A close Kremlin ally, the Patriarch of Moscow has blessed the Ukraine invasion. Fellow religious leaders are going after him.
Like a
lot of insiders associated with Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev
has faced calls for international ostracism in the weeks since the invasion of
Ukraine. It’s no surprise why: He’s used his powerful Moscow perch to endorse
the Kremlin’s attack on its neighbor, cheering on the troops and casting their
mission as part of a civilizational battle against western decadence.
But
unlike the owner of a Russian airline or retail behemoth or energy concern,
he’s not the sort of figure consumers can simply boycott or suppliers can just
cut off. Gundyayev — formal name: Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Russia —
is the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. Which makes the process of
kicking him out of polite society a bit trickier, and explains why that process
at least partially runs through a small, iconoclastic Washington think tank.
The bill
of complaints against Patriarch Kirill is long and ugly. Since taking over
Russian orthodoxy’s highest job in 2009, he’s rearranged the church on more
authoritarian lines, cemented a close alliance with Putin, and lent
ecclesiastical legitimacy to the quasi-mystical, hyper-nationalist Russkiy Mir
theory that Putin has used to dismiss the existence of Ukraine as a separate
country.
Since
the war began, it’s been uglier still. He delivered a sermon calling on
Russians to rally around the authorities and “repel enemies both external and
internal.” In another, he likened the battle to the struggle between the church
and the antichrist. He’s said the war for “Holy Russia” has “metaphysical
significance,” the conquest of Ukraine a matter of eternal salvation. For good
measure, he’s also said that part of what the Russian forces are combating is
the horrific possibility of gay pride parades. Plenty of oligarchs have been
canceled for less.
The
problem with targeting religious leaders is that they don’t simply have yachts
the police can seize or air-overflight rights the government can revoke. In the
United States, where the Orthodox Church in America is formally separate from
Moscow (and critical of the war), there aren’t even many places where activists
could protest a Kirill-aligned cleric’s sermon. Within Russia itself, a group
of Orthodox priests signed a letter opposing the invasion. Outside Russia, it’s
largely been other religious leaders who have taken the Patriarch to task.
And in
the U.S., an evangelical minister named Rob Schenck, who leads a small
D.C.-based institute named after the martyred anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, has championed another venue to exhibit displeasure: He has helped
organize a campaign to get the Russian Orthodox Church kicked out of the World
Council of Churches, the Geneva-based international organization founded after
World War II to promote ecumenical understanding.
“Instead
of the Patriarch challenging Putin and calling him to account, he is
essentially enabling him and offering him a moral imprimatur for the invasion
of Ukraine,” says Schenck, an administrative bishop of the Methodist
Evangelical Church and a one-time conservative activist who later wrote a
memoir of his journey into and out of the religious right. “He has styled it as
a religious war of sorts, the danger of western liberalism and its encroachment
on Orthodox culture. He’s made it a culture war as much as a religious
crusade.”
Working
with allies overseas, Schenck has been circulating letters, lobbying colleagues
and otherwise trying to wrangle the array of denominations that make up the
world council. Prelates including a former Archbishop of Canterbury have
embraced the idea, and last week the organization’s general secretary predicted
it would be on the agenda for the next gathering. “What Rob and so many people
from around the world are calling for, for the first time in Christian history
as far as I can tell, is an ecumenical response to war,” says Michael Hanegan,
an Oklahoma theologian and Bonhoeffer fellow who’s been working with Schenck.
But if
losing McDonald’s or getting kicked off of SWIFT wasn’t going to deter Russia,
would anyone really care about their national church being booted from a
kumbaya society of international religious yakkers — even one that fashions
itself as a kind of United Nations of churches?
Schenck
says there’s some precedent (South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church quit amidst
threats expulsion for defending Apartheid) but also sees it as a matter of
principle: “It violates the very message, ministry and model of Christ himself.
He rebuked his disciples when they took up the sword of violence.”
At any
rate, it would also be another small instance of decoupling between Russia and
the broader international world. In this case, the relationship being severed
is one that actually predates the end of the Cold War, going back to 1961. At
the time, the Soviet Union was officially atheist, but authorities had found
the church could occasionally be useful in maintaining support. Top clerics
tended to have the blessing, so to speak, of the Kremlin — and the security
services. The relationship ran both ways. But the church was still welcome in
the WCC, where it reliably articulated Soviet positions. In 1971,
then-Archimandrite Kirill became Moscow’s representative.
Religious
politics, in fact, have factored into the Ukraine situation in a number of
ways, most of which haven’t gotten a lot of attention in the U.S. In 2018,
Patriarch Kirill was enraged after Ukraine’s Orthodox Church, up to then
located under Moscow on the org chart, was made autocephalous, or able to
govern itself, just like the churches in a number of other independent
countries. The decision spurred a major rupture in relations between the
Russian church and the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch, traditionally the
leading figure in Eastern Orthodoxy. (The Orthodox Church in America has been
officially autocephalous since 1970; its official statement on the Ukraine
invasion calls it a “war of aggression waged by the Russian Federation.”)
Washington
has never been a huge hub of interreligious statecraft, but Schenck, 63, says
it’s the natural place for an outfit dedicated to promoting “morally
courageous” leaders. “Bonhoeffer’s mission was to persuade government actors as
much as anyone else to do what is right and good and ethical,” he says. “I’ve
been 30 years in Washington and I know the lay of the land. I know the actors
and players. So many denominations have their government relations offices
here.”
Schenck’s
earlier years in the city featured rather different sorts of headlines: A
onetime Operation Rescue adviser, he was once questioned by the Secret Service
after confronting former President Bill Clinton over abortion at a Christmas
Eve service at the National Cathedral. He also wrote a treatise connecting the
Second Amendment with the Ten Commandments. But he later experienced a second
evangelical conversion and now supports gun control and Roe v. Wade. (Gun
violence prevention is one of the Bonhoeffer Institute’s subject areas.)
For the
record, Schenck says his real goal is to see Patriarch Kirill grow and change,
too. “As Christians we believe in repentance,” he says. “We believe in making
amends for one’s misdeeds, and redemption. It doesn’t have to be a permanent
expulsion.”
***Michael
Schaffer is a senior editor at POLITICO. His Capital City column runs weekly in
POLITICO Magazine.