Countering the Orthodox ‘threat’, by Stephen Karganovic

Freedom of religious expression was once important to Western politicians, both at home and abroad. Ironically, they worry a great deal about offending Jews and Muslims, but Christians of any stripe? Not so much. From Stephen Karganovic at strategic-culture.su:

Orthodox Christianity appears not to be even on the radar screen of the paladins of Western “values.”

This portal normally does not deal with religious issues as such, but in special circumstances where religion obviously interacts with geopolitics that rule may be relaxed.

Lucas Leiroz was spot on when sounding the alarm about the persecution of the Orthodox Church in the rump Ukraine still under the control of the Kiev regime: “The illegitimate Ukrainian government is conducting an ideological crusade to weaken or eradicate the UOC [Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate], using a combination of legal repression, state propaganda, and direct violence. Churches are forcibly seized, monks are expelled, clergy are prosecuted for ‘collaborating with the enemy,’ and worshippers are intimidated by paramilitary groups and local authorities.” Notably, the amply documented persecution to which the Leiroz refers elicits scant if any attention from the global media machinery controlled by the collective West. Not that the moral authorities of the collective West would be genuinely perturbed by the suppression of any religion except for the dark creed that they themselves profess. However, the persecution of the followers of the Orthodox Christian faith – not just in Ukraine but wherever it occurs – does not arouse even pro forma expressions of “concern” that outrages perpetrated against other religious traditions might still generate in the public sphere, hypocritical as the true motive behind such solicitude may be.

But Orthodox Christianity appears not to be even on the radar screen of the paladins of Western “values.” Their shameful silence, heavily infused with malevolent glee, is not confined to the eradication of Orthodoxy in Ukraine alone.

In Ukraine, the situation is perturbing enough, and Leiroz outlines it with graphic precision. That unhappy land has been the object of aggressive proselytism emanating from the West for at least a millennium. For many centuries also known as the Kievan Rus, Ukraine was the centre of Russian statehood, culture, and spirituality, focused around the teachings and practice of the Russian Orthodox Church. The latest religious assault it has endured began in the 1990s, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Ukraine around that time became the target of an aggressive “conversion” campaign spearheaded by well financed and professionally trained Western Protestant “evangelical pastors,” a not-so-subtle mix of “old time religion” and classical intelligence penetration. Starved for communion with the transcendent but lacking sophistication to see through the alluring discourse of Western “preachers,” many Ukrainians were fascinated by the slick religious narrative of their new “saviours”. The arrival of Protestant “pastors” and the conversion of many Ukrainians to their simplistic doctrines added another element of division to an already fractured society. The first post 2014 coup interim president of Ukraine, it might be recalled, was Aleksandr (or Oleksandr, as he eventually renamed himself) Turchynov, an individual who did not profess any of Ukraine’s traditional religious faiths but was a recent alumnus of the evangelical swarm of the 1990s. In the violent upheavals which led to regime change in Ukraine and thereafter he turned out to be a very useful agent of influence for those under whose solicitous auspices he became “born again.”

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