Istanbul

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Thinking about religion in Russia: Orthodox Christianity has declined, but also grown?

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Thinking about religion in Russia: Orthodox Christianity has declined, but also grown?

“Religion” is a complicated word, as I have noted many times at GetReligion.

Put the word “Byzantine” in front of “religion” or “Christianity” and things get really complicated, as in this secondary definition of that adjective: “ … excessively complicated, and typically involving a great deal of administrative detail.”

Frame Byzantine Christianity with the history of Russian culture and the complications are compounded. Toss in centuries of history — complex, bloody, mysterious and sacred — shared by the Slavic giants Russia and Ukraine and, well, you get the picture.

This weekend “think piece” comes from the Orthodox Christianity news website. This is an information source that, from the American point of view, is extremely conservative. This doesn’t mean that mainstream journalists should ignore it.

Why is that? Because it consistently offers direct links to online sources — documents, speeches, quotable analysis — that the vast majority of reporters and editors would not know about otherwise. This includes, for example, lots of material representing the leadership of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. That’s the historic church of Ukraine that is current caught up — along with millions of its Ukrainian members — in a violent collision between the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s current government, which is backed by the United States, the European Union and the tiny, but symbolic, Orthodox church in Istanbul led by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.

It’s easy, these days, for journalists to get government approved material from Moscow and Kyiv. The ancient Orthodox church being crushed by the two armies? Not so much. Thus, it helps to follow the Orthodox Christianity feed on X (the digital platform previously known as Twitter).

Consider the complex realities represented in this recent post: “Percentage of Orthodox is Down in Russia, but Percentage of Practicing Orthodox is up — Survey.” Read this carefully:

According to a new survey from the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center, the overall percentage of Orthodox Christians has decreased in Russia in recent years, while the percentage of those who actively practice the faith is up.


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Big story? American (at this point) archbishop baptises famous gay couple's children in Greece

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Big story? American (at this point) archbishop baptises famous gay couple's children in Greece

I think that I will write this post before I start getting emails (one or two from inside the wider circle of current and former GetReligionistas) asking whether or not I will write this post.

But first, before I get to the journalism question for this post, allow me to pause and discuss the meaning of a key term — “Byzantine.” Here is the word in context: To understand the following news story, journalists will need to enter the Byzantine world of Eastern Orthodox polity in North America.

The word “Byzantine,” when used as an adjective, has two definitions. First there is this:

… relating to Byzantium (now Istanbul), the Byzantine Empire, or the Eastern Orthodox Church

Now, that meaning is — sort of — relevant in this case. But this second definition is the one that we need:

… (of a system or situation) excessively complicated, and typically involving a great deal of administrative detail.

When people ask questions about Eastern Orthodox “news,” I frequently have to remind them that Eastern Orthodoxy is not the Church of Rome. We do not have a pope, even if, from time to time, the ecumenical patriarch in Istanbul has tried to promote (with the help of many elite newsrooms) a papal vision of his “first among equals” role among Orthodox patriarchs, stressing “first” instead of “equals.” See: Ukraine.

With that in mind, let’s look at the GreekReporter.com story that ran with this headline: “First Greek Orthodox Baptism for Child of Gay Couple in Greece.” The question: Is this an important “news” story worthy of complex, balanced, accurate coverage in, let’s say, a mainstream publication such as The New York Times? Jumping ahead, my answer is “yes,” but with a heavy emphasis on “complex, balanced, accurate coverage.” Here is the whole story from Greece:

Evanggelos Bousis and Peter Dundas, both of Greek descent, became the first gay couple to hold a Greek Orthodox Baptism for their children in Greece. …

The couple’s children, Alexios and Eleni, were baptized by his Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros of America at the Panagia Faneromeni Church in the southern Athenian suburb of Vouliagmeni.


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Ukraine's oldest Orthodox Church seeks independence, while the Lavra monastery is at risk

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Ukraine's oldest Orthodox Church seeks independence, while the Lavra monastery is at risk

This was a very important weekend in the history of Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine and Russia — for those (including journalists) who believe that religious traditions and symbols matter as much as statements by government officials and headlines in Western media.

At the center of the drama, of course, was the city of Kiev, as it is known in to Russians and many Ukrainians, and Kyiv, as it is known to many Ukrainians, as well as officials in the United States and the European Union.

