Russia is seeing a sustained decline in church attendance. The exodus of parishioners from the Orthodox Church intensified during Kirill’s tenure as patriarch.
This is stated in an article by Aleksandr Soldatov in Novaya Gazeta.
According to him, official Russian sociology records a sustained decline in “institutional” religiosity. According to a recent study by the Levada Center, the share of Russians who never attend church services has exceeded half for the first time since the 1990s, reaching 55%. In June last year, the figure was just 44%. Among young people under 25, the share of those who never enter a church reached 68%, while among students it was 71%. At the same time, 73% of Russians identify as “Orthodox”, but as numerous other studies show, such identification does not necessarily imply even a belief in God.
More reliable indicators of religiosity come from figures on church attendance during the main holidays, Christmas and Easter, compiled by the Interior Ministry. In 2024, at the height of patriotic mobilisation around the “special military operation”, Christmas services were attended by about 1.4 million Russians, or roughly one percent of the population. Attendance at Easter services is higher, which is linked to a change in the counting methodology insisted on by Patriarch Kirill. Easter figures now include not only worshippers attending the service, but also those who come to have Easter cakes and eggs blessed. In 2023, their number was about 2.8 million.
The article says the decline in actual, rather than declared, religiosity in Russia is taking place against the backdrop of the cynical use of the Church to promote state ideology and the “special military operation”.
“Church attendance says far more than millions of the most correct words about how ordinary people really perceive such propaganda,” the author writes.
He notes that Christianity, and Orthodoxy in particular, has been replaced in Russia by a “civil” religion that has gradually become “political”. The difference is that the former ostensibly relies on higher religious sanction, while the latter proclaims itself the original source of Truth and grants legitimacy to institutions, including the Church. Putin’s “prophetic” statements, such as “We will go to heaven as martyrs, while they will simply die”, are quoted from pulpits without question, while the patriarch says Putin’s rule should continue until the end of time.
According to LF, in November 2025, Patriarch Kirill Gundyayev said military heroism was “inseparable” from spiritual heroism and that participation in war could be regarded as a form of Christian service. This attempt to justify war through spiritual rhetoric prompted an immediate and sharp response within church circles.
According to Regina Elsner, a scholar of Eastern Christianity and ecumenism at the University of Muenster who holds a doctorate in theology, the Russian Orthodox Church has become one of the key institutions of mobilisation and propaganda.
We previously reported that Pope Leo XIV and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I condemned attempts to use religion to justify violence.
