“Narratives of Anxiety” and Hidden Ontologies: Anti-vaccination Protest in “Conservative Orthodoxy” and Its Cultural Context

Abstract

Protests against efforts toward coronavirus vaccination in 2020 and 2021 received significant support among Russian Orthodox “conservatives” or “fundamentalists” who consider vaccination to be a “chipping” that subordinates a person to hostile forces in preparation for the reign of the antichrist. The article examines the features of the conspiracy eschatology of modern Orthodox conservatives based on specific forms of ontology, aesthetics and social imagination. Abbot Roman Zagrebnev’s collected essays Deeds of Light and Deeds of Darkness (2016) and a number of other sources are used as empirical material for the analysis of these forms. The loss of a person’s individual agency as well as pollution, understood both in the moral and physiological sense, play a particular role in the social concept of conservative Orthodox. Each of these issues are discussed and represented with the help of bodily images and metaphors. The article attempts to see the meaning of conservative Orthodoxy not only through the prism of political ideals, social crises, and eschatological mythopoetics, but also through the connection of this particular type apocalyptic imagination of this kind and ideological holism as a crypto-ontology. The ‘holistic principle’ implies mutual conditionality and constant connection of physiological, moral and social categories and phenomena. This operates within concepts of an “expanded body” as an entity that is exposed to constant risks of pollution and loss of autonomy. In this context, the fear of vaccination, understood as both a form of physiological desecration and a means of social control, turns out to be a natural continuation of a broader ideological or ontological program that opposes the reductionist and discrete ideas about the world characteristic of late modern Western culture.