Slavic Native Faith's identity and political philosophy

Slavic Native Faith (Rodnovery) is intrinsically related to the identity of the Slavs and the broader group of populations with Indo-European origins. Scholar Kaarina Aitamurto has studied Rodnovers' political philosophy as a form of "democratic criticism of liberal democracy", or grassroots democracy. They generally propose a political system in which power is entrusted to asseblies of consensually-acknowledged wise men, or to a single wise individual.

Scott Simpson states that Slavic Native Faith is "fundamentally concerned with questions of community and ethnic identity". Shnirelman notes that the movement is "obsessed with the idea of origin". Rodnovery typically displays greater concern for collective rights than individual rights. Most Rodnover groups will permit only Slavs as members, although there are a few exceptions.

The notion that modern Rodnovery is closely tied to the historical religion of the Slavs is a very strong one among practitioners. There is no evidence that the early Slavs, a branch of the Indo-Europeans, ever conceived of themselves as a unified ethno-cultural group. There is an academic consensus that the Proto-Slavic language developed from about the second half of the first millennium BCE in an area of Central and Eastern Europe bordered by the Dnieper basin to the east, the Vistula basin to the west, the Carpathian Mountains to the south, and the forests beyond the Pripet basin to the north.

Over the course of several centuries, Slavic populations migrated in northern, eastern, and south-western directions. In doing so, they branched out into three sub-linguistic families: the East Slavs (Ukrainians, Belarussians, Russians), the West Slavs (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks), and the South Slavs (Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, and Bulgarians). The belief systems of these Slavic communities had many affinities with those of neighbouring linguistic populations, such as the Balts, Thracians, and Indo-Iranians.Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov studied the origin of ancient Slavic themes in the common substratum represented by Proto-Indo-European religion and what Georges Dumézil studied as the "trifunctional hypothesis". Marija Gimbutas, instead, found Slavic religion to be a clear result of the overlap of Indo-European patriarchism and pre-Indo-European matrifocal beliefs. Boris Rybakov emphasised the continuity and complexification of Slavic religion through the centuries.

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