Source: Orthodox Christian Studies Center (OCSC) – Fordham University
Religion in Russia – Chapnin – UN presentation 2025 
Sergei Chapnin presented his report “Religious Communities Under Pressure: Documenting Religious Persecution in Russia 2022-2025” at the Free Peoples of Russia House in Washington, DC, during a panel discussion entitled “Can Post-Regime Russia Embrace Christian Democracy? Religious Persecution in Modern Russia and Occupied Ukraine.” The panel examined the potential role of Russian Orthodoxy in democratic restoration following regime change, approaches to securing freedom of conscience in a multi-confessional Russia, and the current realities of religious persecution.
Sergei Chapnin
Director of Communications at the OCSC of Fordham University and Chief Editor of The Gifts (Дары) Almanac
Sergei Chapnin is a former Moscow Patriarchate employee with over 15 years of experience. He has deep knowledge of Russian Orthodox traditions, Church administration, and Church-state relations in modern Russia.
Born in 1968, he graduated from Moscow State University, Journalism faculty and studied at St. Tikhon’s Theological Insitute. In the 1990s, he worked for the leading independent newspapers in Moscow – Kommersant and Nezavisimaya Gazeta. He became one of the first journalists in Russia to cover religious life in the post-Soviet space professionally. In 2001, at the invitation of Patriarch Alexey II, Mr. Chapnin was appointed Executive Editor of the Church Herald newspaper. Later, he was the Executive Editor of the leading official publication of the Russian Orthodox Church – The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, and Deputy Chief Editor of the Moscow Patriarchate Publishing House (2009-2015). In 2010-2013, he was a Secretary of the Church, State, and Society Commission of the Inter-Conciliar Board of the Russian Orthodox Church and a senior lecturer at Saint Tikhon Orthodox Humanitarian University, Faculty of Theology.
To describe the religiosity of contemporary Russian society, he introduced the concept of post-Soviet civil religion. In December 2015, after his lecture at Carnegie Center in Moscow (where he made a prognosis that a war in Ukraine would be given a religious justification), he was fired from all his positions personally by Patriarch Kirill. Since 2022, he has been a Director of Communications at the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University and Chief Editor of «Дары» (The Gifts), an almanac of contemporary Christian culture, and a curator of exhibitions on contemporary Christian art.
Mr. Chapnin is the author of numerous articles and commentary in national and international media, including Bloomberg, WSJ, NYT, CBS, NPR, The First Things (USA); BBC, The Economist (UK), Le Monde (France); Wiez, KAI (Poland) and many others. He is the author of the books The Church in Post-Soviet Russia. Revival, ‘Quality of Faith’, and Dialog with the Society (2013) and The Church Revival. A Summary (2018), both in Russian.
