Why the worldview of Patriarch Kirill matters now

Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, now Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’

Given the sweep of current events within the Orthodox Church, I’m finding it’s necessary to counter some of the obscene calumnies that have been coming from certain quarters of the religious press with regard to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’. I confess I am not surprised to see these calumnies coming from such a source as Katie Kelaidis, who has a rather prurient obsession with other women’s fashion choices and wants to see racism and subjugation of women lurking around every corner.

Again, you’re welcome to read the whole thing if you’d like; I’ve linked it above. It’s fairly tedious, I warn you. But here are the relevant paragraphs of her shameless screed:

The extent and influence of Kirill’s reactionary socio-political vision should not be underestimated. It’s a deeply anti-Western, anti-democratic, and anti-human rights worldview which has already had a significant effect on Russian domestic policy and has helped garner Russia’s recent prestige among radical conservatives around the world—particularly in the West. The “axis between Russian Orthodox and American Evangelicals,” as the Economist calls it, has been well documented, and, as Slate’s Ruth Graham points out, it’s not a coincidence that Russian spy Maria Butina sought to infiltrate American politics through the religious right.

Patriarch Kirill has described the Putin-era as a “miracle from God” and offered his powerful opposition to pro-democracy protests in Moscow in 2012. He has frequently supported government policy in sermons and on state-run television, positioning Russia in the role of spiritual defender in response to Western objections to Russian human rights policy: “We have been through an epoch of atheism, and we know what it is to live without God. We want to shout to the whole world, ‘Stop!’” His 2011 book, Freedom and Responsibility, posits a contemporary political landscape in which two antagonistic worldviews—one liberal, secular, and humanistic, the other religious and traditional—are engaged in an existential battle.

Leaving aside the various, what can be generously termed lazy factual errors above – for example, that His Holiness Pat. Kirill did not powerfully oppose the pro-democracy protests in 2012 (as reported by the New York Times), and that the political rôle of Ms Butina has been gravely overestimated by prosecutors and investigators (as reported by CNN) – this is an egregious, gross misreading of His Holiness’s politics and theology. It is true that Freedom and Responsibility does posit the antagonism between a globalist liberalism and a the rise of religious reaction; however, what is left out is the key point that Patriarch Kirill advises against siding wholly with one or the other! Kelaidis is counting in bad faith on her readers not to educate themselves by reading what Kirill actually wrote, and instead letting them come to a false conclusion that Kirill is an apocalyptic fundamentalist waging an existential war against ‘human rights’ as such!

If this characterisation were true it would indeed be cause for concern, but it’s not. It is infinitely more instructive for English-speakers not versed in Russian to read the English-language essay he wrote in 1999, ‘Gospel and Culture’. This demonstrates the position which he has held since before he was elected Patriarch by the Synod. Here too, he says:

We have come close to the juncture between two centuries, summing up the one ending and looking with anxiety and hope at the one to come. We look to it with anxiety because we cannot help but see how many unresolved problems humanity faces today, in what a hopeless situation—both spiritual and material—millions of people live. The world is faced, on the one hand, with an aggressive globalising monoculture which tries to impose itself everywhere, dominating and assimilating other cultural and national identities and, on the other, with nationalistic upheavals, tribalisation, and disintegration of the human family. Yet in the midst of contemporary hopelessness and despair, as Christians we live with hope in the eschatological expectation of parousia—the coming of Christ—and Christ’s ultimate triumph over the forces of evil.

Then-Metropolitan Kirill sums up the problems of global Christendom at the end of the twentieth century, including ‘the accumulated arsenal of [nuclear] weapons’, ‘fratricidal wars waged in the former Yugoslavia [and] Chechnya’, ‘the disparity between North and South, the gap between rich and poor’, ‘infant mortality’ and ‘millions infected with HIV/AIDS’ in terms most œcumenists of the day would have agreed with entirely. And he continues as here:

Mission as a witness to the spiritual and ethical heritage of Christianity becomes the number one task for the churches. For fifty years the World Council of Churches has spoken about concrete matters such as overcoming the consequences of the Second World War, liberation from social oppression, disarmament and the elimination of racial discrimination and sexism. We have to acknowledge that it is vital for Christians to address these issues, as they are common concerns for the whole human community.

