4. Attending a campaign meeting is an effective way to meet an individual's spiritual need. If you go for it, you are quite sure that you will experience a feeling that can be interpreted as satisfaction.

5. An individual can calculate whether to go to a long-term or short meeting organized by the campaign, depending on how strong the need is and how much time he has. A person can take part more or less actively, thereby manipulating the power of his experience.

6. The impression of an individual person can be predicted and controlled. You know what you are experiencing, and you can control some aspects of your impression.

7. The organization of evangelical campaigns is similar to the establishment of a network of enterprises like McDonald's. More often than not, there is a center and there are companion clients who have chosen to join the center in the relative freedom of their own communities.

Instead of continuing this list, I will cite a number of considerations that point to the "irrationality" of rationalized spiritual products, such as evangelical campaigns in Eastern Europe.

1. The attractiveness of mass gatherings within the framework of evangelistic campaigns depends on the scale of the event. But this same scale prevents them from meeting people face to face. One symptom is the need to install huge audio and video systems at the meeting site so that everyone can see the preacher. Scale leads to the opposite result.

2. The spiritual impression "made" by the congregation can be described as strong, clearly unlike any other. Ricer describes the taste of fast food in the same way. But nothing is said about whether this experience is really deep, auspicious, or true.

3. The question may be asked: Is it really possible to satisfy a spiritual need by an evangelical congregation, or are there aspects of religiosity that cannot be satisfied by this kind of spiritual commodity?

4. In an individualized environment, the religious content embodied in culture and tradition is not taken into account.

The arrival of the fast food industry in Eastern Europe is unlikely to help the local food industry flourish. There is a great risk that new enterprises will destroy old local enterprises. Likewise, new rationalized religious "goods" are likely to destroy older, more traditional forms of religiosity.

Russia on the verge of the Counter-Reformation

When I studied at the seminary (in the mid-1980s), I considered "sect studies" to be the most boring and unnecessary subject. Krishnas, occultists, Moonies and other "new religious movements" were not mentioned in that course. In the old fashioned way, it was mainly about Baptists, Adventists, Pentecostals. And it seemed to me that it was profoundly useless to study their history and their theology. After all, there is a completely atheistic country around, and if one day I meet a Protestant among millions of atheists, I will rather be happy to meet him: after all, I am a close soul. And this subject, to be honest, was taught to us without a spark. So I can testify: in Orthodox seminaries on the eve of "perestroika" we were not taught to see Protestants or Catholics as some kind of enemies; The atmosphere of the theological schools was unequivocally ecumenical. Guests from the West, who constantly came to us for theological talks and simply on visits, assured us that they admire Orthodoxy, its depth, antiquity, steadfastness, prayerfulness, that the times of alienation of Western and Eastern Christians are over, and that the time for reconciliation has come.

Ten years have passed, and so much has changed. Orthodoxy and Protestantism in Russia (as well as Orthodoxy and Catholicism in Ukraine) found themselves in a state of direct confrontation. The charge of aggression and intolerance was not accumulated by us, not by the Orthodox. For us, the 70s and 80s were the years of "détente", ecumenical "détente". But this détente turned out to be a one-way street. While our theologians were engaged in the "theology of peace," the Protestant world (primarily in the United States) was accumulating strength to rush into the collapsed Soviet Union. By the year 2000, the Protestants intended to create 200,000 of their parishes in Russia (they did not succeed, but even unfulfilled plans talk a lot about the planner).

Such an extensive action needs propaganda support. And Protestant propaganda (with the support of secular anti-church journalists) endlessly repeats two theses: 1) we preach "just the gospel" and 2) we help the Russian Church in the evangelization of Russia, we do not fight Orthodoxy. They came to us with an action of peace, but if the Orthodox oppose the Protestant mission in Russia, then this is a manifestation of traditional Orthodox intolerance and aggression. For example, a thief who has broken into an apartment besieges the awakened owner: "Don't make noise! You disturb people's sleep!" Protestants threw battalions of preachers into Russia, and in the distorted mirror of propaganda, the Russian Church still turned out to be the aggressor. In the spring of 1996, in the Siberian city of Noyabrsk, an Adventist preacher came to my lecture and said: "Why do you, Moscow theologians, come here? You are disturbing religious peace in our city!" Indeed, in this city (a city of Soviet-built oil workers, without a church and a priest, but with a population of 100,000) there were already 23 Protestant pastors of various denominations by that time. And so, it turns out that an Orthodox preacher, coming to a Russian city, "violates religious peace," because American sects already consider this city their own!