Russian propaganda demonizing Ukraine as religiously intolerant resonates strongly with many American conservatives. the Christiansand a number of factors turn up the volume on a familiar tune.
Ukraine’s efforts to eliminate collusion with the aggressor clergy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) have been presented by Russia and its foreign sympathizers as religious persecution specifically targeting Christians.
“TRUTH… Ukraine is not a true democracy (and) persecutes Christians” declared Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican presidential candidate, in a message dated December 5, 2023 on X (formerly Twitter).
A few weeks earlier, American media personality Tucker Carlson had published a viral video interview with lawyer Robert Amsterdam, representing the so-called Union of Orthodox Journalistsdenouncing what they claim is the widespread persecution of the UOC MP by the Ukrainian government, due to the arrest of several priests for actively supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Despite overwhelming evidence that Russia is actually persecuting Ukraine – kidnapping, torture and killing the clergy, ban “unauthorized” religious activities and destroy places of worship (including those of the UOC-MP) – a number of American Christians, especially conservatives, are singing (or at least humming) Russia’s false anthem.
And they cover a well-known melody.
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What those who know say
“The idea that Christians are persecuted is one of the most galvanizing issues for evangelicals around the world, and it has really moved in many ways to the center of, at least, the components of identity evangelical,” said American studies professor Melani McAlister. and international affairs at George Washington University in Washington, DC
McAlister, who published his book in 2018 The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicalstold the Kyiv Post that as American evangelical Christians learn more about their co-religionists around the world – especially where Christians are in the minority – “they start working more closely with these people, then become interested in a way to stories of persecution. theirs.”
As a result, “the notion of a global war against Christians” is “a very powerful, even dominant narrative among American evangelicals for, I would say, 20 years,” McAlister said.
More than 360 million Christians, or one in seven, experience high to extreme levels of persecution, according to World Watch Report 2023. International Open Days, a global advocacy group for persecuted Christians. The top 50 countries on the organization’s 2023 Global Watch List are mostly in Africa and Asia. The United States is not on the list.
But many conservative American Christians, Protestants and Catholics, nonetheless say the battle is now being fought on the home front, especially as religious beliefs and practices have declined in the country in recent years in particular. If current trends continue, Christians are now expected to make up less than half of the U.S. population within a few decades, according to the Pew Research Center.
This decline, in the context of an increasingly secular American society, risks intensifying what researcher Elizabeth Castelli, professor of religion at Barnard College, has called the contemporary “Christian persecution complex” in the United States – an anxiety skillfully exploited by (among others) Donald Trumpwho repeatedly presented himself as a political martyr and a messiah.
Persecution has “a long legacy” of association with Christian identity, with Christianity itself “being founded on an archetype of politico-religious persecution, the execution of Jesus by the Romans”, Castelli observed in an article from 2007.
Why American Christians Can Relate
The September 11 attacks, carried out by Islamic terrorists, significantly intensified the political activism of American Christians seeking to counter perceived threats to their religious freedom, she wrote.
Yet Castelli noted that long before the attacks, the Christian martyr narrative had become intertwined in the United States with identity politics — and with what historian Richard Hofstadter, writing in 1964, described as “the paranoid style in American politics”, marked by “passionate exaggeration, distrust and conspiratorial fantasy”.
The “war on Christians” movement sought to reframe “democratic debates over social policy as acts of religious intolerance and persecution in themselves,” Castelli wrote.
Vladimir Putin’s use of Christianity and so-called traditional family values to justify both the war in Ukraine and domestic repression plays a counterpoint to this theme – and evokes echoes of the “cultural authority” enjoyed by the American Christians in early post-Soviet Russia, said Bethany Moreton: professor of history at Dartmouth College, and author of the next book Leaning toward Moscow: American conservatives and the Russian romance.
Many evangelicals still remember the time when “only a few years ago this atheist empire” “invited” them to evangelize the Russians and declared that “public life should be Christian, business should be Christian, education had to be Christian.” Moreton told the kyiv Post. “It was a very exhilarating moment.”
She also noted the “longstanding” hope among American Protestant Christians, dating back to the 19th century, to win Russia over to their faith.
“There was a mission field here with all these people who were nominally Christian, in the sense that they were Russian Orthodox, but who were clearly expecting a real conversion experience and a relationship with the Bible,” Moreton said. “Russia would become an incredibly rich mission field. »
The missionary impulse for Russia was also “racialized to a certain extent, because Russia was the great white reservoir of souls who could at any time be converted en masse,” she said.
At the same time, Russian Orthodoxy presents a kind of mystical appeal to some American Christians, who view it as a “pure, patriarchal” faith that is “somehow unbroken since the Old Testament and the early years of Christianity ” said Moreton.
“This is a small phenomenon, but there is among Christian nationalists in the United States a constant sense of admiration and, to some extent, conversion to Russian Orthodoxy,” she said. , adding that this trend is “well known among Orthodox believers.” in the USA.”
In some Orthodox seminaries, she said, “there are these kinds of unofficial cells…of people who are studying for ordination and who adhere to a kind of Christian nationalist and very racialized vision” of national identity in the United States. United.
As U.S. aid to Ukraine is threatened due to partisan politics and a contentious presidential election looms, Russia will most likely continue to exploit the narrative of Christian persecution among willing American believers – even as victims of the worst forms of Christian persecution in the world. and Ukraine, continue to suffer.
Gina Christian is a United States-based religion journalist whose work focuses on the Catholic Church (particularly the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church), interfaith relations, religious freedom and human rights. Follow her on X at @GinaJesseReina.
The opinions expressed in this opinion article are those of the author and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
