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Vladimir Putin has made Russia into the kind of country that America’s religious right dreams of.
Among other things, he passed a constitutional amendment declaring that belief in God is a “core national value”. He enacted blasphemy laws that make it illegal to criticize the church or hurt believers’ feelings. He’s rolled back women’s rights, including by restricting abortion and even decriminalizing domestic violence (yes, you read that correctly).
LGBTQ rights in Russia are nonexistent. It’s a crime to “promote or praise” same-sex relationships, or even to describe any sexuality other than heterosexuality as normal.
Under Putin, Russia has become a theocracy where the Russian Orthodox Church reigns supreme above other faiths. One example is the Yarovaya Law, which requires religious organizations to get a permit to proselytize or to hold services. Supposedly, this is in the name of fighting terrorism and extremism. But that power is trivial for the state to abuse, granting permits only to churches that serve the interests of the ruling class while suppressing their competition.
Tsar Putin and Patriarch Kirill
The dominant faith in Russia is the Russian Orthodox Church, which is a denomination of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Eastern Orthodoxy is the faith that emerged from the Byzantine Empire, just as Roman Catholicism emerged from the Western Roman Empire.
Unlike Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy has no pope or other central authority. Rather, it has a multiplicity of local and national churches that practice the same rites and are in communion with each other, but are independent of each other. Each one is headed by a hierarch variously titled a metropolitan, an archbishop or a patriarch.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, is one of Putin’s closest allies. Putin’s patronage has conferred immense power and influence on the church. Kirill himself has also benefited personally, to the tune of billions of dollars. In one infamous story, he was spotted wearing a $30,000 luxury watch which propagandists clumsily, and unsuccessfully, tried to edit out of the photo.
In exchange, Kirill has granted Putin a spiritual blank check. He’s been one of the most vehement supporters of Russia’s genocidal war of conquest against Ukraine:
“Any war must have guns and ideas. In this war, the Kremlin has provided the guns, and I believe the Russian Orthodox Church is providing the ideas,” states Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun, an Orthodox priest and theologian…
The support of the Russian Orthodox Church has grown as the invasion of Ukraine has progressed, with Patriarch Kirill becoming one of the war’s most prominent promoters. In his sermons, he has accused “foreign forces” of trying to divide Russia and Ukraine, which he often describes as “one people.” These thinly veiled attempts to blame the war on the Western world while denying Ukraine’s right to an independent national identity closely echo the Kremlin’s own imperialistic talking points.
“Russian Orthodox leader Patriarch Kirill’s unholy war against Ukraine.” Borys Gudziak, Atlantic Council, 3 August 2023.
In March 2022, just days after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Kirill was justifying war from the pulpit. He said that it was necessary to “protect” Ukraine from corrupting Western ideas of freedom and individual rights:
The day before Russians marched on Ukraine, he congratulated Russian soldiers as defenders of the fatherland and said they “cannot have any doubt that they have chosen a very correct path in their lives.” Less than two weeks after the invasion began, he described the conflict as having “metaphysical significance” and warned his flock that the price of admission to the happy world of Western consumption and freedom was as simple as it was terrible: to agree to hold gay pride parades.
“We are talking about something different and much more important than politics,” he said. “We are talking about human salvation.”
Last week, the patriarch said it was “God’s truth” that the people of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus share a common spiritual and national heritage and should be united as one people—a direct echo of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s defense of the war.
“A spiritual defense of the war in Ukraine? Putin’s patriarch is trying.” Deborah Netburn, The Los Angeles Times, 29 March 2022.
However, Kirill and the church haven’t stopped at echoing the Kremlin’s warmongering propaganda. They’ve gone much further than that.
Throwing their religious authority behind war
The Russian Orthodox Church has thrown its full religious authority behind Putin’s war. Kirill has preached that the invasion of Ukraine is a divine mandate. In so doing, he’s followed in the footsteps of medieval crusaders, Confederate slaveholders, ISIS jihadists, and every other army of fanatics that motivated its soldiers by claiming that God is on their side.
The church has proclaimed that pacifism is heretical and incompatible with Christianity:
According to Russian church figures, “pacifism was present in heretical teachings in various periods of church history—among the Gnostics, Paulicians, Bogomils, Albigensians and Tolstoists, showing, like other utopian ideologies, a connection with the ancient Hiliasm,” the case materials say. It is noted that throughout its history the Orthodox Church has “blessed the soldiers for the defense of the Fatherland”.
