The Orthodox Church as the Engine of the War
There is a comfortable way to talk about the Russian Orthodox Church and the war, and it goes like this: the Church is an ancient faith, a reservoir of belief and consolation, and the regime — cynical as ever — has simply co-opted it, draping its tanks in incense the way it drapes everything else it touches. On this view the institution is a victim of the state, a sacred thing put to profane use. I want to argue that this picture is not just incomplete but backwards. The Moscow Patriarchate is not a faith that the regime co-opts. In its present form it is a creation of the state’s security organs, and in this war it has made itself something more specific and more terrible than a propaganda asset. It is the metaphysical engine of the aggression — the apparatus that takes the killing of one nation by another and returns it to the killers as holiness. ...