The World Council of Churches in wartime

Ecumenism, the goal of visible unity among the world’s Christians, seems ever more elusive in our fragmented and fragmenting world. The barriers to a putative “common faith” involve a long-standing intra-Christian debate: How should the faithful relate to modernity and the general posture of cultural liberalism that has come with it? Supporters of the ecumenical movement that birthed the World Council of Churches in 1948 have generally taken a comparatively positive view of modernity and cultural change; many member churches, for instance, ordain women and officiate weddings for same-sex couples.

Such questions of culture and sexual ethics are important in their own right. Often, however, they are engaged as proxies for other conflicts.

A recent example involves Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church and his justification of Russia’s attack on Ukraine as a kind of holy war against the infiltrating decadence of the West, a decadence evinced, he claims, by pride parades that took place in the Donbas region prior to the pandemic. There is a struggle for the soul of the Eastern churches that, by Kirill’s reckoning, constitutes a metaphysical battle. Russia is bound by God, he insists, to win this battle. A truer story, of course, would account for Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attempt to regain geopolitical dominance—and for the ROC’s attempt to claim a portion of the Putin regime’s power.