Here’s the quotation I keep thinking about, drawn from a historian (and Orthodox priest) I interviewed for a 2018 column that ran with this headline: “A thousand years of Orthodox history loom over today’s Moscow-Istanbul clash.” That quote: "Kiev is the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Russian Orthodox Church is Kiev." From this point of view, the churches of Ukraine and Russia are brothers, connected by centuries of shared history — good and bad — and Orthodox tradition.

The crucial issue, in many ways, is one the press seems to think is secondary — the future of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, the font of Orthodox spirituality in the Slavic world.

Let’s start with two short wire-service reports and, along the way, I will point readers to some crucial documents that add more depth and clues as to what is happening. First, from the Associated Press:

KYIV, Ukraine — The leaders of the Orthodox churches in Ukraine that were affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church have adopted measures declaring the church’s full independence and criticizing the Russian church’s leader for his support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Orthodoxy, the largest religious denomination in Ukraine, is divided between churches that had been loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate and those under a separate ecclesiastical body.

The council of the Moscow-connected body, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, on Friday said it “condemns the war as a violation of God’s commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ ... and expresses disagreement with the position of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia regarding the war in Ukraine.”

It also adopted charter changes “indicating the full self-sufficiency and independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.”

Note, in the lede, the assumption that simply saying that this has happened means that it has happened, as in the “leaders of the Orthodox churches in Ukraine that were affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church.”

Now, the official declarations (click here for details) made by the leaders of the oldest Orthodox body in Ukraine — usually called the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) — are very serious and they were accompanied by changes in WORSHIP that, for the Orthodox, are even more important than words on paper.


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Angels and demons: Orthodox pain woven into this year's Pascha epistles in Ukraine

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Angels and demons: Orthodox pain woven into this year's Pascha epistles in Ukraine

With the barrage of horrors from Ukraine, it wasn't hard to distinguish between the messages released by the Eastern Orthodox leaders of Russia and Ukraine to mark Holy Pascha, the feast known as Easter in the West.

The epistle from Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill offered hope for this life and the next. But his text contained only one possible reference to the fighting in Ukraine, which the United Nations says has claimed the lives of 3,000 civilians, at the very least.

"In the light of Pascha everything is different," wrote the patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. "We are not afraid of any mundane sorrows, afflictions and worldly troubles, and even difficult circumstances of these troubled times do not seem so important in the perspective of eternity granted unto us."

But the first lines of the message released by Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and All Ukraine placed this Pascha in a radically different context -- a clash between good and evil, right now. It was released on April 25th, the day after Orthodox Christians celebrated Pascha according to the ancient Julian calendar.

This letter was especially symbolic since Metropolitan Onuphry leads Ukraine's oldest Orthodox body, one with strong ties to the giant Russian Orthodox Church.

"The Lord has visited us with a special trial and sorrow this year. The forces of evil have gathered over us," he wrote. "But we neither murmur nor despair" because Pascha is "a celebration of the triumph of good over evil, truth over falsehood, light over darkness. The Resurrection of Christ is the eternal Pascha, in which Christ our Savior and Lord translated us from death to life, from hell to Paradise."

The contrast between these messages underlined a complex reality in Orthodox life after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a land cruelly oppressed by the Soviet Union, but with strong Russian roots through the "Baptism of Rus" in 988. That was when, following the conversion of Prince Vladimir, there was a mass baptism of the people of Kiev -- celebrated for a millennium as the birth of Slavic Christianity.

Metropolitan Onuphry and other Orthodox hierarchs with historic ties to Moscow have openly opposed the Russian invasion, while trying to avoid attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church. The bottom line: Leaders of ancient Orthodox churches will ultimately, at the global level, need to address these conflicts.


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Question for New York Times scribes and others: Did Vladimir Putin dream up the Kievan Rus?

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Question for New York Times scribes and others: Did Vladimir Putin dream up the Kievan Rus?

If you know anything about the New Testament, then you know that St. Paul spend a lot of time and energy in the great cities of Greece.

It would seem logical for one of the ancient patriarchates of Eastern Orthodoxy to be located in Greece, perhaps in Athens, Corinth or Thessaloniki. So who is the patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church? Why are the great churches of Greece led by archbishops, instead of their own patriarch?

