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Masculine strategies in Russian Orthodoxy: From asceticism - to militarization
The article gives an outline of masculine strategies in the context of sociocultural preferences of
post-Soviet Orthodoxy. The article 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.
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