On
Christianity and State Power: The Example of the Russian Orthodox Church Today
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has
been, in effect if not always in title, the ruler of Russia since the beginning
of the year 2000, when former Russian president Boris Yel’tsin resigned and
Prime Minister Putin became President Putin. Since then he has been elected
president several times and has served as Prime Minister when the Russian
constitution did not permit him to run for another consecutive term as
president. When he first became president, Russia was a more or less democratic
country. At least, it was more democratic than it had ever been before and than
it has ever been since.
Back in the late 1990s, when
Yel’tsin first made Putin prime minister, Putin was quite unknown to the
Russian people or to the world. He was born in what was then Leningrad in 1952.
He became a KGB agent. He served as a minor agent in East Germany at the time
when the Berlin wall came down. Thereafter he served as an assistant to
Leningrad mayor Sobchak, who had a reputation as a liberal at the time. From
there he went to Moscow where, for reasons that are far from clear, Yel’tsin
made him head of the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB in which Putin had
served in a minor capacity. In 1999, Yel’tsin made him prime minister of the
Russian Federation. To nearly everyone’s surprise, in December, 1999, Yel’tsin
announced that he would resign as Russian president at the end of that year.
When he did resign, Putin succeeded him as president as the Russian
constitution provided. Putin then won his first election as president later
that year. It is generally believed, though it hasn’t really been proven, that Yel’tsin
chose Putin as his successor precisely because Putin was relatively unknown and
because Putin promised to give Yel’tsin and his family immunity from
prosecution for corruption, which Putin did shortly after becoming president.
Putin has turned what had been a
relatively democratic and free Russia into a fascist authoritarian or even
totalitarian state. He gets himself reelected through rigged elections. He
imprisons or kills anyone who dares to run against him in his staged elections.
He has even murdered opponents outside Russia. He has made opposition to him or
his policies illegal, and he has had thousands of people arrested and
imprisoned for voicing opposition to him. Until February 16, 2024, he had a
prominent opponent named Alexei Navalnyi.
Putin once tried to kill him by having him poisoned, but Navalnyi survived when
he got to Germany for medical treatment. Navalnyi returned to Russia, where
Putin had him arrested and convicted on trumped up charges. On February 16,
2024, we learned that Navalnyi had died
in prison. Putin has managed to silence his most prominent opponent.
In 2022, Putin ordered the Russian
military to invade Ukraine. In doing so, Putin has adopted a centuries-old
Russian position regarding Ukraine. The Russian Empire occupied most of today’s
Ukraine in the late 18th century under Empress Catherine the Great. Imperial
Russia always maintained that Ukrainians were really just Russians. Imperial
policy was that Ukrainian is not a language separate from Russian but is only a
dialect of Russian. In the nineteenth century, the imperial government
prohibited the publication of books in Ukrainian and the use of Ukrainian in
public administration and education. Imperial Russia considered Ukraine to be
only a part of Russia that the Russian government had every right to rule as it
saw fit.
The history of what today is the
nation of Ukraine is complex, particularly, perhaps, as it relates to Russia. It
is, however, undeniable that Ukraine has had stronger connections with western
Europe than Russia has had. For a very long time, most of what today is Ukraine
was part of the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, a mostly Roman-Catholic
European nation. There was no independent Ukrainian nation until a short-lived
Ukrainian republic after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Ukraine became one of
the original Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922. There was no lasting,
meaningful Ukrainian independent nation until 1991, when the Soviet Union
ceased to exist. In 1991 Ukraine became an internationally recognized sovereign
state that covered the same territory as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
Republic. That Soviet entity had not originally included the Crimean Peninsula,
but in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev, then head of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, transferred that peninsula from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet
republic.
