THE RUSSIAN PARADOX OF RELIGION AND FERTILITY. SPECIFICATION OF THE PROBLEM AND DEVELOPMENT OF AN EXPLANATORY HYPOTHESIS*

This article focuses on the specifi cation of the hypothesis of the relationship between religiosity and fertility in Russia. On the surface, the situation looks like a paradox, i.e., on the one hand, Churches and religions are generally known to support childbearing values; religious people are believed to have more children than non-religious people; but, on the other hand, in Russia religiosity has been growing in recent years, but the birth rate has been falling. Despite the fact that in contemporary Russia a large part of the population identifi es with Orthodoxy and the number of such people is growing, family and marriage norms characteristic of Orthodoxy, in particular those related to the ideal of large families, are not actually being put into practice. This article proposes to consider mechanisms that might explain this circumstance. In order to specify the hypothesis of the potential infl uence of religion on the fertility, a literature review was prepared, followed by the identifi cation of key potentially important variables. Three approaches (and correspondingly three groups of texts) have been identified; they analysed the relationship between religion and fertility, namely the reduction of religion to individual religiosity; reduction of religion to a set of extra-religious variables; and, finally, the analysis of religion as an environment and community. The use of the resources of the first two approaches does not allow us to formulate a hypothesis in order to explain today's Russian paradox of religion and fertility. It is possible to formulate an explanatory hypothesis based on the third class of texts. Kevin McQuillan's study is used to construct a hypothesis and to specify a vocabulary of variables about the Russian paradox. He identifies three aspects of the religious situation (pro-natalist doctrine, strong religious institutions, strong religious identity), which, in his opinion, can only work together to ensure that the principles preached by religion are actually put to practice. Based on the distinction made by C. McQuillan, as well as on the research of the third group of authors mentioned above, we show that the contemporary Russian Orthodoxy cannot fully rely on any of these mechanisms of infl uence on believers, which, presumably, can explain the lack of an appropriate influence on their decisions in matters of family and marriage.