Faith traditions preach universalist lessons and yet they often are geographically circumscribed, and scholars tend to follow course. This volume of collected essays offers an opportunity to investigate key questions regarding imperial understandings of faith, confessional divides and loyalties, and the relationship between national culture and religion in a space less known to historians of religion in Europe despite a rich specialist historiography. It ventures beyond well-trodden concerns for Polish Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy to consider varied religious and national identities in successive multi-ethnic states of central and eastern Europe. The essays favor a treatment of the historical experiences of Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, but embrace a broad temporal consideration, addressing concerns from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.
The authors who choose to explicitly examine the imperial vantage point emphasize coercion. Barbara Skinner's essay on a state-sponsored campaign of pressure against Uniates in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire offers an intriguing prelude to their formal 1839 conversion to Orthodoxy. Importantly, Skinner demonstrates how broad intimidation—including consequential changes in liturgical practice—elicited a popular response, specifically from parish priests, laity, and local notables. Editor Yoko Aoshima's contribution focuses on the ambitions of the Russian Ministry of Education, arguing that strictly regulated religious training of future teachers in the northwestern part of the empire provided a model for instruction in the empire's interior. This claim raises questions about the nature and direction of “russification.” As other historians of education have demonstrated, tsarist authorities wished teachers to acculturate their peasant charges regardless of confessional orientation. Furthermore, Wayne Dowler's work on Russian-language schooling among Kazan Tatars has shown that educators employed a range of tools beyond religion to shape the sensibilities of non-Russian children.
Other scholars investigate the development of national culture within the context of religion. Vilma Žaltauskaitė and Olga Mastianica-Stankevič both explain how Polonized, theological seminary students and nobles embraced Lithuanian identity and attempted to define the content and direction of national culture, sometimes in a contradictory fashion. Zita Medišauskienė's essay on the place of religion in the rhetoric of the 1863–64 Uprising offers a healthy reminder that faith did not inform the politics of all, even those who were motivated by nationalism. Defense of Catholicism animated Lithuanian and some Polish texts, but Belarusian newspapers rarely addressed religion during the revolutionary moment. By contrast, Aliaksandr Bystryk argues that the Belarusian Catholic press advanced a conservative form of nationalism centered around the church in the early twentieth century. Collectively, these essays provide critical insight into evolving, elite literature on national identity and remind us of the important function that media plays in disseminating and consolidating sentiment. The authors could say more, however, about the contours of this sentiment, the reception of the reading public, competition between seemingly incompatible nationalisms, and the overlapping worlds that the writers occupied. Anthony Smith's notable identification of a paradox of ethnicity as “the coexistence of flux and durability” suggests at least one way of thinking more broadly of these processes within the “cultural parameter” of religion (National Identity, 1991). Taku Shinohara's fascinating essay on interconfessional Czech national festivals is more geographically afield, but it demonstrates partly what Smith means: how imaginations of the past mixed with modalities of the present to produce a discernible, mobilizing form of nationalism.
Despite the study's emphasis on the faith of national aspirants, it is Polish Catholicism that lurks in the background of much of this study. It is the object of Max Weber's selective derision addressed in Hajime Konno's contribution. Skinner, Chiho Fukushima, and Dominika Rank all address the Uniate relationship with Polish Catholicism over several centuries. Absent from the volume is a detailed discussion of the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the Uniate Church and the reasons for its acceptance, rejection, and continued popularity. This concern calls for an engagement with the critical question, raised by Serhii Plokhy among others, of the existence and legacy of a premodern Ruthenian nation. The volume's assertion of regional differences among Uniates as well as adherents of other faiths is especially compelling. Kenshi Fukumoto's examination of unemployment relief in Łódź is regrettably the only essay to explicitly discuss Judaism. But his work conjures up a multireligious, complex world that the volume regularly references. Sometimes the book draws boundaries between faith communities too starkly, but the diversity of expression is readily apparent in the capable research of these experts.
