Authors
Bojidar Kolov1; PÅL KOLSTØ1; 1 University of Oslo, Norway Discussion
This paper explores how the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has come to frame Russia’s ‘demographic crisis’ as a moral, spiritual, and civilisational challenge bound up with the country’s survival as a great power, rather than as a social or economic issue. The study traces the emergence of the Orthodox demographic discourse from the Church’s 2000 Basis of the Social Concept to its contemporary convergence with the Kremlin’s neo-traditionalist agenda. Drawing on Church documents, Orthodox media, and statements by clerical and lay actors, the paper examines how ideas of faith, tradition, and national identity are mobilised to define legitimate forms of family, gender, and sexuality. It argues that within this discourse, fertility and parenthood are reimagined as spiritual virtues and patriotic duties, while demographic renewal becomes a measure of moral health and national strength. Through its articulation of a moral vision of social order, the ROC seeks to delineate the moral boundaries of the Russian nation and to consolidate its role as guardian of both the nation’s biological continuity and its spiritual integrity. In doing so, the Church’s demographic rhetoric reproduces hierarchies of gender and belonging that privilege heteronormative, patriarchal, and ethnically coded ideals of citizenship. By situating the Russian case within broader transnational discourses linking religion, morality, and population politics, the article shows how the ROC’s pronatalist vision fuses theological, nationalist, and security rationales, transforming demography into a domain of shared church-state governance. The analysis examines the norms, identities, and subjectivities that this discourse enables and legitimates, suggesting that the moralisation of population policy reflects a wider securitisation of public morality in contemporary Russia, where the defence of ‘traditional family values’ operates simultaneously as a project of sovereign moral order and a strategy of regime legitimation. 
