Tensions in Ukraine highlight wisdom of our Constitution

Editor’s note: The situation in the Ukraine is a breaking news story and continues to develop.

We’re all familiar with the First Amendment that was included in our Constitution to guarantee that there would be no establishment of a particular religion in the United States of America. The operant word is “particular.” The founding fathers, by and large, stemmed from England, where the Anglican Church was the established religion. That meant that other expressions of Christianity were forbidden, not to mention other religions. The Toleration Act of 1689 softened this, so that “non-conformist” churches were allowed to exist, but their adherents were still frozen out of government and university positions. That is the backdrop for the writing of our First Amendment.

The First Amendment to our Constitution, however, does not mean that your faith should not influence your political positions. But that’s an aside: the point is No Established Church, which is to say no collusion between church and state.

Fast forward to what’s happening worldwide these days and, especially, to the tensions and problems between Russia and Ukraine. Here, religion and politics have become seriously intertwined again. Ukraine has been independent for over three decades and is trying to forge a democracy on the fault line between Russia and Central and Western Europe. In 2018, the principal Orthodox Churches of Ukraine entered a new union (there are reasons why there were three, but that requires a long explanation) to form the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It’s no secret that the eastern Ukrainian churches, which includes those in Crimea, were a sizeable chunk of the Orthodox Church in terms of both numbers and commitment.

The Russian government together with the Russian Orthodox Church, which has been the established religion since the 11^th century, opposed this move and did everything in their power to try to stop the merger, and that opposition has continued as military and ecclesiastical pressures. In recent weeks the patriarch of Moscow, head of the church, declared his intention to start new churches in Egypt and Turkey. The first is an attempt to bring pressure on the patriarch of Alexandria, Egypt, who has supported the fledgling Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The second is a direct attack upon the ecumenical patriarch in Istanbul, the titular head of the Orthodox Church worldwide. Russian governmental pressure has been exerted in recent years through the military annexation of Crimea (always a ping-pong ball in Russian diplomacy), which is the eastern part of Ukraine with a major port at Odessa on the Black Sea. Military action in Ukraine has also transpired in Kiev in the Maidan Revolution of 2014. Standing in the shadows of these politico-religious machinations is American interest, which favors Ukraine as a bulwark against the Russian drive for territorial expansion.

As a priest in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA, although not ethnically Ukrainian myself, I am not an objective reporter. These events are not without reverberation in our national church. We have, literally, thousands of new members who have come to the US in the latest wave of migration, spurred in part by the frictions “back home.”

My point in this column, ultimately, is to underline in red the significance of having a constitution in which the state is not connected to an established church. We are blessed because our founders deliberately sought to evade such issues. In Czarist Russia, the Orthodox Church was the established religion, and current Russian policies demonstrate a reversion to this pattern of collusion. I grieve for the people of both Ukraine and Russia who must live through this current nightmare. Please pray for all those involved as these weeks go by and the saber-rattling continues.

Fr. Gabriel Rochelle is priest emeritus of St. Anthony of the Desert Orthodox Mission, Las Cruces, Fr. Mark Phillips, pastor. The church website is: stanthonylc.org.