That’s a complicated question (click here for Orthodox Wiki timeline) and, as always, the Orthodox will argue about many historical twists and turns. But the big idea is that over the centuries Constantinople grew to become the great city of the wider Greek world and, thus, the leader of Greek Orthodoxy remains in Istanbul. That’s where the Ecumenical Patriarch’s few remaining churches have faced crushing persecution by the Turks. Consider the plight of Turkey’s only seminary, in Halki, which has been shuttered for half a century. Halki is a tragic and sad place. I’ve been there.

Thus, the archbishops in Greece are powerless and without influence? Tell that to the Greeks.

What does this have to do with a simplistic, laugh-to-keep-from-crying paragraph of unattributed information — written in classic “omniscient anonymous" voice — in another New York Times story about the religious tensions in Ukraine? Here is that paragraph:

The Russian church … has made no secret of its desire to unite the branches under a single patriarch in Moscow, which would allow it to control the holiest sites of Orthodoxy in the Slavic world and millions of believers in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, for its part, has been slowly asserting itself under its own patriarch, reviving a separate and independent branch of Eastern Orthodoxy, after the independence of Ukraine in 1991.

Where to begin?

If you know anything about Orthodox Christianity in the Slavic world, you know that the story begins in Kiev in 988 with the “Baptism of Rus“ in the waters of the Dnieper River, after Prince Vladimir embraced Orthodox Christianity as the faith of his lands. The famous Lavra of the Kievan Caves was founded in 1051, marking the birth of monasticism in what would become the Russian world.

Kiev was the key city in Slavic Orthodoxy. However, Moscow grew in importance and, eventually, became the base for the Russian Orthodox Church, much as Constantinople became the great city of the wider Greek world.


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Old news in Turkey: What does Islam teach about turning Christian churches into mosques?

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THE QUESTION:

What does Islam teach about seizing Christian churches to become mosques?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The bitterly contested Hagia Sophia (“Holy Wisdom”) in Constantinople (the city now named Istanbul) was the grandest church in Christendom across nine centuries. Then Muslim conquerors under Mehmed II confiscated the church in 1453 and converted it into the Aya Sofia Mosque. In 1935, Turkey’s government secularized it to be an interfaith museum, but three weeks ago turned it into a working mosque once again.

Christian leaders worldwide are aggrieved by that latest development.

But apart from Christian feelings and fears for the future of the building’s celebrated artwork, in strictly Islamic terms was the 1453 takeover of a church proper? Should it be perpetuated in 2020, and are such takeovers legitimate today? Turkey’s summertime action has sparked new debate among Muslims.

A traditionalist view is well articulated at www.muslimmatters.org by Muhammad Wajid Akhter, a physician on the council of the British Islamic Medical Association who studies Islamic history.

He notes that Christian conquerors in Spain took over the Al-Hambra Palace and Cordoba Mosque, and built Granada Cathedral over the site of a mosque. That is accurate. But when was the last time Christians confiscated a mosque? Those events occurred in 1236, 1492 and 1529. In the centuries since, the world has gone through the Enlightenment, the rise of democracy and widespread support for human rights.

Tolerance-minded Muslims say Istanbul has plenty of mosques already and didn’t need to add one in 2020, Akhter, however, contends that a mosque “is owned by Allah” and Muslims have no right to simply give away “something that does not belong to us.” By the same reasoning, of course, Christians can say Hagia Sophia is sacred ground that belongs to their God, not Mehmed and his forces of 1453.

Akhter dismisses the concern some Muslims express about Christian sensitivities as “impractical” and “untenable.”


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A generation's big global issue: Can centrists win Islam's ideological civil war?

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On July 24, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey, was converted from a museum to a mosque, giving Christians a bitter reminder that this had been the world’s grandest church for nine centuries until the 1453 conquest by Muslim forces.

Most media ignored that — two weeks beforehand — a scholarly leader of what is very likely the world’s largest organization of grass-roots Muslims posted a dramatic challenge about treatment of non-Muslims.

Excerpts from this piece by Yahya Cholil Staquf of Indonesia: “The Islamic world is in the midst of a rapidly metastasizing crisis, with no apparent sign of remission.” To “avert civilizational disaster, people of all faiths must work together to prevent the political weaponization of fundamentalist Islam.”

