Ukraine’s Baptist population is under threat of oppression as Putin seeks ‘spiritual security’ for Russia.
Ukraine’s Baptist population is under threat of oppression as Putin seeks ‘spiritual security’ for Russia.
T hough there are many different reasons that Vladimir Putin might use to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one has been underdiscussed: religion. The Russian government’s concept of “spiritual security” sheds some light on Putin’s rationale for his unprovoked aggression against a peaceful neighbor.
Ukraine has the second-largest Baptist population of any European country, only slightly behind the United Kingdom, and the Ukrainian Baptist Union is the largest Protestant group in Ukraine, numbering over 100,000 believers across 2,000 churches. Ukraine’s Baptists trace their history to German Anabaptists, and they have been well-established in the country since the 1800s. Ukraine’s Baptist seminary has 1,300 students, and its interdenominational Evangelical seminary has another 500. In recent years, Ukraine has become more prominent in sending Baptist missionaries to other countries as well.
Ukraine has long been a hub for Evangelical Christianity in Eastern Europe, but Ukraine’s Evangelicals, especially its Baptists, are now under threat of increased persecution from Russian invaders.
The idea of spiritual security has played a role in Russia’s national-security strategy throughout Putin’s reign. A 2010 paper by Daniel Payne in the Journal of Church and State traces the idea back to the debates around the 1997 Law on Freedom of Conscience and on Religious Associations. Post-Soviet Russia was established as a secular state, and it officially still is, but the 1997 law began to differentiate between “traditional” and “nontraditional” religions, with “traditional” religion meaning the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Payne writes, “In the eyes of the religious leadership of the ROC, Russia was losing its cultural identity as an Orthodox nation.”
Andrew Bunnell is a Baptist who has done mission work in Russia for years. “I first went over there six months after the fall of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1992,” he told National Review. As an adult, he lived in St. Petersburg for a number of years and then Tallinn, Estonia, making frequent trips to Ukraine. Now living near Atlanta, Bunnell is finishing his Ph.D. with the University of Washington at Seattle, with a focus on American missionary work’s influence on politics.
The years immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union were “extremely free” for missionaries, Bunnell says, with a wave of American Evangelical Christians flocking to the post-Communist environment. “Kind of similar to McDonald’s and Coca-Cola and Hollywood, there was this influx of American religion, and for many Russians, or at least Russian elites, it got caught up into this cultural wave of ‘the West is here.’”
That made the ROC anxious, and Putin saw an opportunity. The ROC provided a source of Russian national and cultural identity that could fill the void left by the Communist Party, and Putin needed that shared identity to consolidate his power.
In a 2005 paper, Julie Elkner writes of the ways in which state power was fused with the ROC. In 2002, an Orthodox Church was consecrated at Lubyanka, the former KGB headquarters complex in Moscow that now serves as headquarters of the FSB, Russia’s current national police force. “Reportedly the fruit of an initiative of Putin dating to his tenure as FSB director, the ceremony set the seal on the special relationship between the FSB and the Russian Orthodox Church,” Elkner writes.
While it’s often pitched as a return to ancient Russian values, Elkner writes, “The traditional values invoked in connection with Russia’s spiritual security often turn out upon closer inspection to have their roots not in pre-revolutionary tsarist Russian history, but in the Soviet past, and in the Soviet regime’s attitude towards ideological subversion in particular.” That the push for spiritual security has been led by former KGB man Vladimir Putin should come as no surprise.
In Putin’s speech on February 21, he said, “Ukraine is not just a neighboring country to us, it is an inherent part of our own history, cultural, spiritual space.” Note that he listed “spiritual” right alongside “historical” and “cultural.” In the same speech, he said Ukraine was a creation of “Bolshevik communist Russia.” Some in the West interpreted the speech as the ruminations of a madman, but Putin clearly applied the concept of spiritual security to hearken back to the Soviet past, just as Elkner wrote.
Intertwined with spiritual security is the idea of the Russkii mir or “Russian World.” A 2017 paper from the Finnish Institute of International Affairs says that “the state and the Church use the concept of the Russian World and its various interpretations as a way of propagating anti-Western and conservative religious values.” Ukraine has been seeking to separate itself from the Russian World. A key move came in 2018, when the Ukrainian Orthodox Church split from the ROC. Previously, Ukrainian Orthodoxy was run from Moscow. The split was an embarrassment for the ROC, which stood to lose about a third of its parishes, and for Putin, who was confronted with yet another example of Ukraine’s unwillingness to submit to Russian domination.
The connection between geopolitics, spiritual security, and Russian national identity has shown up in official Russian foreign-policy documents for years. Payne quotes from Russia’s 2000 national-security strategy, an official state document that says that “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.”
