Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 21 – Many Evangelical
Protestants in Ukraine and who emigrated to the United States at the end of the
Soviet period are critical of the aspirations of most Ukrainians to join Europe
and opposed to Ukrainian efforts to oppose Russian expansionism, according to
Elena Panich, a Ukrainian specialist on religion.
On Risu.org.ua, Panich says that
this reflects a great deal more than just “the impact of Russian propaganda,”
although that is clearly involved. Instead, she says, it is part of an effort
by Evangelical leaders in Ukraine to remain “’above’ the conflict” and to
insist that “’this is not our war’” (risu.org.ua/ru/index/expert_thought/authors_columns/opanych_column/57631/).
And that in turn, she suggests,
reflects some even deeper experiences and trends. “The émigré community is a kind of ‘extension’
of [Ukraine’s] evangelical brotherhood abroad.”
It includes some Ukrainian patriots,” but on the whole this community is
better called post-Soviet” because it takes its values from its origins.
“For the majority of believers who
emigrated from eastern Slavic lands at the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s,”
Panich says, “the USSR remains that fatherland to which today are retained warm
feelings,” even though the Soviet state was hostile to Christianity and
Evangelicals in particular.
The Evangelical emigration remembers
that period as one of great struggle and thus tends to be “nostalgic” about
both those times and “the great power in the borders of which they first felt
their attachment to global politics.” And “the sacralization of the Soviet
Union took place in their consciousness in an unnoticed fashion even as they
were struggle with it.”
“Having been a religious
minority,” Panich says, “they felt themselves big in the framework of a great
empire. [That] empire guaranteed them mobility, a language of ‘inter-ethnic
communication, and even in its own way great power pride” because both in
Soviet and post-Soviet times, they viewed that country as the target of their
Evangelical effort.
“Of course,” the religious specialist continues, “the ‘old’
motherland no longer exists; it is preserved only in memory. But today it is
embodied by Russia which presents itself as the natural extension of the Soviet
state,” the supporter of the Russian language as a lingua franca, and thus an
object of pride for some.
For many in the émigré churches and some in the
Evangelical community in Ukraine, “the imperial character of Russia is
understood as something natural, customary and even approved by God because God
in the final analysis creates states.” As a result, one can say that “the
Evangelical movement formed on the territory of the USSR became an imperial
church.”
At
present, Panich continues, some “post-Soviet Evangelicals in the US and also in
Russia and even in Ukraine have without noticing it found themselves in the position
of hostages of ‘the Russian world’ in the sense in which this ‘world’ can be
considered a project of Russian cultural imperialism.”
For
such people, “the national struggle of the Ukrainians and their desire to
escape from the imperial influence of Russia is conceived as a revolt against a
customary and on the whole legitimate order.” And that attitude is reinforced
as various investigators have found by the negative attitude many of these
Evangelicals have toward Western culture.
(On
this point, Panich cites the research of Esther Grace Long, the daughter of an
American missionary, as presented in her doctoral dissertation at the
University of Kentucky in 2005, “Identity in Evangelical Ukraine: Negotiating
Regionalism, Nationalism and Transnationalism.”)
“It
is no secret that Evangelical Protestants in Ukraine, not all but a significant
portion were among the biggest opponents of European integration.” Panic
reports that she even heard Evangelicals pray that the EU association agreement
would not be signed, and when Russia invaded Ukraine, many remained prisoners
of their old “stereotypes.”
Few
of them expected the invasion and they proved unable to analyze what had
happened. And now, it appears that any
calls for an agreement which come from this community “in fact are calls for [a
subconscious and unacknowledged] acceptance of Russia’s right to seize the
territory of former republics and the right of the strong to use force.”
Such
attitudes, Panich concludes, show that it is possible to be “an oppressed
minority but not see oneself as separate from the geopolitical and cultural
space of the empire.” And when that is the case, “any efforts to destroy this
space will be seen … as a violation of a sacramental unity which underlies the
unity of the church itself.”
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