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The Russian Empire offered itself to its topics and the realm as an Orthodox nation, a purchaser and defender of jap Christianity. but the tsarist regime additionally lauded itself for granting non secular freedoms to its many heterodox matters, making 'religious toleration' a center characteristic of the state's id. The Tsar's international Faiths indicates that the ensuing tensions among the autocracy's commitments to Orthodoxy and its claims to toleration turned a
defining function of the empire's non secular order.

In this panoramic account, Paul W. Werth explores the scope and personality of non secular freedom for Russia's diversified non-Orthodox religions, from Lutheranism and Catholicism to Islam and Buddhism. contemplating either rhetoric and perform, he examines discourses of spiritual toleration and the function of confessional associations within the empire's governance. He finds the paradoxical prestige of Russia's heterodox faiths as either demonstrated and 'foreign', and explains the dynamics that formed the fate
of more moderen conceptions of non secular liberty after the mid-nineteenth century. If highbrow swap and the moving personality of non secular lifestyles in Russia steadily driven the regime in the direction of the attractiveness of freedom of judgment of right and wrong, then statesmen's nationalist sentiments and their fears of
'politicized' faith impeded this improvement. Russia's spiritual order therefore remained beset by way of contradiction at the eve of the nice conflict. in keeping with archival examine in 5 nations and an unlimited scholarly literature, The Tsar's international Faiths represents an important contribution to the background of empire and faith in Russia, and to the research of toleration and spiritual range in Europe.