Editor’s note: The author is a Ukrainian relief worker, church planter, and seminary professor in the city of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine. He was raised in a Russian-speaking context in the city of Donetsk, southeastern Ukraine, currently under Russian occupation. From 2001 until some weeks after Moscow’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of his homeland, he served as a missionary in Russia: “I was there in Russia, while my heart was breaking for my people in Ukraine.” He is also one of four authors of a March 2022 open letter against the war that was signed by more than 400 Evangelical leaders and church members across Russia during the few days in March 2022 when it was circulated online.1 “As believers,” the signatories concurred, “we evaluate what is happening as the grave sin of fratricide: the sin of Cain, who raised his hand against his brother, Abel. …The war destroys not only Ukraine, but Russia—its people, its economy, its morality, its future.”
Andrey Kravtsev’s text below is an expanded version of his article published on 29 April by Christian Leadership Alliance (https://christianleadershipalliance.org).
Over the two decades of my life in Russia, I witnessed a gradual formation of a new civil religion progressively filling the post-Communist ideological vacuum. While this superficially bears some marks of Orthodox Christianity, it in reality worships the nation as supreme spiritual entity. The current Russian war on Ukraine has been partially fed by—and in turn, contributed to—the shaping of this syncretistic set of ideas. On the one hand, there is nothing new in this phenomenon as it calls to mind those historical empires that claimed divine status in order to ensure complete loyalty from their subjects. On the other hand, its consequences have already been disastrous. As is customary for an idol that has taken the place of God, the nation demands human sacrifice, and we already see half a million casualties of this war. The Russian patriarch, as chief priest of the emerging ethnic cult, has blessed this sacrifice by publicly announcing that all who die fighting in the “holy war” will be “absolved of all their sins.”
Civil religion
The “creed” of the new quasi-religion can be found on the official website of the Russian Orthodox Church. Recently it published a document that illustrates more explicitly the replacement of key Christian doctrine with a civil religion serving the current political ambitions of the Russian state.2 Entitled “The Present and Future of the Russian World,” this was approved by a special session of the World Russian People’s Council (WRPC) chaired by Patriarch Kirill at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior on 27 March 2024.
In the most obvious substitution, the “Russian World” of the document’s title is identified with all who exalt “Russian tradition, the sacred things of Russian civilization, and great Russian culture” as “the highest value and meaning of life.” At the same time, the text never mentions God, Christ’s death and resurrection, nor any of His teachings as having any relevance to individual or social existence. The nation here claims the place of God Himself, who alone should be the supreme value and meaning of a Christian’s life.
A second substitution identifies Russia with ultimate goodness. She is hailed as “the universal force holding back [the Antichrist] and protecting the world from evil.” Christian Scripture indeed speaks of a unique people who are entrusted with the task of anticipating the Kingdom of God in their communal life. However, this is not a specific nation but the universal Church: a community of believers including representatives of all nations and cultures.
History demonstrates that the association of this notion with particular ethnic groups or states stems from the privatization of Christianity by national elites. In this instance, the myth of Russia as the “Third Rome”—the sole Christian state entrusted with the task of preserving true faith until the end of time—shaped her rulers’ self-awareness and attitude towards their subjects for at least four centuries. At the same time, it defined Russian foreign policy and fueled continual imperial wars.
Western civilization as evil
A third substitution in the WRPC document is the identification of Western civilization with the forces of evil: the West is directly accused of having “fallen into Satanism.” In Christian theology, however, humans—whether from the West or the East—are neither absolutely good nor the source of evil. To see oneself as the sole “bearer of light” is self-deception, and to demonize others is to embark upon a dangerous path of dehumanization and hatred.
Patriarch Kirill often disparages Western secular humanism’s prioritization of individual rights and desires as rebellion against God. Yet he is never heard exposing the unjust courts, persecution of people for their convictions, or extrajudicial violence—including torture— that take place within Russia’s borders. Nor does he speak out against the mass violations of the Commandments “Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” and “Thou shalt not covet” which are committed daily by representatives of “Holy Russia” against citizens of a neighboring country.
Combined, these three substitutions generate a fourth: the thesis that Russia’s war against Ukraine is a “holy war”—for that is how the WRPC document maintains the “Special Military Operation” should be understood in spiritual and moral terms. Here, we see how the transposition of the metaphysical categories of good and evil into the realm of relations between cultures inevitably transfers spiritual warfare to the political sphere. Since the mid-2000s, the Russian political elite has revived the time-tested narrative of a hostile West in order to secure the power and resources its members have usurped. The Russian Orthodox leadership has assisted by providing eschatological context for this narrative, thus granting it sacred status.
