The rise of the Russian Christian Right: the case of the World Congress of Families

Abstract

This article offers a case study of the Russian-American pro-family organisation the World Congress of Families, explaining its emergence, strategies, and religious and political agenda from 1995 until 2019. The article adds to a growing body of research that sheds light on transnational networks of conservative and right-wing political and civil society actors. It zooms in on Russian pro-family activists as connected to such networks and thereby takes an innovative perspective on the Russian conservative turn as part of a global phenomenon. The article also makes the argument that a specific Russian Christian Right movement, comparable to and linked with the American Christian Right and conservative Christian groups in Europe, is taking shape in Russia.

Anti-Gender Politics as Discourse Coalitions: Russia’s Domestic and International Promotion of “Traditional Values”

“…On the contrary, the conservative turn encompassed a broad range of actors within state and society, drawing on a variety of historically situated discourses. In addition, there were transnational influences, most importantly the activity of US Christian conservatives in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union (Stoeckl 2020).…”

“…The WCF, co-founded in 1997 by US and Russian Christian conservatives, has a strong Russian branch involving church figures, oligarchs, and politicians closely tied to the Kremlin (Stroop 2016;Gessen 2017). In her detailed study of the Russian involvement in WCF, Kristina Stoeckl (2020) argues that this showcases the emergence of a new type of player in Russia, a "Russian Christian Right," deploying strategies typically associated with US Christian conservatives, such as interdenominational cooperation (see also Laruelle 2019). According to a report by the EU Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, between 2008 and 2018, Russian oligarchs, primarily the previously mentioned Konstantin Malofeev and the Putin ally Vladimir Yakunin, contributed almost 200 million USD to European anti-gender organizations including WCF and GitizenGo, as well as far-right parties including France's Front National (now Rassemblement National) and Italy's Lega (Datta 2021).…”

“…Russian conservative intellectuals such as Aleksandr Dugin have been sources of influence for Catholic anti-gender ideologues (Garbagnoli 2017). Russian ultra-nationalists such as Aleksei Komov and Konstantin Malofeev are well-known figures in the World Congress of Families (WCF) and other organizations convening anti-gender activists (Datta 2021;Gessen 2017;Stoeckl 2020). Key tropes of the antigender movement, such as arguing that the idea of gender as socially constructed (rather than biologically determined) is harmful to children's natural development, have been embraced by the Russian state.…”

‘Better to be a Dictator than Gay’: Homophobic Discourses in Belarusian Politics

“…They often embrace the sanctity of marriage and the importance of having children. To date, however, figures from the Belarusian opposition have not had any high-profile engagement with transnational groups backed by US conservatives, such as the International Organisation for the Family, which previously held the World Congress of Families in locations including Georgia and Moldova (Stoeckl 2020). Attempts have been made to actively exclude LGBT people from the wider opposition movement.…”

Judeo-Christian democracy and the Transatlantic Right: Travels of a contested civilizational imaginary

“…It is not. Not only for the obvious reason, that it now has substantial economic and organizational underpinnings, such as the World Congress of Families, which lends substantial financial and advisory support to orthodox Christian conservatives at local, regional, and national elections (Possner, 2019;Stoeckl, 2020). Nor simply because the Trump-Pence presidency, together with such countries as Israel, Hungary, and Poland, launched a whole series of coordinated "Judeo-Christian" initiatives: from transformations of the legal frameworks around gender, civil rights, and the rule of law, to radical reformulations of the norms that govern global immigration and security (Holm and Tjalve, 2020;Mancini and Rosenfield, 2020).…”