Shrinking the Public Sphere
The conflation of fringe politics with fringe religion has obvious value for the state, promoting the narrative that deviation from the (Putinist) mainstream is a matter of fanaticism rather than legitimate political differences. Here the Citizens make the perfect poster children, because, to anyone not already inclined to take them seriously, their claims are patently absurd. But what Silantiev and Strelakova are doing in Necromancers of Our Time, and what Silantiev and his other coauthor Sergei Chekmaev do in their book Destructology, goes several steps further. [1] In applying anti-cult methodology to groups that are not, at their core, religions, they willfully ignore the boundary between the spiritual and the secular. Just as anti-extremist legislation and police work shrinks the available space for legitimate political dissent, Silantiev and co. are trying to redefine the public sphere as a realm with no room for the secular.
Silantiev does not repeat the mistakes of more familiar Bible-thumpers who alienate the less committed with fire-and-brimstone rhetoric. The veneer of sociology covers up an unacknowledged debt the to the theology known as presuppositionalism. Presuppositionalism rejects the very idea of rational disputation with non-believers, because the unerrant Bible is the only source of Truth. As Chrissy Stroop writes:
The “unsaved,” bringing their own presuppositions to the evidence, will come to different conclusions—about the Bible, for example, or about the formation of the Grand Canyon, which the “evolutionist” will see in terms of geologic time, while the creationist will see the impact of Noah’s flood.
[...]
“Based on human observation of the evidence alone, the reasoning goes, there is no way to adjudicate between these two incommensurate “worldviews.” The “saved” Christian, with his “biblical worldview,” simply “knows” that he [...] is right.
Stroop, a prominent "exvangelical" writer, argues that the American Christian Right characterizes all opposing views and phenomena as "religions" (including "transgenderism," the subject of this particular post) in order to ensure that "there can be no religiously neutral space, no concept of equal accommodation as a way to manage the fact of pluralism in any modern society democratically. Instead, there can be only a struggle for the domination of your religion or worldview over those held by others. ”
Presuppositionalism has a longer way to go in the Russian Federation. Decades of official atheism left their mark, and even most people who identify themselves as Orthodox Christians have no particular church affiliation. But just as Putin's third and fourth terms have demonstrated the increasing entanglement between the priorities of the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church, Silantiev's destructology represents a hybrid of the presupposionalist insistence on viewing all opposing views as false religions and the Russian State's criminalization of dissent. Extremism and sectarianism are on the verge of becoming synonyms.
Note
[1] Chekmaev's involvement is noteworthy. A journalist best known as a science fiction writer and editor, Chekmaev has long been a driving force behind the socially conservative science fiction coming out of the liberpunk movement (See Plots against Russia). He has edited anthologies about the dangers of tolerance, the decline of the family, and a future USSR at war in space. Religion is not a new theme for him; in 2018 he published Modnoverie, an anthology devoted to satirizing neopaganism. He is closely associated with Snezhnii kom, a publishing house that, though dealing primarily with science fiction, brought out Silantiev's and Strelakova's Necromancers of Our Time. The boundaries between sociological science fiction and science fictional sociology appear to be wearing thin.