Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism

Chapter Four. Missionizing, Converting, and Remaking the Moral Self

Chapter Four Missionizing, Converting, and Remaking the Moral Self At exactly the same time that U.S. immigration policies changed to allow the recognition of persecuted evangelical believers as refugees, prompting the mass exodus of longstanding believers and their relatives, very significant changes concerning religious policy also occurred in the Soviet Union. The millennium commemorations in 1988 of the thousand-year anniversary of Christianity in Kyivan Rus′ and the vast popular interest it generated in religion prompted a sea change in religious policy.1 In October 1990 one of the primary goals of Soviet ideology, to establish a scientific atheistic worldview, was abandoned when the Supreme Soviet adopted legislation that guaranteed freedom of conscience and accorded legal status to religious institutions. In essence, the Soviet state pledged to cease impeding the establishment of places of worship and persecuting individuals who chose to practice their religion openly, regardless of affiliation. In the late 1980s, increasingly vocal claims to a nation’s right to selfdetermination became a viable strategy for political and cultural elites to challenge Soviet hegemony. This meant that national and religious resurgences occurred simultaneously and were often mutually reinforcing. With less fear of state retribution, some clergy and religious institutions used their moral authority to support nationalist movements as oppositional forces to Soviet rule, which increased the popularity of these groups. Much has been written about the role of religion in enhancing claims to national distinctiveness and about the importance of “religious nationalisms” in bringing an end to seventy-four years of Soviet rule. Protestants and other religious groups that are supraethnic and “non-traditional,” rarely lent active support to nationalist political agendas. Many individuals in the former Soviet Union have argued that the ideological vacuum left in the wake of the collapse of communist ideology as a viable worldview and a source of individual and collective meaning was simply replaced with a religious-based orientation to self and society. The disorientation prompted by convulsive social change as the Soviet system began to fall apart and fifteen nation-states, each with one or more “national religions” quickly emerging to take its place, certainly did cause some to embrace religion as an anti-Soviet alternative, a new moral compass to guide their ideas and behavior amid social confusion and economic collapse. Yet this is only part of the story. The sharp rise in conversions to evangelicalism in a formerly socialist society undergoing rapid and sweeping change shaped transformations on multiple levels: for individuals, for communities, and for the social order more broadly. Foreign missionaries have played an evolving role in this process. They began with “fire and brimstone” preaching in stadiums and on the streets to gain converts. These efforts were more visible than they were fruitful. In Ukraine, the strategy shifted quickly into substantial—and largely successful—efforts to build an evangelical infrastructure. Foreign religious organizations sought to establish Ukraine as a Eurasian base for evangelical missionary and clerical training. Within fifteen years of the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine not only was the recipient of substantial numbers of missionaries, it also began to supply them. Changes in the Religious Landscape The success of any religious resurgence is predicated on favorable political and legal conditions. The religious landscape after 1989 developed very differently in Ukraine than it did in Russia, largely because of the different trajectories Orthodoxy took. The institutional structure of Orthodox national churches mirrors the ideal of a nation-state, with each people ideally constituting a single ethno-religious community. In Ukraine, the political struggles after independence to create a single Ukrainian Orthodox Church, canonically recognized as independent from the Russian Orthodox Church and capable of buttressing the legitimacy of an independent Ukrainian Missionizing, Converting, and Remaking the Moral Self 131 state, compromised the role of clergy as moral leaders as they battled among themselves for property and power.2 The sustained efforts of intellectuals , dissidents, politicians, and diaspora leaders failed to unite the three Orthodox churches in Ukraine: the Ukrainian Orthodox ChurchKyiv Patriarchate, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate. These seemingly intractable problems, combined with the Orthodox Church’s history of complicity with the Soviet state, tarnished the reputation of Orthodoxy in general and brought an end to the state-backed monopoly status of the Orthodox faith in Ukraine. This political bickering indirectly contributed to making Ukraine a model of religious pluralism among formerly socialist...