Former cleric of the Rostov and Novocherkassk diocese, Alexander Usatov, on disappointment in the Russian Orthodox Church
I gave the ROC 30 years of my life, for many years I burned with faith and tried to bring the light of Christ to people. After 15 years of priestly service, I was completely disillusioned with religion and decided to leave the priesthood. A month ago, I sent Patriarch Kirill a statement asking him to deprive me of the priesthood. I left for reasons of principle and I want to tell you why I came to this decision. My motives are close to many thinking priests, but not all of them dare to break with the illusions carried through their whole lives.
In the 2000s, I headed the missionary department of the diocese. In those years it seemed to me important to oppose sectarianism, I saw in sects a threat to the Church and the whole society. Over time, I realized that reproaches towards totalitarian sects are quite appropriate in relation to the phenomena of the Orthodox environment: elders-gurus, total control, contempt for science, pulling out quotations and so on.
Russians are not inclined to read Scripture and fulfill the biblical commandments, except for one: believe in the One God. They prefer the ecstatic and radical movements of the so-called. "Orthodox monarchists", "zealots of Orthodox piety", lovers of exorcisms, lecturing, veneration of elders, elders, as well as "Movement against codes" (INN, barcodes, 666 and chips). Most of the parishioners are mired in superstition. This is not so much ignorance as deep and archaic processes in the psyche. I got the feeling that the Church has ceased to be a hospital for human souls, and most likely never was. It is like a hospice where hopeless patients receive temporary comfort but are not healed.
Later I realized that not only sectarians and occultists, but also the parishioners of the Russian Orthodox Church are not looking for the Truth in the Church, but are engaged in primitive psychotherapy. I learned from books on the psychology of religion that a neurotic person seeks to experience the stability of life through regularly repeated rituals and holidays, thus trying to reduce the anxiety that torments him. It became more and more difficult to drive away the idea that the ministry of a priest resembles the work of a pagan priest or a Siberian shaman.
Now I believe that church life not only attracts people with psychological problems, but is itself a neurotic environment, where a huge number of sufferers replace work on themselves with rituals and "mechanical" asceticism. Before the revolution, the Church tried to "separate the wheat from the chaff." Few people allowed themselves to spread gossip about miracles and engage in hysteria; people clearly understood that the Khlysty sectarians had nothing to do with the Church. Now any mentally unhealthy person or who is on the verge of deviation is perceived in the Church as an adherent of traditions, and manifestations of critical thinking immediately cause rejection.
I came to the conclusion that in the modern Church, much is built on the formation of a guilt and inferiority complex in parishioners. If you add food and sexual prohibitions to this, you get a great mechanism for managing people.
Church "counseling" does not work, it does not help believers to cope with internal problems. People are urged to observe a lot of prohibitions and taboos, which is impossible in principle. All that remains is to endlessly blame yourself and wait for forgiveness. People go to confession weekly, repent, but nothing changes in their lives. Would you recommend such a “clinic” to your loved ones? I do not recommend.
Promotional video:
So I gradually lost the feeling that my pastoral ministry is necessary and useful to people. Without understanding psychology, priests often harm and hurt people. The patriarch recently urged not to perceive confession as psychoanalysis, but in fact everything happens that way. This is not real psychotherapy, but a disgusting parody.
For many years it seemed to me that spiritual enlightenment could, to some extent, change the church atmosphere. In the Rostov-on-Don diocese in 2005, almost for the first time in the Russian Orthodox Church, we made preparatory talks mandatory before being baptized. I remember how an unpleasant surprise it was for many priests. It came as a shock to me: it turned out that theology and instruction in the faith of ordinary people from the street were alien to the clergy. High-flown sermons for “friends” and a conveyor belt of ceremonies for the sake of getting “money” - this is how I imagine church life in an ordinary parish. Catechesis, mission, work with youth - there is nothing here except slogans, and the paper will endure any lie and unsubscription for the authorities. Can you guess why all these activities of the Church are in the corral? It doesn't make money here and now, but my soul,you have to invest your knowledge incessantly without any guarantee of a positive result.
