"How to Earn a Million in the Glory of God?" Ethics and Spirituality among Orthodox Entrepreneurs in Contemporary Russia

This article explores the emerging convergences between Orthodox and neoliberal discourses on morality in contemporary Russia. It follows the case of Saint-Petersburg-based Union of Orthodox Entrepreneurs (UOE) that was established in 2012 with the goal of promoting a culture of entrepreneurship based on Orthodox values. Drawing on fieldwork with the UOE, I explore how Orthodox understandings of spirituality and moral self-transformation through virtuous practices become entangled with neoliberal discourses of self-development in shaping contemporary Orthodox entrepreneurs' understanding of business ethics and their practices of ethical self-fashioning. Despite the UOE's ambition of creating a shared "ethical" culture of entrepreneurship, most of its members still hold highly idiosyncratic views on the morality of commonplace legal and illegal business practices and resist the idea of subscribing to a unified code of ethical behavior. I argue that the Union's failure to produce a unified ethical model is associated both with the constraints of the market practices that limit entrepreneurs' ability to act on their proclaimed values and with the distinct model of ethical formation inherent to Orthodox tradition, which resists reduction to a narrow ethical code and offers believers multiple individualized ways of pursuing spirituality. Thus, a peculiar characteristic of the emerging alignment between Orthodoxy and market ideology is that religiosity in the contemporary Russian context does not translate into any specific pattern of economic behavior or model of handling business.