Religon, Culture & Ukraine

 From The Article I read Culture wars and modernity which compares the Russian Orthodox church with American right-wing Evangelicals.

By far the best known and most shocking attempted return to an imaginary past is, of course, that of ISIS and the Da’esh Caliphate. But it is telling that Patriarch Kirill of Moscow (pictured above) imagines a former Holy Mother Russia encompassing Ukraine and Belarus, and singles out gay pride marches as evidence of “Western decadence”. The war in Ukraine has revealed how far Russian Orthodoxy, in part, has been co-opted, even militarised, by the Russian state. Putin, ostensibly a Russian Orthodox believer, and Patriarch Kirill, almost certainly a KGB asset, inherited a mutually beneficial relationship formed during the post-Brezhnev Soviet era. It seems no accident that extreme forms of “back to the future” religion can spawn violence.

And I think the criticism was rightly made. What worries me is how the world might view the whole of Orthodox Christianity, so I turned to Orthodox Times and found up front Pressure on Kirill intensifies – 400 priests call for condemnation by world Orthodoxy:

In particular, the 400 clergymen of the Ukrainian entity of the Patriarchate of Moscow are pressing charges against Patriarch Kirill, claiming that Kirill preaches the doctrine of the “Russian world”, which deviates from Orthodox teaching and should be condemned as a heresy.

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The authors of the text, call on the Council to “examine Kirill’s public statements about the war against Ukraine, to evaluate them in the light of the Holy Scriptures and the Sacred Tradition of the Church”, and to deprive Kirill of the right to hold the Patriarchal throne.

Kirill is not returning to a traditional Orthodox  world but is backing a Russian political fiction not unlike Trump with his MAGA fantasy. Please, do not confuse Kirill with the Orthodox Church.

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