“Heterodox Religiousness” in Today’s Russia: Results of an Empirical Study

Abstract

The author presents a selection of important results from a new representative population survey on the attitudes and experiences with various forms of heterodox (also sometimes called non-institutionalised, “eclectic” or “esoteric”) religiousness, conducted in the Russian Federation in 2006 – the first survey in this country to have focused specifically on this kind of religiousness. The author shows that heterodox religiousness appears to have become the dominant form of religiousness in contemporary Russia and involves a larger proportion of the population than traditional Christian religiousness.