Post-Soviet psychological traumas
Admittedly, we should take into account the psychological traumas experienced by many Russians following the break-up of the Soviet Union, including the loss of political significance, ideological chaos, disillusionment with democracy, impoverishment of the population, regional separatism, and the rampant spread of organized crime. Rather than working to revive core Christian values in the face of these challenges, however, many Russian Orthodox clerics have preferred to preach the “unique spirituality” of their nation, denounce the “decadent West,” defend increasing restrictions on civil liberties, and strive for proximity to the autocratic regime. This has fed a spirit not of national repentance, but of national resentment.
Russian state propaganda has repeatedly portrayed Ukraine as an “antiRussia,” but it is more correct to view it as an “alternative Russia.” Ukraine faced many of the same post-Soviet challenges as other former republics, but has followed a different trajectory. Unlike Russia, no assumption exists that all ethnic Ukrainians belong to a dominant Orthodox Church by default. Ukraine’s robust religious pluralism—it has multiple Orthodox Churches, two forms of Catholic Christianity, and a significant Evangelical population, in addition to other faith groups—has generally obliged governments to treat religions equally.
Religious pluralism usually goes hand-in-hand with social and political openness. Historically, Evangelicals have tended to reject the autocratic principle rex est lex loquens—“the king is the law speaking,” adhering instead to what 17thcentury Scottish Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford termed lex, rex—“the law is the king.”3 Ukraine has elected six presidents over the past 30 years and—despite prolonged birth pains— has been developing as a democracy committed to challenging post-Soviet corruption and chaos. Democratic aspiration is, in fact, one of the real reasons for the current war.
In and of itself, this democratic foundation— entailing regular changes of power, human rights, and media competition—is no threat to the Russian people. It certainly rings the death knell for Russian authoritarianism, however— and therefore the privileged position of the Russian elite. Potential democratic challenges to this elite are why state propaganda (religious included) instills the fear of the West as “the perpetual enemy” in the minds of the young Russians who die by the hundreds every day on the steppes of Ukraine.
Evangelicals Not Isolated
Evangelicals, as part of their societies, cannot be fully isolated from these cultural influences. Here, the differences between Ukrainian and Russian Evangelicals are substantial. While Evangelicals in Ukraine even had a church member serving as Acting President for several months in 2014 after President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country, the real freedom of Evangelicals in Russia began to fade with the 1997 law privileging “traditional religions.” As a result, Ukrainian believers had to begin thinking about the social and political implications of their faith, while their Russian brothers and sisters have largely remained within the Soviet paradigm of eschatological escapism centered upon the gospel of “God, my soul, and heaven.”
Today, in my estimation, fewer than a quarter of Evangelical leaders in Russia support the war either actively or passively (although that number may be higher in Pentecostal or Charismatic circles where emotional experience can override biblical authority). Approximately another quarter oppose the so-called “Special Military Operation” either actively or passively, but they have to be very careful as to how, where, and to whom they say anything. The remaining half has taken refuge in a form of apolitical Christianity. Tested and approved by Soviet Evangelicals back in the 1950s-80s, this has proven to be the safest choice. In sum, Russian Evangelicals’ attitude to the current war serves as an eloquent illustration of Paul Hiebert’s classic “Critical Contextualization” chart on responses to nonChristian cultural tradition.4 While some seek to understand such tradition through biblical evaluation, others are refusing to contextualize and/or are falling into syncretism.
In this context, it is startling to see a number of Western Evangelicals—such as “MAGA Christians” in the United States—also captivated by a false image of Vladimir Putin as a leader with “conservative moral values.” This February, for example, Pastor Mark Driscoll of The Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, tweeted: “No matter what your thoughts are on Putin, I think we can all agree we need a leader who loves this country as much as he loves his.”5
In reality, what lies at the root of the current crisis in Eastern Europe is spiritual ignorance within Russia, where— despite more than 30 years since the Soviet collapse—most have still to hear the Gospel clearly. For Russia’s own sake, it is vital to expose the “sacred” ethnocentric myths that take its place—as Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, “doom [befalls] a nation without the Word of God.”
It is high time for Christian believers both in the West and the East to think through the implications of their faith once again. Let us try to be instruments of peace and justice, rather than submit to manipulative politicians who are consumed by their own thirst for power, wealth, and self-glorification. First and foremost, our values and loyalties should be determined by the Gospel, which tells us who we are, why we are here, and the true nature of the battle which involves us all. ♦
1 Dated 2 March 2022 and published online, the text of the open letter was removed by 4 March 2022: https://gazeta.mirt.ru/ stat-i/obschestvo/post-2535/.
2 http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/6116189.html.
3 https://archive.org/details/lexrexorlawprinc00ruth.
4 https://munsonmissions.org/tag/paul-hiebert/.
5 9 February 2024, https://x.com/PastorMark/ status/1756052393433952314
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