Did you know that Vladimir

Putin’s rule of Russia is a “miracle from God”? That the split between Ukraine and Russia is based not on Ukraine’s aspirations for democracy and self-determination, but on nefarious “external forces”? That Putin’s military intervention in eastern Ukraine was necessary because Russian speakers there refused to hold “gay parades” and were being persecuted for it?

Doesn’t ring a bell? Then allow me to introduce you to His Holiness Patriarch Kiril, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, head of the Russian Orthodox Church and spiritual leader of a 100 million people. Give or take. He puts the Holy in Putin’s Holy War. Excuse me, the Holy Special Military Operation.

Turns out Kiril is a pretty interesting guy. Before he was His Holiness, he was Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev. He was also a KGB agent.

This isn’t exactly breaking news. Gundyayev’s role as a KGB spy was reported in 2009, based on reviews of material from Soviet archives. Those same archives also showed the previous patriarch to be KGB. I guess if you believe church-state separation is an evil godless Western plot, you might as well go all in.

I wish I could say a former KGB spy was the only religious leader to support Putin, but I’d be wrong. We don’t even need to leave our shores to find one. I’m talking about the evangelical leader Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son and heir to his dad’s televangelical empire.

In February 2014, just days after Putin launched his invasion of Crimea, Graham publicly applauded Putin’s attempts to “protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian propaganda.” In 2015, he met with Kiril and Putin, noting that “millions of Americans would like [Putin] to come and run for president of the United States.” Sadly, he might have been right.

Thankfully, virtually every major Christian leader, in the Russian Orthodox community and outside, has condemned Putin’s war. The Orthodox Christian clergy in Ukraine have been particularly emphatic in their denunciation of Kiril. Barely four years ago, they reversed three centuries of history and broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church.

His Kgb-ness blames this not on the behavior of his church and his boss, but on evil Western influences. No surprise there.

It frightens me to see the similarity between the Russian Patriarch’s embrace of Putin’s war and the Jan. 6 attack on the capitol. Just a few days ago, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-calif.) correctly identified Christian nationalism at the heart of the operation. Well aware of the problem, Christianity Today described the capitol attack as signifying a ”Post-christian Church”, courageously admitting and condemning the role of right-wing evangelicals in its planning and execution.

Megachurches that endorse presidential candidates as “anointed by God” and whip up the faithful with apocalyptic visions about an “end times” war with Islam, seem little different to me from Kiril and his demented ramblings about Putin and Russia as the savior of the world from the godless, decadent West.

Who do we have like the Christians of the Ukrainian Orthodox church, who have the courage of their convictions to push back against an unholy alliance of faith and power?

I suggest they are those Christians who understand their values are best lived by example, and not enforced at the point of a gun.

They are those Christians who understand a government that permits others to have different values is not attacking yours. This is a key difference between East and West. I worry it might be irreconcilable.

What then are we to make of a holy war where soldiers slaughter hundreds of children huddled in a theater, as has happened in Mariupol? Where unarmed civilians were forced to kneel and then shot in the head, as happened in Bucha? Where their commander in chief prominently wears a silver cross on his chest, takes communion regularly, and boasts of his secret baptism?

The great Enlightenment thinker Voltaire saw this coming. He knew a profound human truth that cries out to us three centuries later, through the screams of slaughtered children everywhere:

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.