It is no secret that America’s “Christian right” includes a great many Orthodox Christians in the US, especially certain kinds of converts to Orthodoxy. In drawing this Newsweek article to our readers’ attention Orthodoxy in Dialogue invites one or more qualified individuals to write a thoughtful, analytical response.

At a gathering of some of the world’s most virulent opponents of LGBT equality, Russian conservative activist Dmitry Komov warned of the destructive agenda underlying the spread of liberal values.

The West, he told a far-right French TV station in December, was committed to the “destruction of all of our collective identities: national identity, religious identity, gender identity,” and warned it would result in  “the destruction of human identity.”

Komov was in Chisinau, Moldova, for the Eurasian colloquium, where Russian Orthodox ideologues and European far-right activists rubbed shoulders. Between 13 and 16 September they are also joined by members of a U.S. conservative Christian groups in the city for the World Congress of Families [designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center]. The unlikely allies feel that after decades of struggle, the time has come to topple Western liberal hegemony.

Relations between Moscow and Washington have been strained over allegations that Russia influenced the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, but religious conservatives in both nations have recently found common cause.

Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia and parts of the U.S. Christian right have formed an alliance that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago, when American evangelical leaders railed against “godless communism.”

Russia has reinvented itself as a bastion of Christian values in a world beset by relativism and godlessness. As a result, conservative Christians gathering at the World Congress of Families are looking to Putin to protect Christianity from the West. Read More

In the western Ukrainian city of Lviv in the spring of 1990, one could sometimes hear the phrase katafal’na tserkva—катафальна церква, “catafalque church”—a folk rendering of avtokefal’na tserkva or “autocephalous church”—автокефальна церква. Indeed, the concept of an autocephalous Ukrainian Church was thought to have died at the end of World War II, except in the Ukrainian diaspora.

But in August 1989, the Russian Orthodox parish of SS. Peter and Paul had opted for Ukrainian autocephaly, and in November 1991 the Russian Orthodox Exarchate of Ukraine, now rebranded as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC-MP), declared itself autocephalous. The Moscow Patriarchate reacted swiftly, forcing Metropolitan Filaret (Denysenko) to resign the following year, and eventually laicizing and anathematizing him. The UOC returned to the Russian fold. But within a few years two new autocephalous churches—the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyivan Patriarchate (UOC-KP) and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC)—had sprung up.

Today, neither the UOC-KP nor the UAOC is recognized as canonical in the Orthodox world, and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) as well as the UOC-MP regards them as schismatic. But according to a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey taken last May and June, 43% of Ukrainians identify with one or the other of these autocephalous churches, while only 17% adhere to the canonical UOC-MP. Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimea and its war in the Donbas have alienated many Orthodox believers in Ukraine, and entire parishes have defected to the autocephalous Churches. Read More

Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk

On September 8, 2018 the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations published Metropolitan Hilarion’s “Patriarch Bartholomew Will Bear Personal Responsibility before the Judgment of God and the Judgment of History.” In it His Beatitude responds to the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s moves to normalize the canonical status of the Kyiv (Kiev) Patriarchate as the autocephalous (i.e., fully self-administered) Orthodox Church for Ukraine.

Metropolitan Hilarion’s statement is very brief. We recommend that you take the two or three minutes to read it. For our purposes we draw attention to the following assertion by His Beatitude:

…[The] Ukrainian Church [of the Moscow Patriarchate], which unites a majority of the Orthodox faithful in Ukraine (over 12 thousand parishes, over 200 monasteries) has not asked for any autocephaly, for any independence. […] Thus the Patriarchate of Constantinople is now openly on the warpath. And it is a war not only against the Russian Church, not only against the Ukrainian Orthodox people….

It seems significant that Metropolitan Hilarion should cite the total number of parishes and monasteries rather than actual people. On page 78 of the periodic Public Opinion Survey of Residents of Ukraine—this one conducted March 15-31, 2018 and published on May 21—we find that the Kyiv Patriarchate holds the allegiance of precisely twice as many Orthodox Christians in Ukraine as the Moscow Patriarchate: 39% and 19% respectively of the total population of Ukraine. These figures have remained remarkably consistent over the course of consecutive releases of the same survey. Read More