Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism

Introduction

Introduction Ukraine was called the Bible Belt of the Soviet Union.1 It was home to over half of the 1.5 million registered Baptists in the USSR, making Soviet Ukrainians the largest Baptist community in Europe, and one of the largest in the world outside of the United States. As early as 1954, however, Soviet Baptists estimated their ranks to be nearly three million, reflecting the signi ficant number of unregistered believers and children who participated as well as numerous underground communities.2 If the growth of evangelical communities during the Soviet period was steady, since the collapse of the USSR it has skyrocketed. Already by 2000, one quarter of all registered places of worship in Ukraine were Protestant, and in southeastern Ukraine, the number of Protestant churches nearly equaled the number of Orthodox churches.3 Today, the largest evangelical megachurch in all of Europe is an independent Pentecostal church that was founded in Kyiv in 1994 and now has over twenty-five thousand members. Not only has Ukraine become home to some of the most active and robust evangelical communities in all of Europe, it has also rapidly become a center of evangelical publishing, seminary training, and missionary recruiting that aims to serve all of Eurasia. Hundreds of Ukrainian missionaries travel to Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union every year to evangelize. These staggering changes in the religious landscape have largely taken root since the late 1980s. Many scholars were taken by surprise when a religious renaissance flourished during the final years of Soviet rule. The Soviet regime’s vision of modernity and of a “bright future” enlightened by science and free from superstitious belief rendered religious communities and religious practice anathema. To a stunning extent, antireligious agitation beginning in the 1920s managed to chase religious sentiment, symbolism, and practice from the public sphere. This retreat, compounded by an ongoing barrage of antireligious propaganda and waves of repression against active believers over the following decades, led many analysts to conclude that Soviet society had indeed become secular, if not outright atheist. Yet during the Soviet period, evangelical communities in Ukraine and throughout the USSR not only survived, they thrived. Whether one speaks of the Revolution of 1905, the Revolution of 1917, or the collapse of the USSR in 1991, during each of these periods of jarring political reform, widespread social change, and extensive moral questioning, there were seismic shifts in the religious landscape that led to the growth of evangelical communities . These social and political crises, which were to some degree predicated on alienation from Orthodox authorities, led to extensive legal reform concerning the status of minority religious organizations. Affiliation with nontraditional religions carried decisively different political and national implications. During these periods of tumultuous change, evangelical believers constructed alternative cosmologies, philosophies of life, and moralities as self-conscious traditionalists within the confines of religious communities that were branded as “foreign.” The broad religious renaissance that flourished throughout the region in the 1990s suggests that repressive conditions did not altogether eradicate religious belief and practice and produce only secular worldviews among Soviet citizens. Although communist policies secularized the public sphere to an impressive extent, the Party’s propaganda often made use of religious sensibilities, in the process reaffirming them. Antireligious legislation chased the expression of religious sentiment and practice into private, atomized domains, where knowledge of religious practice and doctrine was often, with each passing generation, replaced by ignorance or indifference, even if the sensibility often remained. For some Soviet citizens, however, religion became a refuge, a meaningful identity and mode of living in an alternative moral universe, in defiance of the numerous risks and penalties involved. These communities constitute further evidence of a vibrant and resilient form of “civil society” that existed during the Soviet period. 2 Communities of the Converted This book explores individual motivations to convert to evangelicalism and the strategies these communities employed to survive and grow. There have been tremendous shifts from the sensibilities, beliefs, and practices these evangelical communities embraced during the Soviet period to those they advocate at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In analyzing these shifts my intention is to provide an analytical framework for thinking about the historical experience of Soviet secularism to better understand the religious renaissance that occurred after 1991. How does a state foster the secular? How can individuals and groups respond? For this reason, I...