NATO analysis of Russia’s 2021 national-security strategy noted that, compared to the 2015 version of the document, spiritual-moral values “occupy a much larger place, nearly four pages.” The analysis goes on to say that “the terminology is now more strident and in this section the USA and its allies are explicitly identified as the source of attacks on Russian values, together with transnational corporations, NGOs, religious, terrorist and extremist organisations.”
Alongside the rebuilding of the ROC came the rise of Alexander Dvorkin’s movement against “totalitarian cults.” That movement has culminated most visibly in the 2017 court decision to ban Jehovah’s Witnesses from Russia. They have been tortured and imprisoned. Another movement, Alexander Dugin’s “Eurasianism,” is inherently expansionary. As Robert Zubrin wrote in 2014, Eurasianism sees Ukraine as part of “New Russia.”
“Many people don’t appreciate the extent to which the invasion of Ukraine is a spiritual quest for [Putin],” writes Giles Fraser at UnHerd. “Putin regards his spiritual destiny as the rebuilding of Christendom, based in Moscow.”
“Based in Moscow” is the key — this rebuilding is not ecumenical. Evangelical Christians in Russia experience what amounts to conditional toleration. “As long as they stay in their lane, stay quiet, do their thing in the corner, they are more or less tolerated,” Bunnell tells NR. “But once they get out publicly into more dynamic evangelism, they are pretty quickly pushed back to their corner.”
The Russian government uses its anti-evangelism law, signed by Putin in 2016, to do the pushing. Passed under the guise of “anti-terrorism,” the law prevents believers from sharing their faith outside of church. It has been used most often against Russian Evangelicals. Passing out New Testaments or meeting in small groups at home to talk about the Bible is punishable with fines.
With that regime invading Ukraine, Baptists are concerned. Elijah Brown, the general secretary and CEO of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA), was in Ukraine last week. He told National Review that, without the war and persecution Baptists in Ukraine face, “we anticipate that the Ukrainian Baptist convention would become the largest Baptist convention in all of Europe.”
Baptists in the separatist-occupied Crimea and Donbas regions have been facing persecution for years. The BWA adopted resolutions condemning that persecution in 2014 and again in 2018. Brown tells NR, “It’s one of the places in the world where Baptists can say they, in particular, receive a special level of persecution.”
The reason, Brown explains, lies in the EuroMaidan protests of 2014. Ukrainians protested the pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, leading to his fleeing the country. An interim president, Oleksandr Turchynov, was installed to oversee a free election for a new president of Ukraine. Turchynov did not run in the election, and Petro Poroshenko, an anti-Russian candidate, won. Turchynov, who had a long public career before his 104-day stint as acting president and who has continued in public life to the present day, is a prominent Ukrainian Baptist. Brown says, “Baptists who are inside the occupied territories were told by forces that were present, ‘You belong to that religion of that leader,’ and so they received a special targeting.”
In Luhansk, the Ukrainian Baptist Union was designated as a terrorist group, the Baptist Hymnal was banned, and all 44 Baptist churches in the region have been closed. “We’ve heard repeatedly from pastors in that area who have talked about being taken into the woods and beaten and had the money they had on them stolen. We’ve heard repeatedly about military forces stationed outside of churches,” Brown says. “One of the pastors from that region, an older gentleman, told us that the persecution he was facing today was worse than anything he had lived through during the times of the U.S.S.R.”
Baptists in Donetsk have faced less physical persecution under the occupation government. Restrictions on their freedom have been more like those faced by Evangelicals in Russia: Facially neutral regulations are used to harass Baptists in particular.
Brown told NR, “We have an example of a Baptist church which was brand new, had just been built before the occupation, so it was totally up to all the local and applicable fire codes, but after the occupation was immediately told that they no longer met the fire-code regulations. So, another church, which was nearby and had qualified under the new fire-code regulations, offered to allow the Baptists to meet in that church. . . . When the Baptists went to meet at that building, they were met by the police and barred from entrance to that building.”
We know from the rest of Ukraine that it doesn’t have to be this way. Baptists in the parts of Ukraine under Kyiv’s control enjoy religious liberty. They were preaching sermons about peace the Sunday before the invasion. They live alongside Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Pentecostals, Jews, and Muslims.
Putin can’t stand that. Religious liberty is antithetical to his regime’s view of “spiritual security.”
“This fight is very much, for many of our Ukrainian Baptist friends, a fight to preserve their right to worship,” Bunnell tells NR. “The stark differences between the freedoms that Baptists enjoy in Ukraine and the kind of soft and at times even hard suppression that they get in Russia — it couldn’t be more stark.”
Bunnell still communicates with Baptist pastors in Ukraine. One of them, named Olek, told him the following: “We have many church members fighting now. While this war is happening, we are shepherding our flock, and caring for our people. And we will continue to do this no matter what happens with the war.”