I don’t mind that people dislike how Tucker Carlson goes after Zelensky. But I find Noah’s defense of Mike Pence and, beyond that, the Ukrainian government hard to swallow.
Tucker Carlson asked Mike Pence whether, while in Ukraine recently, he brought up to his government hosts the legal suppression of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has involved shuttering hundreds of buildings, evicting monks from one of the most sacred sites in Christian Orthodoxy, and other enormities. Mike Pence said that he spoke to a religious leader in Kyiv, who assured him that none of this is happening.
That was the entire substance of his response. Look at the tape. It’s, “I talked to a guy.”
Rothman defends Pence by saying, in effect, “Carlson is selling a false narrative” — that Zelensky, rendered in antisemitic terms, is persecuting Christians. Rothman’s defense is — it is happening, and it’s good! But that it’s not religious persecution, per se. What the Ukrainian government is doing, Rothman says, is “to limit the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church and its patriarch, Kirill, to destabilize the country from within.”
Rothman lists a handful of discrete subversive incidents alleged against clergy or members of the UOC. One promoted Patriarch Kirill’s sermons. Others provided cash. A congregation sang a hymn. He further points out that the UOC is a minority compared with the entire body of Ukrainian Christians. So what? If people break laws, they should be tried for their crimes. We don’t just start rounding up their co-religionists. But, breathtakingly, we get an argument that we should accept the idea of collective religious guilt in Ukraine, because separation of church and state is foreign to this part of the world. “Those separations are observed by neither the state nor the church,” Rothman writes. So, it’s not a religious persecution per se, just a political operation that cashes out in the legal suppression of an entire, discrete, long-historied religious communion.
We could also use our eyes. Rothman neglects to mention that many remaining members of the UOC, those who did not join in the schism of 2019, have sought out ways to separate themselves from the Russian patriarch who promotes the war, including a declaration of independence in March of 2022. In Orthodox ecclesiology, there is no way for them to effect this separation unilaterally. According to their theology, they have to be recognized as a separate body from the ROC by the patriarch of Constantinople. The UOC has done humanitarian work throughout the war, and some of it was praised by Zelensky early on. Metropolitan Onufriy, the patriarch of Kyiv in the UOC, condemned the war in no uncertain terms the day it started. The UOC held a local council shortly after the war began to strengthen the self-governance of the religious body. It was decided at this council that the Church would cease its liturgical practice of praying for Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, as it normally would among prayers for the patriarchs of all the local Orthodox Churches in communion with each other. These are not small concessions to the political reality members of the Church feel. To dismiss this church entirely, as so many do, as a front for the Russian FSB, is — in my opinion — not just bigoted, but blind, and willfully so.
The American press has been particularly bad on this. GetReligion’s Terry Mattingly documented just how poor the New York Times‘ coverage has been, full of factual inaccuracies and unjustified characterizations. Mattingly also gives a good rundown of the history of political and canonical splits bedeviling Ukrainian Orthodox Christians.
By conceding, against plentiful evidence, that the allegiance of UOC’s souls — somewhere between 6 and 12 percent of the country — belong to Moscow, I believe Rothman and others end up inadvertently taking the side of Kirill and Putin; joining their assertion that all these Ukrainian citizens spiritually and politically belong to Moscow in a way that effaces their Ukrainian nationality. That would imply Moscow’s claim of responsibility to protect them has legitimacy.
I don’t find the issue all that difficult. What the Ukrainian government is doing to the UOC is unjust, collective persecution. Apologists can explain it away as nationalistic zeal that pales in comparison to the crimes the Russian army is committing. Fine. But, the United States is not supporting or paying for the Russian army. And we have been championing Ukraine as a bulwark of freedom, and funding their government. That comes with scrutiny and higher standards. I thought Ukraine’s supporters cared for moral clarity and hated moral equivalence.