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A.Russian President Vladimir Putin murdered another Christian this week. It was just another day in Putin’s supposed plan to protect the “Christian West” from godlessness. After all, they tell me, we cannot create a Christian nationalist empire without kill some people.
Before the world forgets the corpse of Alexei Navalny in the freezing environs of an Arctic penal colony, we should look at him – especially those of us who follow Jesus Christ – to see what moral courage.
Navalny was perhaps the world’s most recognized anti-Putin dissident, and he is now one of many Putin enemies to end up “suddenly dead.” He survived poisoning in 2020, he recovered in Europe and eventually returned to his homeland even though he knew what he was going to face. Speaking about his dissent and his willingness to bear the consequences, Navalny repeatedly referred to his profession of Christian faith. My Christianity today his colleague Emily Belz discovered a 2021 transcript of the trial Meduzain which Navalny explains, in astonishingly biblical terms, what it means to suffer for one’s beliefs.
“The fact is that I am a Christian, which usually makes me an example and is constantly ridiculed in the world. Anti-Corruption Foundation, because most of our people are atheists, and I myself was a militant atheist,” Navalny said (as rendered by Google Translate). “But now I am a believer, and that helps me a lot in my activities because everything becomes much, much easier.”
“There are fewer dilemmas in my life, because there is a book in which, in general, it is written more or less clearly what action to take in each situation,” he explained. “It’s not always easy to follow this book, of course, but I really try.”
Specifically, Navalny said, he was motivated by the words of Jesus: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied” (Matt. 5:6, NASB).
“I always thought that this particular command was more or less an activity instruction,” Navalny said. “And so, while I certainly don’t really like where I am, I have no regrets about coming back or what I’m doing. It’s good, because I did the right thing.
“On the contrary, I feel a real form of satisfaction,” he said. “Because at a difficult moment, I did as instructed and did not betray command.”
These words may seem a little too easy. After all, an unbeliever might respond, most members of the pro-democracy, anti-tyranny movement of which Navalny was a part did not, in fact, believe “the instructions” of Scripture. And Putin himself is supported by key leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, where some are as willing as any court prophet to baptize his murder in the language of Christian virtue and Christian civilization. (Though there is examples of loyal dissent Also.)
But this answer would not take into account Navalny’s point of view. He was not saying that Christians are courageous while unbelievers are not. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary – in Russia and elsewhere as well – to put such notions to flight.
Navalny acknowledged, however, that the allure of moral cowardice when showing courage means standing alone. A conscience can always reassure itself that remaining silent at this moment is the right thing. Navalny acknowledged the terror of being left outside his field of belonging – being labeled a traitor by his compatriots and a heretic by his fellow clergy.
To resist the pull of this crowd requires a different motive than a greater chance of political “success” than even. Navalny recognized that it was necessary, as the evangelical missionary Jim Eliot once said, to kiss “strangeness”.
“For a modern person, this whole commandment – ‘blessed’, ‘thirsty’, ‘hungry for righteousness’, ‘for they will be satisfied’ – of course seems very pompous,” Navalny said. “It seems a bit strange, to be honest.”
“Well, people who say such things are supposed, frankly, to look crazy,” he admitted. “Crazy, strange people, sitting there with disheveled hair in their cell and trying to cheer themselves up with something, even if they are alone, they are loners, because no one needs them. “
“And that’s the most important thing that our government and the entire system is trying to say to these people: You’re on your own,” he continued. “You are a loner. First it is important to intimidate, then to prove that you are alone.
In this, Navalny not only identified his own motivations for conscientious strangeness, but he also contradicted the very nature of the Putinist conception of Christianity. To be “Christian” in such a regime is to be Russian (or whatever the local equivalent of one’s blood and soil may be). To be a “Christian” is to be an “ordinary” person, unwilling to think outside the box, to expose his conscience to any thought that might bring him difficulty.
After Navalny’s murder, The free press published letters between Navalny and famous former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, who served time in the same Arctic penal colony during some of the most dangerous years of communist rule. Biblical passages are cited throughout, including Navalny joking about “where to spend Holy Week” other than in the prison complex the older man called his “alma mater.”
This was the root, I believe, of Navalny’s moral courage, of his willingness to remain alone, of his willingness to die. It’s not just that he knew Bible verses; the pro-Putin patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church probably knows better. It’s the path he seemed to know the Scriptures. He seemed to recognize not only Jesus’ simple “instructions” about hungering and thirsting for righteousness, about being blessed in persecution, but also the story behind and around those instructions. He knew those words sounded strange. He knew they looked crazy.
In the introduction In his collection of poems on joy, the poet Christian Wiman notes that the first hearers of the New Testament message, offended by the strangeness of what they heard, “might well have gone home to rows of corpses crucified specially designed to eradicate all living beings.” cause of any insurrectional hope or joy. The strangeness was the important point. No one can really hear what Jesus is saying when he calls the forgotten, the persecuted, the poor, and the reviled “blessed” unless they understand why his own family thought he was crazy (Mark 3:21).
This is probably why Navalny so clearly recognized the Putin regime’s methods of making dissidents feel strange, crazy and alone: Navalny had seen it before, in a Roman Empire that did the same thing with the crosses.
Those with moral courage, of all faiths or no faith, have all sorts of motivations for their beliefs. But whatever the motivation, we cannot maintain our moral courage if we do not want to be distanced from what we call “my home”, from what we call “my people”. This is the joyous irony: we are never alone when we are part of a larger story, when we belong to a larger body.
The cloud of witnesses includes Elijah and Jeremiah, Peter and Paul, Maximus and Bonhoeffer, and countless others who died seemingly abandoned, who seemed foolish in their day (Hebrews 12:1). It is people like these – who do not come from the “German Christian” Reich bishops or the Putin-applauding Orthodox patriarchy – from whom the next generation of our faith is born.
The very meaning of “hunger” and “thirst” is that one is led to realize that something is missing – that the satisfactions offered are not enough. The very appetite for such things is a sign that what one hungers for, what one thirsts for, is really there.
We can sometimes see this, even from a gulag. It’s strange. It’s crazy. But it’s what at least one person I know would call “blessed.”
Russell Moore is the editor-in-chief of Christianity today and directs its public theology project.