The church is now talking to itself, she answers questions that no one asked. The ROC literally got stuck in the Middle Ages, when society completely suppressed any manifestation of individuality, where domestic violence was perceived as an obvious blessing. This applies not only to visitors and parishioners. Almost all priests are in the grip of bondage. Many of them do not know how to do anything except fulfillment of demands, and almost everyone passed through the so-called filter. obediences, that is, testing for loyalty to the bishop and willingness to pay taxes. There is a good comparison of the Russian Church with a franchise. You put on a black robe with a cross jewelry. All! Now people will start giving you donations. Apart from power and money, its administrators are of little interest. And individual "romantics" among priests are often even more dangerous, because they themselves do not know what they are doing,spreading ideas "from the wind of his head."
After I was ordained, by the nature of my work, I had to look for answers to reproaches and challenges from a non-church environment. I began to notice the falsity of Orthodox apologetics at virtually every step: in biology, history, psychology. It seemed important to me to study the books of popularizers of science, neuroscientists and religious scholars.
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia celebrated Matins in the Yelokhovsky Epiphany Cathedral on the eve of the feast of Praise of the Most Holy Theotokos, on April 3, 2020. Photo: Kirill Zykov / Moskva Agency
I began to see blatant falsity in the lives of the saints, in incomprehensible canonizations, in the appearance of holidays in honor of events in the life of the Mother of God, which never happened. I do not want to broadcast this lie again.
I confess that it became difficult for me to tolerate other priests. Many clergymen thought of themselves as the infallible pope in any field of knowledge. Such a would-be shepherd easily distributes his fabrications about genetics and history, about geology and sociology, about how to be saved, and what needs to be cut off, how to give birth and on what days to conceive a child. Each of them overcomes their complexes in their own way, each has its own unique manifestation of a sense of their own greatness, but I do not want to have anything to do with it.
At an elementary level, the sacred space of the temple really lulls a person, but this “works” by itself, this does not require priests. Now I am convinced that this religious organization in many cases does harm, stimulating in people neuroticism, outright infantilism, slave psychology and suppression of critical thinking. Many church people are afraid to live, and often just want to die in some bright feat (for example, having contracted the coronavirus in a church or violating the prescriptions of an endocrinologist). It's terrible that now some priests are pushing people to such a false feat.
I was amazed when I learned that the apocrypha, non-canonical scriptures, from ancient times entered the flesh and blood of church life. At that moment I realized that the Church has no immunity against this "dirty water", it accepts any legends and inventions and subsequently cannot part with them. But what if this concerns not only church traditions, but also Scripture itself?
In the past two years, I have begun reading books by Western biblical scholars such as Borg, Crossan, and Erman. I saw the “Great Deception” in the books of the Holy Scriptures (as Bart Erman calls it). Some Christians allowed themselves to write epistles on behalf of the Apostle Paul, others compiled gospels using distorted or even invented stories about Christ. I presented the results of my research in the collection "Development of Christian Ideas and Practices", where I examined the dynamics of the development of church traditions and tried to substantiate the hypothesis that the most important views of Christianity were changing already in the 1st century. I believe that the Lord Jesus and the Apostle Paul gave the best in Christianity. Further, God did not seem to interfere in the development of events. All this is only human, too human … I came to the conclusion that the modern Russian Church has virtually nothing to do with the "historical Jesus",and the providence of God in the history of the Church was absent.
I have already moved away from the idea of reforming the Church, preaching light Orthodoxy and churchliness "with a human face." The church is as far from the values of humanism as heaven is from earth.
And the problem is not that church people are special now (in fact, they are). And not even that the biblical stories about Adam or the Flood are ordinary myths (the perception of biblical stories in a mythological vein as parables could remove a lot of difficulties in communicating with modern people).
For many years I have pondered the inspiration and limitations of the Old Testament. And he came to the conclusion that these are the formalized expectations and fortune-telling of the Jews, covered with lofty words "Thus says the Lord." My idea of the inspiration of every iota of Scripture collapsed. Now I don't believe in the inspiration of the New Testament texts either. Many of them are fraudulent, while others record the traditions that developed in Christian communities 40 or 65 years after the crucifixion of Christ. It is very difficult for us to perceive the image of the "historical Jesus" through these layers.