A summary: Believers must emulate the devout, but more culturally moderate, Muslims in what is now Indonesia who established religious freedom for all even before the young United States did so in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

Yet in our own era, Christianity has all but disappeared in its historic Mideast birthplace, “the latest chapter in a long and tragic history of religious persecution in the Muslim world.” In recent decades, in Africa through the Mideast and across Asia, non-Muslim minorities have, wrote Staquf, suffered “severe discrimination and violence inflicted by those who embrace a supremacist, ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam.”

This “unchecked spread of religious extremism and terror,” in turn, leads to “a rising tide of Islamophobia among non-Muslim populations.”

An “intellectually honest” examination of the situation, he added, shows that the “extremists” can rely on “specific tenets of orthodox authoritative Islam and its historic practice” from classical times, which advocate “Islamic supremacy” and encourage “enmity toward non-Muslims.” This means that, for instance, the “remarkable savagery toward Yazidis and Christians” perpetrated by ISIS in Iraq and Syria was “not a historical aberration.”

These and other newsworthy assertions come from Staquf — who is the general secretary of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama (or NU. The name means “Revival of the Ulama,” the term for the collective body of religious scholars).


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Clock keeps ticking: Will Turkey dare to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque -- again?

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Clock keeps ticking: Will Turkey dare to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque -- again?

Art historian Andrew Gould had studied many copies of the exquisite mosaic of Jesus found high in Istanbul's 6th Century Hagia Sophia cathedral.

But that didn't prepare the architect and sacred artist for what he felt when he stood under the icon, illumined by the soaring windows in the south gallery that overlooks the main floor, under the central dome that is 184 feet high and 102 feet in diameter.

The Deesis ("supplication") icon -- at least twice the size of life -- shows the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist with their heads bowed, framing an image of Christ Pantocrator ("enthroned"). The glass mosaic cubes were set at angles to create a shimmering effect across the gold background and the many-colored images, whether viewed in daylight or with lamps and candles.

Much of this icon was destroyed a century ago as workers probed to find priceless mosaics under layers of plaster and paint added through the centuries after 1453, when the Ottoman armies of Mehmed II conquered Constantinople.

Now, Turkish leaders want to convert Hagia Sophia -- a museum for decades -- back into a mosque.

"There is no more refined icon of Christ anywhere," said Gould, of the New World Byzantine Studios in Charleston, S.C. "Just in terms of information, we have copies we can study. … But visiting Hagia Sophia and seeing this icon under natural light, seeing it in the context of the sanctuary, was crucial to the development of my whole understanding of Orthodox art."

If the "Deesis" is covered again, along with other icons, "this is not something that can be replaced with photographs in art books," he said. "It would hurt artists and believers around the world in so many ways."

The current controversy is rooted in politics, more than lingering tensions between Muslim leaders and Turkey's tiny Christian minority, which has little power other than through ties to Greece, Europe and the United States.

Hagia Sophia became a museum in 1934, a symbol of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's drive to build a modern, truly secular state. Now, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sent many signals that he wants Turkey to return to Islamic principles.

Debates in Turkish media have swirled around whether modern leaders retain the "right of the sword" to reclaim Hagia Sophia, noted Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish journalist and author of the book "Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty."


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No think piece this weekend! Time to take some virtual tours of stunning religion sites

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Enough thinking, especially about the coronavirus crisis.

This is especially true for those of us who are Eastern Orthodox. Today is our Easter — Pascha — on the ancient Christian calendar.

So rather than a lengthy “think piece” to read on this Sunday — as is the norm at this blog — I would like to give readers a chance to do something relaxing and a bit inspiring.

My colleague Clemente Lisi of The King’s College in New York City has created a small collection of Internet links to virtual tours of several important religious sites and regions around the world. Thus, he writes, in a feature for Religion Unplugged:

With most of the world’s population stuck at home in an effort to stem the spread of the coronavirus, travel has come to a standstill. Springtime, and the approaching summer, are typically a time to take a flight and explore another part of the world.

Since most of us are inside and waiting for this pandemic to subside, you can still visit places virtually — with the help of your computer — from the comforts of home. Religious sites and museums, popular with pilgrims and tourists alike, are very popular this time of year.

Staying home doesn’t mean you can’t travel digitally. It is also a chance to research places you’d like to visit once normalcy resumes.

Amen. How else are you going to get to visit the Vatican, the Middle East, important mosques around the world and Westminster Abbey.

But since this is Pascha, allow me to start Lisi’s virutal here — in Hagia Sophia.


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