Why does God allow war in Ukraine

Russian Patriarch Kirill’s blessing of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine has divided the worldwide Orthodox Church and drawn criticisms from Christians of every tradition.

In a recent sermon, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church justified the Russian invasion by saying the conflict is part of a struggle against sin and pressure from liberal foreigners to hold “gay parades” as a “test of loyalty.”

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Bishops in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church have authorized the significantly symbolic act of having their priests not commemorate Patriarch Kirill in their prayers during public worship services.

A worldwide group of 275 Russian Orthodox priests and deacons have also called for “the cessation of the fratricidal war” and affirmed the right of the people of Ukraine to their political self-determination. Additionally, an ecumenical group of more than 100 U.S. Christian leaders also sent a letter to Kirill asking him to use his influence to help stop the invasion of Ukraine and to “prayerfully reconsider the support you have given to this war.”

What is the Russian Orthodox Church?

Within Christianity, the three broad traditions are Protestantism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Within Eastern Orthodoxy there are several self-governing ecclesiastical jurisdictions known as patriarchates that are headed by a patriarch.

Orthodox churches have historically been organized along national lines, notes Peter Smith, with patriarchs having autonomy in their territories while bound by a common faith. The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), also known as the Moscow Patriarchate, claims exclusive jurisdiction over all Eastern Orthodox Christians who reside in the former member republics of the Soviet Union, excluding Georgia. About half of the world’s Orthodox believers—around 150 million people—are part of the Russian branch, and about one in three (36 percent) ROC parishes are located in Ukraine.

The current patriarch of the ROC is Kirill I (original name Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev), who was elected to the office in 2009. Kirill was the first head of the ROC to be elected after the fall of the Soviet Union.

What is the Orthodox Church of Ukraine?

In 2019, a group of Ukrainian Orthodox churches broke away from the Moscow Patriarchate, triggering the greatest schism within Orthodoxy for centuries.

Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, considered by most to be the Orthodox church’s highest authority, gave the Ukrainian church a tomos, or holy scroll, granting it independence from the ROC for the first time since 1686. (Although the patriarchates are self-governing, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is recognized by them as primus inter pares (“first among equals”) and is regarded as the spiritual leader of many of the eastern Christian parishes.) In response, the ROC severed ties with Constantinople.

By breaking away from the Russian Orthodox Church, the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine was seen as being a threat to the ‘spiritual security’ of Russia.

This split within Orthodoxy has had geopolitical ramifications. Ukraine’s former president Petro Poroshenko said in 2018, “The independence of our church is part of our pro-European and pro-Ukrainian policies.” And as Max Seddon points out,

It was a blow to Vladimir Putin, for whom the Russian Orthodox church had come to symbolize Moscow’s sphere of influence in its near abroad. While Ukraine hailed receiving the tomos as “an event no less substantial than our goals to join the EU and NATO,” Putin convened his security council in the middle of the night to discuss a response.

By breaking away from the ROC, the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine was seen as being a threat to the “spiritual security” of Russia. Putin even used it as a part of his pretext for invading Ukraine. In his February 21 speech, Putin said,

[The Ukrainian government] continues to prepare the destruction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. This is not an emotional judgement; proof of this can be found in concrete decisions and documents. The Ukrainian authorities have cynically turned the tragedy of the schism into an instrument of state policy. The current authorities do not react to the Ukrainian people’s appeals to abolish the laws that are infringing on believers’ rights. Moreover, new draft laws directed against the clergy and millions of parishioners of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate have been registered in the Verkhovna Rada.

What is ‘spiritual security’?

“Spiritual security” is a subset of Russian national security that includes protecting traditional Russian values using the power and authority of both Putin’s regime and the ROC.

In 2000, the Putin administration issued a National Security Concept, a blueprint for a “system of views on how to ensure in the Russian Federation security of the individual, society and state against external and internal threats in any aspect of life and activity.” Included was an explanation of a concept that has become known as “spiritual security”:

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. There must be a state policy to maintain the population’s spiritual and moral welfare, prohibit the use of airtime to promote violence or base instincts, and counter the adverse impact of foreign religious organizations and missionaries.