In 2014, Putin’s Russia occupied Crimea militarily and claimed to transfer it
into the Russian Federated Republic, the current form of the Russian
government. The international community of nations has refused to recognize
that theft of part of the sovereign Ukrainian nation, but it was just the
beginning of Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. In early 2022, Putin sent most
of the Russian military into Ukraine in an attempt to destroy Ukrainian
sovereignty and reincorporate Ukraine into Russia. In the nearly two years
since that illegal, immoral invasion began, the Ukrainians have put up a much
better fight against the Russians than most observers, the author of this piece
included, thought they would be able to do. The NATO nations, including the US,
have given Ukraine massive amounts of military aid, which has been crucial in
making Ukraine’s resistance to Putin’s Russia possible, though the bravery of
the Ukrainian people has played the major role in the surprising success they
have had against their fascist invaders.
The religious, cultural, and
political history of Ukraine and Russia is fraught. The religious, cultural,
and political history of Russia begins in what today is Ukraine. The eastern
Slavic people, who today include both Russians and Ukrainians (and
Belorussians) became Orthodox Christians after the year 988 CE, when Grand
Prince Volodymyr I of Kyiv, Vladimir I of Kiev in Russian and English, converted
to Greek Orthodox Christianity. That’s when and where the study of Russian
history usually begins. Moscow didn’t become the center of Russian cultural and
political power for centuries thereafter. Moscow eventually became the capital
city and center of power of an immense empire that, after the late eighteenth
century, included all of today’s Ukraine and some Ukrainian territory that
today lies outside the state of Ukraine.
It is hard to underestimate the
significance of the fact that the Christianity the eastern Slavs, including the
Russians and the Ukrainians, adopted was Orthodox not Roman Catholic. In
western Europe, the church and the area’s political entities, including both
nascent nation states and the Holy Roman Empire, were often at odds over who
held the ultimate political authority. The pope in Rome always contended that
ultimate power belonged to him as Christ’s vicar on earth. The various kings
and emperors of western Europe often contested that claim. The pope may have
crowned Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor in 800 CE, but neither Charlemagne
nor most any other western European ruler ever recognized the pope’s ultimate
authority over them.
It was not so in eastern Europe.
Eastern, or Greek, Orthodox Christianity arose as the state religion of the
Roman Empire. Roman Emperors, beginning with Constantine in the early fourth
century CE, raised it to that level of recognition and power. The Christian
leaders of the time were overwhelmed by the splendor and power of empire, of
which they were now a part. Their
intoxication with power overcame their commitment to Jesus’ values of justice
and nonviolence. The Christian church became the handmaiden of imperial might. It
became a principal ally and support of imperial power not an opponent of it. The
emperor, not a pope, was the head of the church. The imperial church never
became more than an agency of state power. The fact that the Roman Empire ended
in the west in the sixth century CE but continued on in the east until 1453 CE
is part of the explanation of why western and eastern Christianity came so to
differ with regard to their relationship to secular power.
That’s how it was, first in what
became Ukraine, then in what became Russia, after the conversion of the eastern
Slavs to Orthodox Christianity in 988 CE. The Russian Orthodox Church was never
a center of power apart from the Russian autocracy the way the pope was a power
apart from the secular states of western Europe. Henry VIII of England could,
and did, take England out of the Roman Catholic Church. Peter I of Russia, aka
Peter the Great, could, and did, abolish the Moscow Patriarchate and, in
effect, reduce the Russian Orthodox Church to a ministry of the imperial
government.
Western Europe and Russia give us
two radically different examples of how Christianity relates to secular power. Christianity
can stand against it as a counterbalance to secular power, or it can capitulate
to it and function as one of its principal supports. It has functioned in both
ways throughout its history. Today, in the United States, there are elements of
Christianity that work to have it function in both ways among us. A great many
American evangelical Christians advocate Christian nationalism. They say,
wrongly, that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. They want to
turn their country into the Christian nation they think it originally was. They
want, in effect, to turn this country into a Christian theocracy. They want to
merge Christianity with American secular power.
