The article raises the question of the conceptual boundaries of sociological research on Orthodox religiosity in Russia. It analyses the enduring disparity between two well-established approaches: the macrosociology of 'generalised religiosity', which centres on individual practices and self-identification; and the sociology of church communities, which examines the local interactions between priests and laypeople. It is shown that, within the first approach, the role of the clergy is systematically excluded from the conceptualization and operationalization of churchliness, despite increasing empirical evidence of their significant role in running social mechanisms within parish life. A “blind spot” in the sociology of religion remains a lack of understanding of the vision of churchliness from the priest’s perspective. Drawing on data from two focus groups comprising 14 parish priests of the Russian Orthodox Church, divided according to age and length of ordination, this article reconstructs the collective vision of church life proposed by the clergy. The article reconstructs such a collective vision of churchliness proposed by the clergy based on the materials of two focus groups with the participation of 14 parish priests of the Russian Orthodox Church, divided by age and ordination experience. It was revealed that for priests, the key signs of churchliness are not formal indicators (frequency of church attendance, communion), but poorly formalized qualities in sociology – embeddedness in the rhythm of church life, church thinking, inner attitude to church life, etc. Priests are skeptical about the very possibility of quantifying church life. The development of research on parish communities requires a vision of churchliness on the part of those who launch church life in one way or another. The possibilities of operationalizing and measuring this vision can become a perspective task and a definite challenge for the sociology of religion.
The article raises the question of the conceptual boundaries of sociological research on Orthodox religiosity in Russia. It analyses the enduring disparity between two well-established approaches: the macrosociology of 'generalised religiosity', which centres on individual practices and self-identification; and the sociology of church communities, which examines the local interactions between priests and laypeople. It is shown that, within the first approach, the role of the clergy is systematically excluded from the conceptualization and operationalization of churchliness, despite increasing empirical evidence of their significant role in running social mechanisms within parish life. A “blind spot” in the sociology of religion remains a lack of understanding of the vision of churchliness from the priest’s perspective. Drawing on data from two focus groups comprising 14 parish priests of the Russian Orthodox Church, divided according to age and length of ordination, this article reconstructs the collective vision of church life proposed by the clergy. The article reconstructs such a collective vision of churchliness proposed by the clergy based on the materials of two focus groups with the participation of 14 parish priests of the Russian Orthodox Church, divided by age and ordination experience. It was revealed that for priests, the key signs of churchliness are not formal indicators (frequency of church attendance, communion), but poorly formalized qualities in sociology – embeddedness in the rhythm of church life, church thinking, inner attitude to church life, etc. Priests are skeptical about the very possibility of quantifying church life. The development of research on parish communities requires a vision of churchliness on the part of those who launch church life in one way or another. The possibilities of operationalizing and measuring this vision can become a perspective task and a definite challenge for the sociology of religion.
the author would like to thank the participants of the roundtable discussion “Churchliness and its Limits”, organized by the Laboratory for the Study of Church Institutions at St Tikhon’s Orthodox University for the Humanities, for their comments on the report that served as the basis for this article.