Numerous observers of Putin’s government have expressed concerns that this focus allows the state to increase its power over Russian citizens. “Ostensibly, the government’s focus on spiritual security is designed to preserve and strengthen ancient traditional Russian values,” says Julie Elkner. “When viewed in historical context, however, the discourse of spiritual security reveals greater affinities with Soviet-style attitudes towards ideological subversion.”

Why does Kirill support Putin’s war on Ukraine?

Kirill is a close ally of Putin. While the two Russian leaders may disagree on some areas, they’re united in their desire to protect the “spiritual security” of the “Russian World”—which they believe includes Ukraine. When the World Council of Churches recently wrote to Kirill asking him to “intervene and mediate with the authorities to stop this war,” the patriarch responded that “forces overtly considering Russia to be their enemy came close to its borders” and that the West was involved in a “large-scale geopolitical strategy” to weaken Russia.

Since he took power, Putin has made numerous attempts to portray himself as the protector of Christendom. Kirill appears to be willing to support Putin’s grand ambitions since they align with his own agenda. While the patriarch maintains that Ukraine is still under his spiritual jurisdiction, Putin sees Ukraine as part of the Russian empire that was lost after the fall of the Soviet Union. “What Putin sees as a political restoration,” says Philip Pullella, “Kirill sees as a crusade.”

What’s the significance for Christians in the West?

Over the past decade, an increasing number of American Christians have praised Putin and his allies because of their criticism of Western decadence. The Russian president has publicly spoken out about homosexuality and divorce, and expressed support for the “traditional family.” But Christians in the West are often unaware that Russia is far from a haven of social conservatism. The country has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, and their authoritarian leader is “pro-choice.” In 2017, Putin said, “In the modern world, the decision is up to the woman herself,” and added that making abortion illegal would only push the practice underground, causing immense damage to women’s health.

Christians in the West are often unaware that Russia is far from a haven of social conservatism.

Expressing a sentiment shared by many experts on Russia, Alexis Mrachek says that “Putin’s use of traditional Christianity is calculated for political effect. American and European observers would do well to see through the charade.”

Similarly, Moscow Patriarch Kirill is not a champion of Christian values such as religious liberty. He also has little tolerance for Russian Christians who don’t want to be under his spiritual leadership. Kirill has said “there can be no place in Russia for a free market in religious life” and called “foreign missionary activity a sinister threat to the nation’s security.” But it’s his failure to oppose an unjust war that makes him a threat to Christians in the West and to those in Ukraine. Whether out of fear or deference, he’s allowing Putin to use the authority of the Russian church to discredit the Christian faith.

The day after Russia started dropping missiles on Ukraine, pastor Greg Laurie took to Facebook with a message for his flock. To much of the world, current events may look like the unhinged machinations of a megalomaniacal authoritarian intent on worldwide disruption, but to Christians of a certain ilk, Laurie argued that the war could be viewed as something else entirely: a sign of the second coming of Christ. “Is there any prophetic significance to what is happening in Ukraine right now?” the heading of the post posed. “The answer is…Yes!”

For millennia, end times Christians have tried to shoehorn current events into proof of Jesus’ imminent return, taking cryptic language from the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, Matthew, and Revelation to come up with various theories as to how the world will end. In most of these theories — embraced by conservative evangelical or fundamentalist branches of the faith — an entity referred to as Gog and Magog descends from the “far north” upon a peaceful, reconstituted Israel, whose people had been “brought out from the nations, and all now dwell securely,” as it is described in Ezekiel. The resulting war that follows allows a Messiah to swoop in and come to Israel’s rescue. It also ushers in the end of the world as we know it and the establishment of a new and better kingdom of God on earth.

Certain members of every generation since antiquity have found ways to convince themselves that they lived in the end times. “One of the beauties of end times theology is that it’s protean,” says Randall Balmer, a professor of American religion at Dartmouth College. “That is, it can be shaped and shifted to comply with particular circumstances, and it allows those who subscribe to it to claim to have a command of history, that they know how it’s all going to come out eventually.”

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Over the centuries, the Gog and Magog label has been applied to Babylon, to the Roman Empire, and to the Vikings, among others. It wasn’t until the Cold War that Russia entered the narrative, as many American Christians cast the U.S. as the “new Israel,” the USSR as Gog and Magog (it’s a land in the “far north,” after all), and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev as the Antichrist (he even bore what many considered to be the “sign of the beast” on his forehead). In addition to the apocalyptic threat of nuclear war, the formation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 was seen as proof that prophecy was being fulfilled and that the end times were upon us.