Other American Christians, your
humble author included, consider Christian nationalism to be radically
un-Christian. We seek to follow Jesus, and we see Jesus as profoundly
anti-imperial. He lived under Roman occupation and oppression. The Romans saw
him as such a threat to their power that they crucified him as a political
criminal. He proclaimed what he called the kingdom of God. He called us to the
creation not of powerful, secular, worldly states but to a transformed world
the values of which would be essentially the values of the world turned upside
down. The kingdom of God is the world governed by God’s values of nonviolence,
peace, and distributive justice for all people. Jesus called us all to follow
the ways of God that we see in him not the corrupt, violent, exploitative ways
of both his world and ours. Christians who truly seek to follow Jesus
understand that our faith’s proper relationship to state power is one of
opposition at least to the extent that any state power in question engages in
policies that are neither peaceful nor just, which nearly every secular power
does at least much of the time.
Those of us who believe that our
Christian duty is to work for the kingdom of God not for any worldly secular
power always run into at least one problem from the Bible. That problem is
Romans 13:1-7. Those verses read in relevant part:
Let every person be subject to the governing
authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities
that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority
resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment For
rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no
fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive approval; for
it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be
afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of
God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only
because of wrath but also because of conscience.
Christians who see no distinction
between the ways of the world and the ways of God often cite these verses as a
reason for supporting, indeed for being subservient to, whatever secular power
they live under.
But we have to ask: Was Jesus then
a wrongdoer? For the Roman Empire certainly executed wrath upon him. It put him
to a horrifically painful death on a cross. In the Gospel of Mark we see that,
before his arrest, Jesus was afraid of the Romans. Does that mean he did what
was wrong? These pseudo-Pauline verses certainly say that he did. He didn’t
resist Roma with violence, but he certainly taught values that directly
contradicted most of the values under which the Roman Empire operated. No true
Christian can believe that what Jesus did was in any way wrong from God’s point
of view. He was, after all, God Incarnate. He wasn’t crucified because he did
what was wrong. He was crucified because the Roman authorities did what was
wrong. Romans 13:1-7 are in the Bible, but that doesn’t make them right. They
are just flat wrong, and no true Christian can take them as a legitimate
statement of divine truth.
Today, the Russian Orthodox Church
continues the ancient Orthodox tradition of subservience to the state with
which it is associated. It supports Vladimir Putin’s illegal and immoral
military invasion of Ukraine. How it can do so is essentially beyond the
comprehension of any western Christian. Yet the Russian church today stands in
complete conformity with its Orthodox tradition. There is much to admire about
Orthodox Christianity. Its liturgy is spiritually powerful even for those of us
who do not understand the language in which it is being celebrated. I have
experienced that power myself. In 1976, I experienced the Orthodox Easter
service at the monastery at Sergeev Posad, then called Zagorsk, the seat of the
Patriarch of Moscow.
That service was conducted in Old Church Slavonic, the traditional language of
the Russian Orthodox Church. I know a fair amount of Russian. I don’t know Old
Church Slavonic. It didn’t matter. I found the ritual of the Orthodox Easter
service, set in a space filled with sacred icons, to be immensely powerful even
though I didn’t understand the words being said.
Orthodox Christianity’s
subservience to the secular authorities is not one of its admirable
characteristics. It is one of the ways in which that ancient variety of
Christianity fails to meet Christ’s call to all Christians to represent the
kingdom of God not the kingdoms of the world. The current Patriarch of Moscow
kowtows to Vladimir Putin at every turn. He supports Putin’s destruction of
Russian democracy. He supports Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He fails to condemn
the myriad war crimes Russian soldiers commit there. He opposes the heroic
struggle of the Ukrainian people for independence and freedom. In all of these
ways he may be truly Orthodox. He is not truly Christian.
So what is the proper relationship
of Christianity to state power? It is not necessarily one of opposition. After
all, most state powers do some good from time to time. When they do, Christians
may and should support them. But all state powers, including our own United
States of America, also do what is wrong. They do it a lot. The best example is
perhaps the way nearly every secular power has and is willing to use a military
to kill, maim, and destroy in support of its aims. Such death and destruction
are never moral. They are never Christian. Romans 13:1-7 may call for mindless
obedience to every state power. Jesus Christ doesn’t. God doesn’t. We
Christians must always evaluate the actions of our governments under the
standards of the kingdom of God that we learn from Jesus. Tragically, the
Russian Orthodox Church doesn’t do that. We must not follow its example.