When Russia’s massive casualties forced Putin to declare a draft, Kirill offered religious rhetoric to cushion the blow. Like an Islamist imam promising paradise to suicide bombers, he declared that Russian soldiers who die in battle are automatically cleansed of all sin:
“Many are dying on the fields of internecine warfare,” Kirill, 75, said in his first Sunday address since the mobilisation order. “The Church prays that this battle will end as soon as possible, so that as few brothers as possible will kill each other in this fratricidal war.”
“But at the same time, the Church realises that if somebody, driven by a sense of duty and the need to fulfil their oath … goes to do what their duty calls of them, and if a person dies in the performance of this duty, then they have undoubtedly committed an act equivalent to sacrifice. They will have sacrificed themselves for others. And therefore, we believe that this sacrifice washes away all the sins that a person has committed.“
To some degree, this is expected. Putin has a well-known habit of imprisoning and murdering his critics. No one who criticized him could remain in power in Russian society—let alone stay alive.
However, more disturbingly, even many Russian Orthodox believers living abroad are full-throated supporters of the war:
In an interview in August 2022 with a website close to the Moscow patriarchate, for example, Archbishop Gabriel of Montreal and Canada justified the invasion in language that closely follows official Russian propaganda. “Russia was forced to take steps to protect itself from the neo-Nazis who were shelling civilians in Donbas for eight years, and continue to this day,” he said.
In London in March 2023, Bishop Irenei, the head of the Diocese of Great Britain and Western Europe and the most influential bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, went further, issuing an “Open Letter on the Persecution of Christians in Ukraine” in which he cited “the tragedy of the most extraordinary and heartless persecution of Christians taking place in many parts of the country.” The letter puts the blame for this persecution on Ukrainian authorities, not the Russian army: Bishop Irenei was referring to Ukrainian charges against clerics of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine who have supported the Kremlin.
“Putin’s Useful Priests.” Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, Foreign Policy, 14 September 2023.
Both of these clerics, the article notes, were born and raised in the West. Their support for the war doesn’t come from Kremlin pressure, but a genuine ideological orientation toward restoring Russia’s imperial past. The same is true of ordinary Russian Orthodox believers, very few of whom—except, obviously, Ukrainians—have cut ties with the church or raised any other protest.
The days of the tsars
Putin’s goal is to restore the church-state alliance that prevailed during the era of the tsars. In official propaganda, the pre-Soviet Russian empire proclaimed itself the “Third Rome”, the rightful successor to the Roman and Byzantine empires. Its mission, as the rulers saw it, was to protect the motherland and to subjugate foreign nations in the name of Christianity. The Orthodox church played a key role in this ethnonationalist ideology of conquest, exalting the tsar as God’s chosen ruler on earth.
Russia today is a glimpse of Christianity as it existed in the past. It’s power-hungry, ruthless, and bent on domination. The war it’s waging on its neighbor is a holy war in the template of humanity’s most benighted eras. And it’s a well-established historical pattern that those who suffer worst in holy wars are other religious believers who happen to be the “wrong” faith.
READ: Deo Vindice!
Ukraine’s people, who mostly belong to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, have suffered and died in huge numbers at the hands of Russian invaders. Russia has leveled Ukraine’s frontline towns and cities with indiscriminate artillery barrages. Russian soldiers have tortured and massacred civilians in towns like Bucha. They’ve salted the earth with minefields that will kill and maim innocent people for decades to come. They’ve kidnapped children from occupied territories and shipped them to Russia for reeducation.
Russia has also waged a terror campaign of missile and drone attacks on population centers and Ukrainian cultural sites. One of those missiles struck the historic Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa, which Kirill himself consecrated as recently as 2010. Many more bombs and missiles have been fired at Kyiv, despite its spiritual and historic significance to Orthodox Christianity as the birthplace of the Kievan Rus empire that modern Russia descends from.
Russia has done all of this in the name of Christianity and Slavic brotherhood, and Kirill hasn’t breathed a word of criticism. He’s almost a caricature of evil—the pompous, toadying cleric who drapes himself in riches while excusing the slaughter of the innocent as God’s will.
For those who claim that religion is a force for peace or for good in the world, Russia’s war on Ukraine stands as a brutal counterexample. Like a shard of the past erupting into the present, it’s a reminder that religious faith has motivated hate, violence and killing at least as often as it’s inspired charity or compassion. Putin hungers for empire, and Kirill has been only too willing to support him. But history won’t look kindly upon either of them. They won’t be remembered as glorious conquerors. Their names, as well as the Russian Orthodox Church as a whole, will forever be linked to an evil legacy of bloodshed, destruction and death.