From a biblical standpoint, none of this is particularly sound. “The biblical authors are not trying to do fortune-telling and say ‘Russia is going to invade X, Y, or Z country’ or ‘There’s this Putin guy, and you can just discern the signs,’” says Zack Hunt, author of Unraptured: How End Times Theology Gets It Wrong. “What was important to these writers was just this message of hope: ‘There’s this enemy, and God is going to deliver us.’”

It was a message of hope for some; for others, it was a message of death and destruction. End times Christians are not just inclined to view what’s happening around them through an apocalyptic lens; they are also disaster artists, recasting the tragedies of mankind — climate change, pestilence, disease, conflict — into a narrative in which each event is not a crisis that needs attention so much as an inevitable fulfillment of God’s divine will. “Let’s go to Matthew 24,” Laurie intoned in his Facebook video. “What did Jesus say? ‘In the last days, there will be wars and rumors of wars.’” There will also be plagues (“If the coronavirus is not a plague, I don’t know what it is”) and an escalation of such catastrophes as the moment of Jesus’ return draws near. In other words, the worse things get, the sooner the Second Coming.

The war in Ukraine is incredibly horrific, and Russia’s leading role — coupled with the end times fortune-telling that’s currently in fashion — makes it a dog whistle moment for the 41 percent of Americans who believe that Jesus will definitely (23 percent) or probably (18 percent) return to Earth by 2050. “Their senses are tuned in to the news to look out for these things because they’ve been trained to look out for these things at church,” says Hunt. “They’ve been disciplined into doing that. They’ve been conditioned to do that. They’re constantly looking out for anything that they can grab onto to say, ‘Hey, that’s biblical prophecy.’ If you’re in that world, it’s exciting — as perverse as that sounds — because it means Jesus is coming back.”

On Feb. 28, raptureready.com upped its “Rapture Index” to 186. The record high is 189, and anything above 160 means “fasten your seatbelts” for the apocalypse. Two days before the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, Joel Rosenberg, founder of the Joshua Fund, whose website describes its objective “to bless Israel and Her Neighbors in the name of Jesus,” went on his podcast to lay out exactly why the impending invasion was significant in a kingdom-come sense. Never mind that Ukraine is not Israel: So central is this biblical War of Gog and Magog to end times theology that the mere idea of Russia mobilizing to this extent against any country was enough to send some evangelical and pentacostal end timers into a flutter. “We’ve never, ever seen the convergence of all the major pieces of this prophecy ever come into this alignment until right now,” Rosenberg argued before the war was even officially launched. “And that’s why we should be watching this thing really closely.”

Pat Roberston — who can always be counted on to connect the dots between current events and crazy — even came out of retirement this week to argue that the world’s most famous tyrant was actually just a hapless pawn in the plans of the Almighty. “I think you can say, ‘Well, Putin’s out of his mind.’ Yes, maybe so. But at the same time, he’s being compelled by God,” Robertson proffered, alluding to Ezekiel directly. “God says, ‘I’m going to put hooks in your jaws and I’m going to draw you into this battle, whether you like it or not.’”

In this framing, each act of aggression, each expansion of Putin’s power, draws end times Christians closer to the moment of physical reunification with their Lord. And that, according to Hunt, is what the rest of us should be paying attention to. “‘Wars and rumors of wars’ become this perverse source of excitement,” he says. “In an individual person, that might not be problematic, but when you have organizations or lobbying groups leveraging or pressuring politicians to be more aggressive against Putin, that [has] a real-world impact. Biden is not going to listen to Pat Robertson egging him on, but there’s something really perverse about hoping for nuclear holocaust. It’s a bloodlust, is what it is.”

It’s also a reframing of Christianity from a source of compassion into a source of vengeance. “What you have is this kickass, superhero Jesus who comes back to fix the passive, humble Jesus who didn’t get things right the first time,” Hunt continues. “This superhero Jesus who is going to beat up the bad guys and stomp on their enemies and crush everything under His heel. Then you find yourself in a place where you essentially have to cheer on violence. You have to cheer on calamity, because you’ve already decided that it’s a sign of the times.”

Roberston certainly has. “You read your Bibles,” he admonished this week. “Because it’s coming to pass.”