Russian War Crimes and Orthodox Moral Education

A grade school education isn't enough

Accusing the Russian military of committing crimes against humanity in Ukraine is not the same as accusing all Russians of war crimes. Much less is it to accuse individual Russians. At the same time, concerns about not giving offense to Russian or of being misunderstood by those outside the Church should not prevent us from making these allegations when the evidence warrants:

Evidence continues to mount of Russian war crimes and crimes against humanity, including but not limited to:

• Massacres in occupied Bucha and Izyum.

• Deliberate air strikes against civilians, including apartment blocks and clearly marked shelters.

• The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to Russia, including the abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied territory.

• An ongoing effort to erase Ukrainian culture and cultural heritage from Russian-occupied territory.

These atrocities shouldn’t come as a surprise given Moscow’s horrific track record in Syria and elsewhere, but they nonetheless remain shocking and appalling in both scope and scale. No wonder high-level U.S. government officials like Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have publicly and formally accused the Kremlin of committing crimes against humanity — crimes for which Putin and his cronies must be held accountable, unlike the pass Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has received.

Read more here.

I’ve spoken to many Orthodox Christians—clergy and laity—whose thinking about Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine is confused. This confusion, I would ask you to consider, is symptomatic of the poverty of moral education both in our schools and especially in the Church. Many Orthodox Christians—like many American Christians—have never been exposed to the Church’s moral tradition beyond a rather bare list of “do’s and don’t’s.”

A grade school moral education (and so the superficial understanding of the moral life it fosters), is a serious pastoral failure. How can people acquire the “mind of Christ” if they don’t know what Christ thinks? Limiting our catechetical ministry to dogmatic (and only a version as superficial as what we do with morality) sets the faithful (including the clergy) up for failure.

While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Russian Orthodox Church’s support is a great scandal and an unspeakable injustice, Christ brings good out of evil. One, small good I think is how the invasion has required Orthodox Christians to do the hard work required to reflect morally on current events and, by extension, our own lives in Christ.