NICHOLAS DENYSENKO
Religion plays a significant role in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Patriarch Kirill, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), has legitimized its violence and promoted ideological tropes justifying Russia’s invasion. Controversial recent decisions by the Ukrainian government to expose and prosecute alleged collaborators among the clergy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC)—until recently part of the ROC— has garnered the attention of the United Nations. The policies of the institutional Orthodox churches in Russia and Ukraine figure into the larger geopolitical conflicts that motivated Russia’s decision to wage war on Ukraine.
Yet the public focus on institutional churches and statements by their leaders obscures a far more significant reality of religious life in Ukraine. Ukraine embraces religious pluralism, even among its predominantly Orthodox population. The situation on the ground, among ordinary Ukrainian believers, is one that challenges the image of rigid confessional loyalties to one of two Orthodox jurisdictions in Ukraine: the UOC and the recently created Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU).
Catherine Wanner, professor of anthropology at Penn State University, has observed religious life in Ukraine closely since the end of the Soviet era. Her recent book, Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine, clarifies misconceptions about religious practice, teases out the perspectives and viewpoints of individual believers, and brilliantly demonstrates how vernacular, affective religiosity evolves and contributes in turn to the development of popular perspectives in the ongoing context of war.
Wanner completed this book before Russia’s full-scale invasion. In fact, she notes that the typesetting for the manuscript was finalized on the first day of that invasion—24 February 2022. Her study instead captures the rapid evolution of Ukrainian public sentiment against Russia during the earlier phase of the war, in what is described as the “contained uncontrolled zone” of Donbas (182). Yet the timing of this book is fortuitous and not a lost opportunity, because it provides clear confirmation that the war actually began in 2014, and not 2022.
Wanner starts by establishing her methodological framework. She argues that previous studies on religion in Ukraine undervalue the “relational interplay between institutional religion and vernacular forms of religious practice” by focusing too much upon practices that go beyond those authorized by church doctrine and law (7). Wanner seeks to show how this relational interplay evolves and shapes public life in Ukraine. The rich, sensual textures and gestures of Eastern Orthodoxy’s liturgies are found to facilitate an affective atmosphere that Wanner finds conducive to vernacular religiosity (8).
Wanner introduces her work by defining Ukraine’s confessional space in Chapter 1 (35). Here she pays special attention to the “Russian World” [Russian: Russkii mir] platform that has been promulgated by Patriarch Kirill with a view to claiming religious space in the post-Soviet context.
Wanner’s presentation gains momentum in Chapters 2 and 3, where she offers examples of vernacular religiosity in dialogue with the institutional church. Her examples include individual testimonies of “places animated with prayer” (58-59). The description of people’s experiences of Kharkiv’s “Goldberg Church” [Church of the Three Holy Hierarchs on Goldberg Street] is one of the most poignant. The structure itself has a unique history, originating as a warehouse before its transformation into a church by a Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity (60-61). The internal configuration features open expanse, abundance of light, and medieval Byzantine chants (61). Wanner notes this church’s reputation as a “place animated with prayer” [Ukrainian: namolene mistse, Russian: namolennoe mesto] as an example of a public space with a unique history that is conducive to vernacular religiosity because it promotes inner peace, calmness, and connection to departed family members (62). The qualities of the space contribute to the formation of individual religiosity despite the church’s affiliation with the Moscow Patriarchate—its confessional identity largely does not figure in people’s experiences (62).
The reality in which public spaces used by confessional institutions promote the formation of vernacular religiosity is epitomized by Wanner’s clever description of religious pilgrimages as “vacationing with a purpose” (71). Monasteries in Ukraine are public shrines, despite the apparently opaque agreements for their use between the government and institutional churches. Wanner’s assertions about the interplay of vernacular religiosity and institutional religion are confirmed with her presentation of pilgrims who visited a monastery in search of various degrees of spiritual therapy. Some of the women lied about their church affiliation in order to gain access to the monastery and its blessings. Wanner comments that the pilgrims’ willingness to do this reveals their mistrust in church leaders and rejection of confessional politics (73). Her hypothesis at this point of the study previews one of her most profound assertions: Ordinary believers use “individual agency” to “reduce the political instrumentalization of religion” (188).
Wanner’s study takes a decisive turn in her chapters examining the significance of the 2013-14 Maidan uprising, the creation of public shrines for commemorative spaces, and the ministries of military chaplains during the first phase of the war with Russia. She enriches readers’ understanding and interpretation of the Maidan through a series of powerful eyewitness accounts on its meaning (89-90). She also emphasizes the struggle of the Maidan as Ukrainians’ aspiration towards dignified human life and invites readers to see parallels between it and the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia (114).
