With Lent concluding this Saturday and Easter celebrations to follow the next day, it is interesting to reveal how Russians treat religion and its traditions.
The poll conducted by Public Opinion Fund on April 19-20 among 1,500 respondents in 100 Russian cities and towns revealed that only 26 percent of the interviewed people consider themselves atheists. The remaining 74 percent claim to be a believer of a certain faith. The margin of error for the poll does not exceed 3.6 percent.
The majority of those polled, 59 percent, comprises Orthodox believers and another 2 percent belongs to other variations of the Orthodox religion. 6 percent of the interviewed people practice Islam, 2 percent cited other religions and 5 percent found it difficult to name their religion. The percentage of the Russian population devoted to different religions has not fluctuated much in the past five years, the Fund’s site
www.fom.ru reported.
Though the percentage of believers is considerably high, the share of those who follow the church’s traditions is much less. Only 10 percent of those claiming to be Orthodox believers attend church services at least once a month. 25 percent of these believers sometimes recite prayers, 37 percent pray in their own words and 36 percent do not pray at all.
60 percent of those confessing a certain faith (except Islam followers) said they have never read religious texts and the fundamental books of their religion. Only 14 percent confirmed their faithfulness and devotion to religious writings.
Only 7 percent of Orthodox believers observe Lent. It should be noted here that Russians, a controversial nation in terms of religion, do not enjoy restricting their diet during Lent but greatly enjoy celebrating its end with Easter eggs and special bread ‘kulich’. In recent years the shopping malls have been making good money selling products related to favored religious holidays, Easter and Christmas being the two most popular ones.
