Defending the Faith challenges the assumption that the present antipathy of the Russian Orthodox Church toward religious pluralism and the Church's close ties with the Putin government were inevitable. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Church found itself divided over how to handle the wave of well-financed and organized missionaries from the West. This perceived threat led to ever increasing ties with the state culminating in the 2016 Yarovaya laws. The book analyzes this development by contrasting the responses of the Russian Orthodox Church to post-Soviet religious pluralism with other regional churches. Most compellingly, the book analyzes scores of interviews with religious clerics from these churches to gauge the clerics' conflicting evaluations of the Soviet past and the debate over the seriousness of the threat of religious pluralism. This book is a must-read for those interested in understanding the actions of the Russian Orthodox Church after 1991."-Rodney Bohac, Emeritus Professor of History, Brigham Young University, Utah 20210308
Dr. Lincoln E. Flake studied international relations in Provo, Utah, Cambridge, England, and St. Andrews, Scotland. He was previously on the Adjunct Research Faculty of the Center for Strategic Intelligence Research at the US National Intelligence University in Washington, DC. He has served for 15 years with the US Department of Defense, including seven years with NATO. He is an editor for the Journal of Slavic Military Studies and contributed to, among other outlets, Oxford Analytica. The author of the foreword:Dr. Peter Martland is a former Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge, UK.