The FAQs: Americans Debate About Religious Liberty in Ukraine

What just happened?

At the recent Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Iowa, former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson asked former vice president Mike Pence if, during his recent meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, he raised the issue of “persecuted Christians in Ukraine.”

Carlson said the Ukrainian government had “raided convents” and has “effectively banned” a Christian denomination: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate).

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“What I can tell you is I asked the Christian leader in Kyiv if that [i.e., arresting Christians] was in fact happening, and he assured me that it was not,” said Pence. “People were not being persecuted for their religious beliefs.”

What’s the religious makeup of Ukraine?

According to a 2022 survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, 85 percent of Ukrainians identify as Christians—72 percent identify with Eastern Orthodoxy, 9 percent with the Catholic Church, and 4 percent with a Protestant Church or other Christian movement. There are also smaller percentages of Jews and Muslims in the population.

Only 4 percent are part of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), which is part of the Russian Orthodox Church. More than half (54 percent) of Ukrainians are in the more recently created Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

What is the Russian Orthodox Church?

Within Christianity, the three broad traditions are Protestantism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Within Eastern Orthodoxy, there are several self-governing ecclesiastical jurisdictions known as patriarchates, each headed by a patriarch.

Orthodox churches have historically been organized along national lines, notes Peter Smith, with patriarchs having autonomy in their territories while bound by a common faith. The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), also known as the Moscow Patriarchate, claims exclusive jurisdiction over all Eastern Orthodox Christians who reside in the former member republics of the Soviet Union, excluding Georgia. About half the world’s Orthodox believers—around 150 million people—are part of the Russian branch, and about one in three (36 percent) of ROC parishes are located in Ukraine.

The current patriarch of the ROC is Kirill I (original name Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev), who was elected to the office in 2009. Kirill was the first head of the ROC to be elected after the fall of the Soviet Union. He’s closely connected to Russian president Vladimir Putin and has been accused of serving as a spy for the KGB during the Soviet Union era.

While the two Russian leaders may disagree on some areas, Kirill and Putin are united in their desire to protect the “spiritual security” of the “Russian World”—which they believe includes Ukraine. When the World Council of Churches wrote to Kirill asking him to “intervene and mediate with the authorities to stop this war,” the patriarch responded that “forces overtly considering Russia to be their enemy came close to its borders” and that the West aimed to weaken Russia through a “large-scale geopolitical strategy.”

Since he took power, Putin has made numerous attempts to portray himself as the protector of Christendom. Kirill appears to be willing to support Putin’s grand ambitions, since they align with his own agenda. While the patriarch maintains that Ukraine is still under his spiritual jurisdiction, Putin sees Ukraine as part of the Russian empire that was lost after the fall of the Soviet Union. “What Putin sees as a political restoration,” says Philip Pullella, “Kirill sees as a crusade.”

What is the Orthodox Church of Ukraine?

In 2019, a group of Ukrainian Orthodox churches broke away from the Moscow Patriarchate, triggering the greatest schism within Orthodoxy for centuries.

Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, considered by most to be the Orthodox Church’s highest authority, gave the Ukrainian church a tomos, or holy scroll, granting it independence from the ROC for the first time since 1686. (Although the patriarchates are self-governing, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is recognized by them as primus inter pares (“first among equals”) and is regarded as the spiritual leader of many of the eastern Christian parishes.) In response, the ROC severed ties with Constantinople.

What’s the significance for Christians in the West?

There are two interrelated issues of importance for Christians in Western nations. The first is the distressing issue of an increasing number of American Christians (including Tucker Carlson) making excuses for Putin and his unjust war on Ukraine. The second is the question of how Christians should advocate for religious liberty protections when religion is being co-opted to justify invading a sovereign nation and killing Christians.

During the Cold War era, Americans on the political and religious right opposed the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union. But over the past decade, a growing number of those who opposed communist totalitarianism have come to embrace (or at least make excuses for) the procommunist totalitarian Vladimir Putin.

