Religion in Russia

Orthodox Christianity is the most widely professed religion in Russia, with significant minorities of non-religious people and adherents of other faiths. Russia has the world's largest Orthodox population.

The constitution of Russia recognises the right to freedom of conscience and creed to all the citizenry, the spiritual contribution of Orthodox Christianity to the history of Russia, and respect to "Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and other religions and creeds which constitute an inseparable part of the historical heritage of Russia's peoples", including ethnic religions or paganism, either preserved, or revived.

According to the Russian law, any religious organisation may be recognised as "traditional", if it was already in existence before 1982, and each newly founded religious group has to provide its credentials and re-register yearly for fifteen years, and, in the meantime until eventual recognition, stay without rights.

The Russian Orthodox Church, though its influence is thin in some parts of Siberia and southern Russia, where there has been a perceptible revival of pre-Christian religion, acts as the de facto, if not de jure, privileged religion of the state, claiming the right to decide which other religions or denominations are to be granted the right of registration. Some Protestant churches which were already in existence before the Russian Revolution have been unable to re-register, and the Catholic Church has been forbidden to develop its own territorial jurisdictions. According to some Western observers, respect for freedom of religion by Russian authorities has declined since the late 1990s and early 2000s. For example, the activities of the Jehovah's Witnesses are currently banned in Russia. According to International Christian Concern, during 2021 "crackdowns on religious freedom have intensified in Russia".

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 there has been a revival and spread of Siberian shamanism (often mixed with Orthodox elements), and the emergence of Hinduism and new religious movements throughout Russia. There has been an "exponential increase in new religious groups and alternative spiritualities", Eastern religions and Neopaganism, even among self-defined "Christians"—a term which has become a loose descriptor for a variety of eclectic views and practices. Russia has been defined by the scholar Eliot Borenstein as the "Southern California of Europe" because of such a blossoming of new religious movements, and the latter are perceived by the Russian Orthodox Church as competitors in a "war for souls". However, the multiplicity of religions in Russia has been a traditional component of Russian identities for hundreds of years, contributing to a long-established ethno-cultural pluralism.

One of the 2020 amendments to the Constitution of Russia has a Constitutional references to God.

Before the tenth century, Russians practised Slavic religion. As recalled by the Primary Chronicle, Orthodox Christianity was made the state religion of Kievan Rus' in 987 by Vladimir the Great, who opted for it among other possible choices as it was the religion of the Byzantine Empire. Since then, religion, mysticism, and statehood remained intertwined elements in Russia's identity. The Russian Orthodox Church, perceived as the glue consolidating the nation, accompanied the expansion of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century. Czar Nicholas I's ideology, under which the empire reached its widest extent, proclaimed "Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nation" (Pravoslavie, samoderzhavie, narodnost') as its foundations. The dominance of the Russian Orthodox Church was sealed by law, and, as the empire incorporated peoples of alternative creeds, religions were tied to ethnicities to skirt any issue of integration. Until 1905, only the Russian Orthodox Church could engage in missionary activity to convert non-Orthodox people, and apostasy was treated as an offense punishable by law. Catholicism, Islam and other religions were tolerated only among outsider (inoroditsy) peoples but forbidden from spreading among Russians.

Throughout the history of early and imperial Russia there were, however, religious movements which posed a challenge to the monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church and put forward stances of freedom of conscience, namely the Old Believers—who separated from the Russian Orthodox Church after Patriarch Nikon's reform in 1653 (the Raskol)—, and Spiritual Christianity. It is worth noting that the Russian Orthodox Church itself never forbade personal religious experience and speculative mysticism, and Gnostic elements had become embedded in Orthodox Christianity since the sixth century, and later strengthened by the popularity of Jakob Böhme's thought in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Orthodox seminaries.