In the movie "PK" all the attempts of the protagonist to reach the heavens did not lead to a positive result. And he concluded that people are trying to call God through “religious managers”, having a “wrong number”: “The system by which you communicate with the Almighty has become faulty. All your calls are going to the wrong number. " Once it seemed to me that this was the problem, and I tried to look for the “correct number” in the Church: how to pray correctly, how to fast so that our voice could be heard in Heaven (Isaiah 58: 4). Many books and articles have been written on this topic.
Eventually I became convinced that the human mind is incapable of perceiving the concept of a supernatural being, even if it exists. People always invent a deity for themselves in their own image and likeness.
Gradually, all the arguments with which I used to apologize for Orthodoxy fell apart. They do not take into account the achievements of modern scientific knowledge, sometimes they contradict it (“a monkey has a different number of chromosomes, a monkey cannot become a human”), and sometimes they are an obvious forgery (Holy Fire, oil flow from crosses, etc.).
As in the case of the biblical scholar Erman Bart, my loss of faith was not directly related to science, but to my inability to “justify God” for the suffering of this world: “I form light and create darkness, make peace and create disasters; I, the Lord, do all this”(Isaiah 45: 7).
Personal archive of Alexander Usatov.
As a result, I turned into an atheistic agnostic, and today I already reject the very concept of theism. Let's call this anti-theism. What it is? The archaic belief in an anthropomorphic heavenly being, who is angry and takes revenge on people, demands a substitutionary sacrifice (atonement), gives them instructions for all aspects of life, and then threatens to torment a person with unquenchable fire, is alien and unpleasant to me. This capricious creature accepts some people, and rejects others. I believe that many of the Old Testament commandments are immoral in this sense. It seems to me monstrous that Christians destroyed dissidents. As well as the recent appeal of my former boss, Metropolitan Mercury, "not to forgive the enemies of the Church." At parting, I heard from him an amazing "Get out!" It turns out that the Church loves only “her own”? Has nothing changed for the better over these 2000 years?
The Bible says that Christ was going to give a denarius to every person (Matthew 20:14), but in the end he will return to earth in order to “righteously take revenge in a blazing fire to those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel, who will be punished, eternal destruction, from the face of the Lord and from the glory of His might”(2 Thess. 1: 6-10). It is possible that these promises of "carrots and sticks" impressed archaic or medieval consciousness. But today I cannot accept it. I believe that already in the 1st century, the idea of a loving Jesus mixed with the expectation of His anger, because this is so characteristic of the concept of theism. People simply could not describe their experience of understanding God in Christ in any other way. As a result, the gospels combine such conflicting ideas about how God relates to people.
The person of Jesus Christ remains exceptional to me. In the sense that Jesus of Nazareth gave people an amazing experience of acceptance and comfort. In his community there were no hierarchies and restrictions, everyone was important and dear: a peasant, a tax collector, a prostitute, and a child suffering from a skin disease and a mentally disabled person. It surpasses everything I know about human relationships. In this sense, Jesus is "divine" for me even now.
Now I would like to conduct the study of church history and Christian traditions from a scientific standpoint - without belonging to the Church. This is how real theology as a scientific discipline should be. I agree with the thesis that, unlike a religious scholar, a theologian comprehends a religious tradition as his own (I hope that 30 years in the Church have given me some experience). In this case, he has a slightly different viewing angle than a secular religious scholar, but excludes all sorts of "I dreamed" or "I feel." And the theologian has no right to adjust the research results to the usual church templates. It is impossible to consider the church of early Christians according to later models: from the 4th century the church became completely different. For example, it makes no sense to assert that the Vladimir icon was written personally by the Apostle Luke, as is constantly done in the church environment.
To briefly outline my attitude towards religion, I would like to quote the statements of Bishop Shelby Spong. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead, a new way of speaking about God must be found. Belief in an omnipotent personal deity, who created the world and continues its activity in it, inevitably contradicts science and contributes to the neurotization of people. The church must refrain from using guilt as a regulator of behavior. No external characteristics of a person, be it race, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation, can be used as a basis for rejection or discrimination. This is the only way religion can find its place in the modern world without humiliating people or destroying their psyche.