Part of the reason for the unlikely alliance is that the Russian president has publicly spoken out against homosexuality and divorce and expressed support for the “traditional family.” But Christians in the West are often unaware Russia is not a haven of social conservatism. The country has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, and its authoritarian leader is “pro-choice.” In 2017, Putin said, “In the modern world, the decision is up to the woman herself,” and added that making abortion illegal would only push the practice underground, causing immense damage to women’s health.

Expressing a sentiment shared by many experts on Russia, Alexis Mrachek says that “Putin’s use of traditional Christianity is calculated for political effect. American and European observers would do well to see through the charade.”

Similarly, Moscow Patriarch Kirill isn’t a champion of Christian values such as religious liberty. He has little tolerance for Russian Christians who don’t want to be under his spiritual leadership. Kirill has said “there can be no place in Russia for a free market in religious life” and called foreign missionary activity “a sinister threat to the nation’s security.” But it’s his failure to oppose an unjust war that makes him a threat to Christians in the West and to those in Ukraine. Whether out of fear or deference, he’s allowing Putin to use the authority of the Russian church to discredit the Christian faith.

Still, just because Putin and Kirill oppose religious liberty doesn’t mean Ukraine should abandon its support for this most essential of freedoms. That nation’s constitution protects religious freedom and provides for “the separation of church and religious organizations from the state.” By law, the government may restrict this right only in the “interests of protecting public order [or] the health and morality of the population or protecting the rights and freedoms of other persons.”

Here’s where the issue becomes complicated.

By breaking away from the Russian Orthodox Church, the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine was seen as being a threat to the “spiritual security” of Russia. Putin even used it as a part of his pretext for invading Ukraine. In his February 21 speech, Putin said,

[The Ukrainian government] continues to prepare the destruction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. This is not an emotional judgement; proof of this can be found in concrete decisions and documents. The Ukrainian authorities have cynically turned the tragedy of the schism into an instrument of state policy. The current authorities do not react to the Ukrainian people’s appeals to abolish the laws that are infringing on believers’ rights. Moreover, new draft laws directed against the clergy and millions of parishioners of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate have been registered in the Verkhovna Rada.

“Spiritual security” is a subset of Russian national security that includes protecting traditional Russian values using the power and authority of both Putin’s regime and the Russian Orthodox Church..

In 2000, the Putin administration issued a National Security Concept, a blueprint for a “system of views on how to ensure in the Russian Federation security of the individual, society and state against external and internal threats in any aspect of life and activity.” Included was an explanation of a concept that has become known as “spiritual security”:

Assurance of the Russian Federation’s national security also includes protecting the cultural and spiritual-moral legacy and the historical traditions and standards of public life and preserving the cultural heritage of all Russia’s peoples. There must be a state policy to maintain the population’s spiritual and moral welfare, prohibit the use of airtime to promote violence or base instincts, and counter the adverse impact of foreign religious organizations and missionaries.

Numerous observers of Putin’s government have expressed concerns that this focus allows the state to increase its power over Russian citizens. “Ostensibly, the government’s focus on spiritual security is designed to preserve and strengthen ancient traditional Russian values,” says Julie Elkner. “When viewed in historical context, however, the discourse of spiritual security reveals greater affinities with Soviet-style attitudes towards ideological subversion.”

In normal circumstances, the benefit of the doubt should be given to the religious leaders of the Russian-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Many of them are, no doubt, simply trying to remain faithful to their religious tradition. The problem is that Putin and Kirill have weaponized religion and made it a tool for their geopolitical interests, including the oppression of the Ukrainian people.

During this time of war, the Ukrainian government will probably err on the side of caution in implementing internal security measures. This is likely to lead to genuine persecution of innocent religious believers. The response to such action is to restore religious liberty by allowing freedom-supporting Western observers to gauge the internal threat and put pressure on the Ukrainian government.

The wrong approach is to be like Pence and rely on internal self-reporting or, like Carlson, to use religious liberty as a cudgel to beat your political enemies. The religious liberty of Ukrainians is too important to be treated so trivially by Americans.