Russian Orthodox Church Urges Priests to Behave Properly Online

This week here in Russia we have witnessed an interesting story that involves two spheres that are rarely interconnected at all -religion and social media. The thing is that one of the priests is now involved in a scandal that was caused by his numerous improper discussions in LiveJournal.

As some of you may be aware, LiveJournal is actually the most popular blogging platform in many countries of the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine where he lives. Absolutely everyone who wants to have a voice online should be there – simply because elsewhere people will hardly listen. This is true for everyone – be it a marketing person or a priest as it now turns out.

The priest I am talking about here published numerous posts on his own blog using the language and the arguments that were not acceptable to the church. In addition to that, he participated in various discussions on other blogs supporting the views that were also deemed to be inappropriate.

The reaction from the church is now here as he has been forbidden to celebrate the Mass until he recovers and regains composure enough to behave properly – both offline and online. This is probably the first time that Russia faces a situation like this and so it makes it interesting because the church now has to decide exactly what its official representatives are supposed to do when they make their appearance online.

The official position has already been announced: the internet should be considered as a yet another place where a priest (or any church member at that) can carry out missionary outreach so it is nothing but a tool – and a tool that should be used properly. Of course the power of the internet is immense and the mere number of people who already actively communicate online combined with the numerous tools of self-expression here cannot be ignored any more by the church.

But there are certain problems here. The first one is quoted by the church in their official statement to the Russian news agencies: it is the danger of anonymity. Of course this is a well-known problem of online communications and it is valid for everyone as it is impossible to avoid trolls hiding under their totally anonymous nicks and it is also not that easy to resist the temptation to behave a little like a troll yourself in return.

But where we can easily see reasons for such a behavior for a regular person, when it comes to a priest, things are very different because there are certain standards that you just expect church members to hold to – like being polite and friendly. Of course you also expect priests to be the most obedient people in the world and follow a certain set of rules in their lives – without anyone considering their behavior could be improper at all.

But it looks like this is yet another problem: since the church has only just begun to embrace the power of the World Wide Web, there are probably no rules or recommendations to priests (let alone regular church members) yet for them to know exactly how they should behave online. Yet to me this does not sound like an excuse at all.

After all, why should there be any difference between your online behavior and offline one? I know that under a nick it is very easy to forget all the ethical norms but this is up to every single person to decide whether you respect yourself and people around you enough to treat them with respect online (same as you would have done during a face to face meeting).

But for a priest I think there should never even be a possibility of considering any questionable behavior anywhere because you are not just a regular person any more – you are someone who represents the church right in the society. And of course hiding behind a mask of anonymity and telling things impossible in real life should not even be considered by such a person – even if the church has not developed any certain rules on that yet.

Via (in Russian)