<p>From the moment the Soviet ideology lost its dominion, the RussianStatehas been searching for spiritual bases that can unite society, create its moral constants and the feeling of the statehood. The religion has the potential for the solution of such tasks in modern Russia. However, the Russian society is polyconfessional, which complicates the development of unique forms of interaction between the state and the religion. In the current conditions of the religious pluralism, the confessional policy of the Russian state is deprived of a unificult conceptual basis, which makes it difficult to determin its characteristic features and orientation. Thus, it is natural to appeal to the experience that is authentic to the Russian culture of the past, or search for modern foreign models of interaction between religion and the state. In the first case, the ideal model will be that of the state and confessional relations in the Russian Empire, where traditional way of social life was combined with a long period of interaction between different religions. In the second case, it is modern experience of the USA, where the state and confessional relations are under construction of the conditions of complicated religious structure and a democratic constitutional framework. As a result, the choice of the optimum confessional policy model is set by coordinates ranging from imperial policy of building up a hierarchy of religions up to formation of a civil religion model which received theoretical justification in R. Bella’s works.<strong></strong></p>