The Time for Silence has Passed—Let's Go Witnessing
It is Time to Act, to Pray with the Fire of Elijah and the Tears of Jeremiah.
American Christianity, in general, has been heavily influenced by a mix of bleak Calvinism, Dispensationalism, and Scofield Bible theology. As a result, it has become closely aligned—and often identified—with certain far-right and so-called "conservative" groups that, in reality, have proven to be strongly opposed to authentic Christian values, even to the point of persecuting and killing Christians.
One striking example is the uncritical support for the State of Israel, a government that has shown little regard for the Christian faith or its adherents. Many overlook the fact that a portion of the funding sent to Israeli and other regimes is funneled through corrupt channels and used to oppress Christians. In Palestine, for instance, Israel has demonstrated open hostility toward the Christian population.
Despite this, many Western Christians—misguided by a flawed, post-Resurrection theology that places modern Israel at the center of God's plan—remain blind to the harm being done. In their misplaced zeal, they end up supporting actions and systems that contribute to their own marginalization and the suffering of their fellow believers.
The same inexplicable attitude is now being displayed in the case of aid to the Ukrainian government. Long before the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian authorities were already harassing and oppressing Ukrainian Orthodox Christians—much in the same way that Israel has persecuted Christians in Jerusalem and throughout Palestine. As in Gaza, the Ukrainian state was waging war against segments of its own population, a reality that remains almost entirely unacknowledged and unexplored in Western media and political discourse.
Today, in Ukraine, we are witnessing the desecration of sacred relics and the profanation of the holy resting places of saints interred in the Kyiv Caves Lavra. These are saints who—through their lives, memory, and divine grace—founded and nurtured the Orthodox faith in these lands over a millennium ago. They received the faith not through invention, but as a living tradition passed directly from Christ and His Apostles. And yet, as with the silence surrounding Israel’s actions, American Christians remain astonishingly indifferent, if not willfully ignorant.
What sort of faith is it that supports those who condone the eradication and killing of their own faithful? What sort of faith is it that defends and even encourages the destruction of an ancient Christian faith, its ancient church buildings, monasteries, and properties—and essentially scoffs at the violation of the remains of the founders of the Christian faith in the Slavic lands and beyond? Imagine the global outrage if someone were to exhume Billy Graham or John Nelson Darby, rifling through their remains to confirm they were not “dogs.”
Who will cry out for us? Who in Orthodoxy will hound these predatory forces and chase them back into their dens?
In fact, throughout the Orthodox world, at the time of the issuance of the Ukrainian "Tomos," one of the first groups of faithful Orthodox to stand up for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church were priests of the Alexandrian Patriarchate across Africa.
While much of the Orthodox world stood by in stunned silence, dumbfounded as to what to do or say, the priests of the Alexandrian Patriarchate reacted en masse and refused to obey a Patriarchal order when they were unilaterally commanded to recognize its so-called "validity." Their canonical consciences led them to action—risking their holy orders, their parishes, their livelihoods, and even life and limb. They resisted bribes and threats, taking a stand, we had, until then, only seen on the part of the faithful of the UOC in Ukraine.
Three of these African priests were specifically targeted in a hit piece by RISU (Religious Information Service of Ukraine), authored by Oleksander Drabinko. In that piece, their names, addresses, phone numbers, and passport numbers were all published—while they were traveling to Moscow to meet, with great sorrow and in mourning over their former Patriarchate, with the Moscow Patriarchate’s Office of External Church Relations in order to take shelter under a canonical omophorion. The writer of this article was indirectly threatened by RISU after protesting the publication of their personal information. However, RISU did eventually relent and edit the content.
It is precisely this sort of agitprop—this psychological and political warfare—that the forces aligned against Orthodox Christianity employ. Forces like the governments of Israel, Ukraine, and now Estonia, aided and abetted by the United States through financial and political support of all three, use these methods to mold public opinion and fix it in the concrete of heresy and ignorance.
The decline of the Christian West and the diminished civic and moral character of a once proud Liberal Democracy—the most powerful nation on earth—has caused monumental damage to itself at the cost of Ukrainian, Palestinian, and Syrian lives. If one wishes to question this, let them go and ask a Syrian—and any Ukrainian born prior to August 24th, 1991.
The disconnect between Western Christians and their ancestral Christian heritage is seemingly insurmountable. The historical chasm carved by schism and the Reformation seems to have reared its ugly heads again with terrifying force. Not since the false union of Florence, the betrayal at the Council of Brest, or the Bolshevik Terror has the Orthodox world witnessed such profound and coordinated assault.
When the most powerful country in the world is populated by a misinformed mass of people, clothed in religious sentimentalism, becomes so cemented in the false teachings that guide them—having abandoned their Christian heritage and provenance in favor of relativistic, reductive, comfortable Cafeteria Christianity—entrenched in and marooned on an island of errant and baffling 19th and early 20th century theological agitprop, compounded by 21st-century hyper-jingoism and the egoism of sola scriptura, history unfolds as the chanting of a black mass—and the Devil's own cup is filled!
What we are witnessing is what happens when jingoism mixes with errant religious fanaticism.
We are witnessing is the fruit of 200 years of heretical conditioning in the West. This conditioning has bred an absolute ignorance of Christian history so astonishingly overreaching and penetrating, that Christians from the West are themselves attempting to rebuild the Jewish Temple while supporting a Ukrainian regime that tears down thousand-year-old Christian Churches—such as the Church of the Tithes in Kyiv, completed in the year 996 A.D. No one is fighting this, except persecuted, outnumbered, and impoverished Ukrainians, proving their faith in action—a work, a podvig—and serving as a lesson, teaching us something all-important.
There is no such thing as discount Christianity—Let no one be deceived.
There are no coupons issued for faithfulness. Christianity is not a lifestyle brand. You pay a price, because a price was paid for you. The African priests and the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onuphry are currently paying that price.
It's never too late to find ourselves again—to go deep where Christianity timelessly exists—and abandon such shallow, stubborn, errant modern ideologies. It is not too late to abandon isomorphic and hypomorphic ideologies to embrace our true Christian history and heritage; But we must do so before this amorphism becomes the status quo. That is exactly where the West is headed if it continues to blindly follow its current heading—waging war, in the process, against its own proclaimed Christian identity.
A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us. ― St. Anthony the Great
David Sauls is an American Orthodox convert in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). David is a passionate advocate for the Church in Africa, and patrons an Orthodox mission in Kenya.
