The Business of Being Kind

If the activities of Moscow’s faith communities represent new approaches to public service in Russia, they have also inspired new modes of economic activity. In Russia’s neoliberal reality, need, deservingness, and affect have become opportunities for political and economic entrepreneurial investment. Both within their own communities of supporters and beyond in Moscow’s commercial sector, religious groups and religiously affiliated assistance programs compete and cooperate with private businesses and state agencies to promote and capitalize on the simultaneously civic and financial value of compassion. By addressing Russia’s “business” or “economy” of kindness and compassion, this chapter considers the forms of revenue, investment, profit, and surplus that are generated and the social, material, and ethical results produced by these profits and surpluses.

Living a Life of Service

This chapter analyzes Russian cultural values and practices of service, with particular emphasis on the role of religiously inspired service in support of state goals of equality and justice. Over the past several centuries, Russia’s religiously affiliated assistance groups have consistently focused on redressing inequalities, whether those are social, cultural, economic, or political. Working both in cooperation with official projects and governmental bodies and in opposition to regional and federal policies, religious communities have addressed issues and operated in arenas that have in turn complicated and expanded what counts as worship, service, action, and even the intended beneficiaries of their work. As the examples documented here show, through activities of civic service and engagement, religious communities and their followers have challenged distinctions between religious and secular and cultivated new ethics of voluntarism and political activism.

Compassion

This chapter introduces themes of care, kindness, compassion, civic action, social justice, and faith-based assistance within the context of contemporary Russian society. The chapter presents the ethnographic field site of Moscow’s faith-based assistance community and sets the stage for the book’s larger discussion about the ways in which members of this community link their acts of assistance with performances of civic action and possibilities for understanding faith as a form of affective labor that produces future-oriented results. The discussion is contextualized within details about Russia’s contemporary political and economic situation, including the unique position of non-Orthodox Christian communities within the country’s religious and social justice spheres.

Developing Faith in a More Civil Society

This chapter examines the ambiguous role of religiously affiliated charitable organizations within the field of social justice work in Russia and how these organizations promote new ethics and practices of humaneness, civility, and civic engagement in their social welfare work. Specifically, religiously affiliated charitable organizations creatively play with both the official and unofficial criteria and terminology for different types of organizations and assistance – development, charity, humanitarianism, nongovernmental, religious, and secular – in ways that enable them to work both outside and alongside state organizations. In so doing, not only do they trouble distinctions between secular and religious, state and non-state, governmental and nongovernmental, but they also contribute to a different form of civil society and civil activism in Russia.

Conclusion

This final chapter returns to the original themes of the book by considering how members of Moscow’s community of religiously affiliated assistance providers grapple with the uncertainties that they encounter on a daily basis, with specific attention to how members of this community struggle to maintain both the human and the humane in their social justice work. As the experiences documented here show, within the faith-based context, assistance encounters are never fully oriented either to the objective pole of human rights or to the subjective pole of compassion and empathy. As such, these struggles reveal that the future-oriented optimism made possible by the affective labor of faith belies the inherent precarity of faith. Yet it is this precarious state that makes possible the intersubjectivity of compassionate care, whereby those who provide assistance and those who receive it engage one another fully as humans.

Practical Love

This chapter analyzes the subjective and experiential qualities of compassion in care work, with particular focus on how volunteers and recipients describe the relationships they forge with one another as deeply intimate experiences of care and affection. By focusing on intersubjective experiences of accompaniment, friendship, and love that emerge through circulations of care, members of Russia’s religiously affiliated assistance community describe their interactions as forms of intimacy and shared humanity, rather than spiritual encounters. This approach presents a counterpoint to anthropological theories of compassion and empathy by illuminating the dynamic and generative nature of economies of affect. Acts and ethics of faith-driven compassion build communities of intimacy and sentiment between assistance providers and their recipients.

The Deficits of Generosity

This chapter examines the destructive aspects of generosity through a consideration of the disposition of gifts and other forms of assistance. These forms of assistance include money, material goods, legal services, and human rights advocacy and protections. By considering how Moscow’s assistance providers and recipients deliberate about what constitutes a good or appropriate gift and whether to accept problematic gifts or deny requests for assistance, this discussion unpacks the unexpected uncertainties and even dangers caused by generosity and excess. In some cases, refusals of assistance are more productive and compassionate, which in turn reshapes relationships of dependency and obligation between individuals, communities, organizations, and even the state.

Faith in a Secular Humanism

This chapter presents the concept of a “secular theology of compassion.” Through a discussion of the ways in which Moscow’s religious communities cooperate to forge common cross-denominational interests through social justice projects, the chapter considers how clergy, staff, and volunteers in religiously affiliated welfare programs separate their personally held religious beliefs and theological philosophies from the larger ethical values that guide their work. Of particular concern are the political, spiritual, and ethical negotiations that take place between Russia’s Orthodox and non-Orthodox Christian communities as they strive to pursue shared goals of social justice while maintaining their respective histories and communities. Their collective efforts demonstrate how ethical values of empathy, care, and justice traverse, confuse, and even transcend religious/secular distinctions and provide opportunities for new shared spaces and practices of religiosity and compassion.