In this spirit, he goes on to deplore, in the strongest terms, the shameful ways in which Western fundamentalist Protestant missionaries have imposed themselves upon non-Western cultures. His focus in the essay itself is on Russia, but note below how he includes especially those in the global South. He stresses the demands upon the idea of mission, that it is incumbent upon all churches to be respectful of different cultures. This is particularly important given the current crisis in the Ukraine:

To ignore a local church means to break a whole into pieces, to tear the seamless robe of Christ. Missionary efforts from abroad should be made in each place as a support and assistance to the indigenous church or churches… Everyone who, armed with the Bible, sets off to enlighten peoples should remember that by the end of the twentieth century there are indigenous Christian churches virtually everywhere. Independent actions taken by missionary groups at the expense of these churches represent an attempt to redraw the map of the world, and wherever they are taken there is always tension, alienation, bitterness.

The holy martyr Cyprian of Carthage wrote about the church schisms of his time: ‘Who is so impious and perfidious and so infected with the passion for strife that he believes that he can or dare break the unity of God, the robe of the Lord, the church of Christ?’ This question can well be addressed in our day to those who act to the detriment of local churches, tearing the faithful away from the church and thus excommunicating themselves from the world Christian community. St Cyprian made it clear that these people were enemies of the church and Christian faith: ‘What unity is respected, what love is cherished or what love is comtemplated by him who, indulging in strife, cuts the church, ruins faith, disturbs peace, eradicates love, defiles unity? … Indeed, he arms himself against the church and impedes divine construction; he is an enemy of the sanctuary, an agitator against the sacrifice of Christ, a betrayer of the faith and devotion; he is an apostate.’

These words uttered in the third century are still relevant today. At the end of the twentieth century we can state that the work of sectarians and schismatics to destroy the unity of churches continues. And this work is not Christian mission, it is spiritual colonialism. Our urgent task therefore is to get rid of colonial practices and develop a new attitude to mission—or rather, to return to the apostolic and early church understanding of mission not as enslaving or bribing people but rather as liberating and bringing them into the light of Christ’s truth. The twentieth century has been the time of a mass collapse of colonial regimes and the liberation of peoples, nations and regions from foreign domination, from the yoke of foreign cultures. The colonial ideology should be overcome in the realm of church and mission as well. Indeed, for many peoples in the southern hemisphere, Christianisation meant, above all, Europeanisation and destruction of their traditional culture, which the Europeans believed to be low and pagan.

Particularly in the last paragraph, these hardly sound like the words of an apocalyptic fundamentalist, let alone a member of the radical nouvelle-droite as insinuated by Ms Kelaidis. What’s more, Patriarch Kirill’s broad-strokes thesis of Freedom and Responsibility, though updated to include the challenges posed by radical Islamic fundamentalism, does not differ in any substantial respect from Metropolitan Kirill’s views in ‘Gospel and Culture’ – for those who would hold to the notion that his position in the church has corrupted the man and everything he says. In Freedom and Responsibility too, he emphasises the dangers, both to indigenous peoples and to the environment, of both the globalist monoculture and the ‘super-consumerist society’ and the global fundamentalist and nationalist backlash – and suggests charting a different path that avoids the pitfalls of both.

This attack on the head of the Russian Church, from within another branch of the Orthodox Church, is perhaps a kind of projection: the sign of a guilty conscience. After all, in so much of the global South, among the Orthodox Churches it has not been the Russian hierarchs imposing an unwanted ethno-linguistic hegemony over newly-independent post-colonial peoples, but rather the Greek ones – and this has been true in the patriarchates of Jerusalem and Alexandria particularly. Russia’s own history on colonial issues, particularly within Russia’s own historical borders, is sketchy at best; however, particularly in East Asia the Russian Church has walked the walk: they have been steadfastly supportive and respectful of indigenous clergy in ways that the Greek churches have not been, even during traumatic events like the Russo-Japanese War, and even in difficult political situations like that in North Korea.

And with recent events in the Ukraine, the issue of colonial interference and imposition of parallel structures in violation of the dignities of the indigenous church – to wit, the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onufriy (Berezovsky) of Kiev, which has been suffering grievously from displacement, violence and land seizures over the past four years – this ill-founded and ill-tempered attack on Patriarch Kirill looks even more so like a classical case of seared conscience.

The worldview of Patriarch Kirill, and deflating the lies and calumnies against it, matter now precisely because they are a key factor in campaigns of collective defamation and the manufacture of consent for war. This is particularly dangerous in an increasingly-unhinged media environment where Russia is already designated as the scapegoat and the external cause of America’s domestic cultural and political problems. I pray that this may soon pass and, now as then, that cooler heads may prevail.