As an epic historical turn, the Maidan both challenged the political orientations of the institutional churches and displayed the vernacular religiosity of the Ukrainian people. Wanner engages the first-rate theological analyses of Cyril Hovorun and Myroslav Marynovych in their observations on the churches’ opportunity to commit to solidarity with the people and fold their rejection of confessional politics into momentary episodes of ecumenical unity. Wanner’s brief discussion of the creation of an ecumenical temple on Maidan Square, which was without any particular confessional patron and open to all, seems to suggest that the current of vernacular religiosity both superseded confessional claims to predominance and provided a snapshot of a potentially new Ukrainian nation that had no anchor in a particular past (97).
Wanner’s presentation of public commemorative spaces, the intellectual debates surrounding their design, and the rapid evolution of Ukrainians’ rejection of Russia in image, sound, verse, and song reveals the tensions caused by the convergence of public mourning, rage, and the relentless push for freedom and democracy independent of Russian domination. Wanner compares the erection of the shrine to the Heavenly Hundred [Maidan protesters killed by police snipers in early 2014] to the American Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, before considering the multivalence of public symbols (124). Her discussion of the memorial wall commemorating deceased soldiers at St. Michael’s GoldenDomed Monastery in Kyiv as a potential expression of rage is an important elucidation of the interplay between events, emotions, and the possibilities for transforming shrines from spaces of grieving into sources of hatred and rage.
The exploration of public shrines extends to the final chapter on the ministries of military chaplains and the interaction between secular and religious forms of therapy. Wanner astutely observes that the Soviet regime used psychiatry as a tactic of waging war on its own citizens, a sharp memory that induced pain and stigmatized psychiatric care (171). Her profiles of military chaplains explore the possibilities for using religious practices to promote healing for soldiers as well as the wider public. Wanner’s discussion of this issue represents her own expertise and also confirms her thesis on the interplay of vernacular religiosity with institutional religion. The construction of interconfessional chapels in hospitals evinces the power of vernacular religiosity, while the ministries carried out by chaplains express the acknowledgement by some church officials of the power of everyday religion.
While Wanner’s study focuses on the period between the Maidan and the full-scale Russian invasion, it also encompasses the legacy of the Soviet era. Her study reveals the convergence of multiple phenomena: challenges to modern Ukrainian identity in confessional conflicts, Russian aggression, and Ukrainians’ underlying desire to construct their own future. Her analyses of interviews with individuals and explorations of public commemorative spaces confirm her thesis on the power of individual agency to express a personal religiosity that draws from the official Orthodox cult but does not comply with all its rules and stipulations.
Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine also engages three issues that will require further study and discussion in the coming years. The first is the rapidly evolving crisis of the OCU and UOC. The UOC’s attempt to find a liminal space of separation from both the ROC and the OCU in the context of the war convinced neither the Ukrainian people nor the Zelensky administration. Wanner notes that the percentage of “just Orthodox” among Orthodox believers in Ukraine—defined as those who eschew confessional affiliation—has declined since the creation of the OCU in 2019 and the subsequent escalation of Russian aggression. The UOC still enjoys some support, but this is rapidly declining, even among its own clergy. The dynamic reconfiguration of confessional entities in Ukraine may portend a shift towards a population more sympathetic to the OCU.
The second issue concerns the formation of public spaces and the use of houses of worship owned by the people rather than religious entities. In this context Wanner notes the 2005 decision by the administration of President Viktor Yushchenko to establish 14 October—the feast day of the Protection of the Mother of God—as a national holiday (156). Many of Wanner’s examples straddle the line between public commemorative spaces or shrines and the slow evolution of a civic religion. Discerning this line is a topic warranting further analysis, especially given the propensity for the politics of memory to be exploited for discrimination, violence, and war.
The third issue relates to Wanner’s presentations on mourning, grief, and therapy. Her focused discussion of these in the chapter devoted to military chaplaincy contrasts spiritual and secular therapeutics. Here she does not engage with the danger posed by clergy who conflate spiritual practices with psychology, especially in the ritual practice of confession and reconciliation. It would be helpful to tease out the role of sacramental confession in promoting healing among those afflicted by the war. However, Wanner’s entire study hints at the role played by public shrines in promoting a mode of death and resurrection: grief and mourning, the act of dying to the destructive practices of the past, and of rising to a new national life. Wanner’s study therefore provides fertile ground for a fruitful discussion on public healing and reconstruction.
In summation, Wanner’s study of religiosity in modern Ukraine is original and ground-breaking. It validates her thesis on the power of vernacular religiosity and offers numerous pathways for further exploration in the areas of confessional politics, civic religion, and public health.
Nicholas Denysenko is Emil and Elfriede Jochum University Professor and Chair, and Professor of Theology at Valparaiso University in Indiana. His most recent book, The Church’s Unholy War: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, was published in May 2023.
