Sergei Chapnin

Sergei Chapnin is a former Moscow Patriarchate employee with over 15 years’ 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, in 1992. In 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 issues professionally.

In 2001 at the invitation of Patriarch Alexey II Chapnin was appointed Executive editor of the Church Herald newspaper. Later he was the Executive editor of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate and deputy Chief editor of the Moscow Patriarchate Publishing House (2009-2015). In 2010-2013 he was also a Secretary of Church, State and Society Commission of the Inter-Conciliar Board of the Russian Orthodox Church and 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 will be given a religious justification) he was fired from all his positions personally by Patriarch Kirill.

Recently he worked as vice-rector at State University of Film and Television in Saint-Petersburg. He is also a member of the «Theology after GULAG» Research Group (VU, Amsterdam) and contributed to Post-Secular Conflicts Research Project (University of Innsbruck, Austria) as a research associate (2016-2021).

Since 2022 he is 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.