In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Matthew Dal Santo about his article “Russia, the Ukraine War, and the West’s Empire of Secularization,” from Telos 201 (Winter 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss Augusto Del Noce’s view of twentieth-century secularization as the unfolding of the philosophy of atheism; how Del Noce understood secularization; why, if Marxism is atheistic, Del Noce sees the West as more atheistic than the Soviet Union; why the alliance between the United States and Ukraine is a secularist one; why it is necessary to link religion and politics to avoid secularization; how the idea of the Holy Rus’ presents a politics that realizes a religious project rather than one that replaces a religious project with a nationalist political one, and how we might differentiate between the two possibilities; the distinction between the causality of (or immediate reasons for) the war in Ukraine and its meaning (or higher causality); and how to make sense of a contradiction between the two in the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 201 are available for purchase in our online store.
Russia, the Ukraine War, and the West’s Empire of Secularization
Matthew Dal Santo
Secularity is not merely to deny the existence of God or obstruct the practice of religion; it is also, and even more precisely, to confine God to the practice of religion.
The Religious Rhetoric of the Russian Civilization-State
Religion occupies a striking place in the current war between Russia and Ukraine. Does the war possess a religious-spiritual rationale, or are Russians claims that it does so disingenuous, confected, propaganda? Russian President Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow have both resorted to religious reasons to explain or justify Russia’s invasion of Ukrainian territory. Repeating religious-civilizational rhetoric that Putin first employed following his return to the presidency in 2012 and then redeployed with greater intensity to account for the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, both president and patriarch have claimed or implied that Russia’s so-called “Special Operation” is needed to defend the wider russky mir, “Holy Rus,” or Orthodoxy-based Russian-language civilization that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus share from the secularized anti-civilization of the West. The outline of their claims can be summarized quickly. The Western world into which Ukraine was being drawn through integration into the EU and NATO, the Russians say, has abandoned its Christian roots. Indeed, it has replaced them with a radically anti-Christian ideology of sexual and other liberation. If Russia had failed to intervene, “gay parades” (a regrettably crude expression used on at least one occasion by Patriarch Kirill) would sooner or later unfold in the “Mother of Russian Cities,” Kiev. Hoodwinked by Western posturing about the religious and spiritual neutrality of Western integration, not all Ukrainians understood this, the Russians suggest. But if they did, few would agree that they wanted it. By seeking to prevent the Ukraine’s integration in NATO and the EU, therefore, Russian authorities are saving the Orthodox Christian civilization (“Holy Rus”) that Russia and Ukraine together belong to. Through military action by the Russian civilization-state, the secularization of this corner of Eastern Europe would be resisted.
On the Western side, Russian claims that the war in Ukraine has a genuine spiritual or religious dimension have been met with disdain. Such disdain has come not only from the secular-minded proponents of liberalism, from whom we would expect it, but also from conservative commentators and critics of secularization, such as the Catholic George Weigel, an editor at First Things and author of a leading biography of (St.) John Paul II. To Weigel, it is axiomatic that when they invoke religious or cultural-spiritual justifications for the war, the Russians are lying.[1] Putin and Kirill, Weigel points out, both have a background in the KGB (although those “backgrounds” are by no means equivalent, Putin having been an agent and Kirill, it seems, an informer), and the KGB was an organization that excelled at disinformation during the Cold War. From this, Weigel concludes that the patriarch is a fake Christian and the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church very probably a fake church. Other Christian communities, including the Catholic Church, should rebuke them and terminate ecumenical relations immediately. More to the point, when the Russians intone religious or civilizational motivations for their aggression in Ukraine, when they talk about the defense of the sacred, the Russians are playing tricks. No such motives, Weigel somewhat easily concludes, were seriously involved in the Russian decision to go to war. Rather, Russian motives, utterly Hobbesian in inspiration, are indistinguishable from those of the old Soviet Union: the extension of the power and influence of the historical Russian state and the cultivation of the fear in which it is viewed by its neighbors. Besides, conservatives such as Weigel typically conclude, all Ukrainians want in integrating with the West is democracy, a regime or form of government that is neutral as regards either religion or secularity.[2]
Whom should we believe? In answering that question, this paper does not wish to offer an apology for Russian behavior but to understand the deeper meaning of the conflict; above all, it wants to seize, if possible, the conflict’s religious or theological value in an era marked, in the West at least, by declining religious observance and pronounced secularization. I am less interested in the causes of the war in Ukraine than I am interested in its causality, more interested in the conflict’s meaning than in the motives of the parties to it. Even if the Russian leadership is lying about the reasons for its decision to invade Ukraine, does it necessarily follow that the prevailing Western analysis of the conflict, as devoid of religious meaning, is right?
That the conflict does, in fact, possess a theological causality and a religious meaning will be the argument of this paper. That is, I will argue that in conformity with the transhistorical meaning of history since the beginning of the twentieth century, the higher causality of the Russia–Ukraine war is secularization—specifically, the universalizing secularization embodied in Western foreign policy and the expansion of the West generally. After all, even if the war had never taken place, would anyone seriously doubt that the effect of Ukraine’s successful integration into the Euro-Atlantic world would not be greater secularization—the importation into Ukrainian culture from outside of the cultural forms of secularized Western culture—and that if for some reason it wasn’t, pressure would be brought to bear (as it has been on Hungary and Poland) to ensure that it was? The answer, as we shall see, has less to do with religious observance than it does with philosophy and how the latter is realized, transhistorically, in history.
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1. Among other examples, see George Weigel, “Needed: An Ecumenical Reset,” First Things, March 9, 2022, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2022/03/needed-an-ecumenical-reset.
2. That there is a tension between Weigel’s condemnation of Russian Orthodoxy and Weigel’s own role as a public intellectual is reflected in the fact that his writings should appear in a magazine whose masthead announces the late Fr. Richard Neuhaus’s principle that “culture is the root of politics and religion the root of culture.” See “Richard John Neuhaus Society,” First Things website, https://www.firstthings.com/richard-john-neuhaus-society. If the idea here is that religion should bear on politics through the medium of culture, then the role of politics in supporting religion through legislative provisions regulating the culture is implicitly admitted. How far is this in practice from the Russian Church’s position on Church-state relations?
