Masculine Strategies in Russian Orthodoxy: From Asceticism to Militarization

The chapter gives an outline of masculine strategies in the context of sociocultural preferences of post-Soviet Orthodoxy. The chapter reveals the specific features of deformation and distortion of normative masculine strategies in the conditions of religious conservatism and the post-secular resort to patriarchal norms, which causes a lack of men in the Orthodox Church, i.e., a certain masculinity crisis. The author subjects to verification the traditional view of gender imbalance, showing that this imbalance is diminishing, although there are still fewer men in the church (participating in worship and church life) than women. The evidenced decline of the percentage disparity between men and women in the church environment over the past 30 years allows us to acknowledge a partial overcoming of masculinity crisis in the Orthodox environment. Analyzing the limitations of ways to realize normative masculinity in the Orthodox environment, the author shows that the way out of this crisis are three ways of hypercompensation: consumerization of the church space, involvement in the global imperial project of Orthodox civilization and cultivating of a special religious attitude toward the war, accompanied by the militarization of the church culture. At least the second option and the third one involves a certain resort to neopatriarchy as they are shifting priorities to the side of primordial masculinity with a greater value of physical strength, authoritarianism and military exploit.