The institutional role of religious organizations in the family and demographic policy
of the Russian Federation
The relevance of this study stems from the fact that religious organizations of traditional confessions in post-Soviet Russia are becoming prominent actors in state family and demographic policy, which necessitates the identification of the institutional mechanisms that embed them in this sphere. The methodological basis of the work is a qualitative analysis of two corpora of federal-level documents: regulatory legal acts of the Russian Federation (presidential decrees, strategies, federal laws, the passport of the Family National Project) and doctrinal and statutory texts of centralized religious organizations (the Foundations of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Social Doctrine of Russian Muslims, the charters, resolutions etc.). The theoretical framework draws on J. Casanova’s concept of the deprivatization of religion and P. Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital. The main scholarly result lies in the discovery of a three-plane institutional mechanism through which religious organizations are incorporated into family and demographic policy: the ideological plane establishes a value consensus (traditional family, large families), the instrumental plane translates this consensus into channels of grant funding and the professionalization of social services, while the strategic plane anchors the partnership in long-term planning documents. The study’s conclusions show that religious organizations are becoming one of the supporting pillars of state family policy by finding a common language with the state through a convergence of value rhetoric and organizational resources. At the same time, a critical reflection in the optic of governmentality (M. Foucault) allows us to see in this process not only cooperation but also a form of indirect state governance that transforms confessional practices of charity into standardized social services.
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Baikov, M. D. (2026), “The institutional role of religious organizations in the family and demographic policy of the Russian Federation”, Research Result. Sociology and Management, 12 (3), 242-256. DOI: 10.18413/2408-9338-2026-12-3-1-5.
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