said that the Church hopes for interaction with the state for the sake of “spreading the true spiritual ideals and unchangeable – I stress this word - values on which Russia is built – justice, mercy, honesty, contrition, love of you country and of one’s neighbor and the readiness to serve them by your activity.” These are not empty words, these words say that religious people have certain wishes for the politicians and they are not ready to unconditionally support whatever one politician does or blame whatever another does. Of course there are different political preferences among religious people, the church is open to everyone. All the members of our political elite should understand that the Church will communicate with the different parties and the different groups of society, including those who are very critical, and with the foreign embassies, and with the people abroad who are also the members of our Church, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Moldovans, residents of Central Asia. Taking into account all the multiculturalism of our Church we still stress that peace among all these people is very important, in the space of the historical Russian and in our contemporary Russia where we live. People are asking whether anything terrible will happen tonight, I hope not. There is no doubt that people have a rights to express any ideas peacefully, to argue with the authorities and with each other, but a particular responsibility would be lying with those who tonight or any other will call for violent actions. This is what we have to avoid. It is very important that any calls for violence, for revolution, for chaos after which, as we know, dictatorship inevitably comes, should be condemned by society. It is necessary to know how to lose, to lead a dialogue with the authorities, even a critical one. We need a dialogue and not revolution or chaos and I think that this dialogue between the power on the one side and society with its deepest layers on the other, meaning the intelligentsia, the peasants, workers, Cossacks, military… Only a dialogue that takes into account the feelings of all these people will not weaken after the elections but will get some constant reciprocal form. The dialogues between the society and the state should not be dialogues between one who talks and one who listens, it should a dialogue of those who take each other’s position into account and create new solutions, changing in the process. I hope that this dialogue will appear and that the results of the elections that reflect the will of society will not be a reason for triumphalism, but for serious internal work inside our society and inside our state. The next few years will not be easy, we understand it, Russia will not be left in peace by the external forces that want to subordinate it to the will of the stranger, the situation in the social and economic sphere in our country and in the world will not be cloudless, but to solve these problems we need to keep the mechanisms of feedback between the authorities and society and these mechanisms should not be built on voluntarism, but should presuppose mutual responsibility for the future of the country.