If you find yourself in a situation similar to the one above and are confronted with law enforcement officials whose definition of missionary activity does not agree with yours, what should you do? We will cover this in a later chapter entitled «What to do if you are accused of violating the laws of missionary activity.».
Chapter 3. Religious Activities of Individuals
As we saw in the previous chapter, the laws and regulations governing missionary activity do not apply to the activities of individuals acting on their own, without official connection or authorization to conduct missionary activity on behalf of religious organizations.
The right to preach and share one’s beliefs is guaranteed under Articles 28 and 29 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation.
Article 28.
Everyone shall be guaranteed the freedom of conscience, the freedom of religion, including the right to profess individually or together with others any religion or to profess no religion at all, to freely choose, possess and disseminate religious and other views and act according to them.
Article 29.
1. Everyone shall be guaranteed the freedom of ideas and speech.
2. Propaganda or agitation instigating social, racial, national or religious hatred and strife shall not be allowed. Propaganda promoting social, racial, national, religious or linguistic supremacy shall be banned.
3. No person may be forced to express their views and convictions or to renounce them.
4. Everyone has the right to freely seek, receive, transmit, produce and disseminate information by any legal means. The list of information constituting a state secret is determined by federal law.
5. The freedom of mass communication shall be guaranteed. Censorship shall be banned.
It is within the rights of every individual believer, when speaking on their own behalf, to preach and share their beliefs; further, one can freely pray, and have conversations about one’s faith in a public place. These activities are not prohibited by law.
Whether on the street, on premises (residential or industrial) sharing of beliefs by an individual believer does not meet the legal definition of missionary activity under paragraph 1 Article 24.1 of the Law «About Liberty of Conscience and about Religious Associations»:
For the purposes of this federal law, missionary activity is recognized as the activity of a religious association, aimed at disseminating information about its beliefs among people who are not participants (members, followers) in that religious association, with the purpose of involving these people as participants (members, followers). It is carried out directly by religious associations or by citizens and/or legal entities authorized by them, publicly, with the help of the media, the internet or other lawful means.
In the previous chapter we identified four necessary characteristics of Missionary Activity:
– Missionary Activity is carried out directly by the religious association and/or authorized persons and organizations. The spread of their personal faith cannot be automatically attributed to the missionary work.
– Missionary activity is aimed at those who are not yet a follower of a religious association; therefore, talking about faith among fellow believers is not missionary activity.
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