It would seem that supporting a war of conquest accompanied by war crimes is incompatible with religious conscience. How can a religious person remain indifferent when the residents of a neighboring country – including fellow believers – are denied the right to live? Before the war, Russian Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Muslims, and Krishnaites communicated with their fellow believers in Ukraine, recognizing a shared identity. Yet when faced with the choice between supporting a war against a neighboring people and preserving fellowship with their Ukrainian co-believers, most of them chose the war. Is it possible to change their minds? How did it happen that the messianic idea of Russia became more important to them not only than the lives of their fellow believers, but even than their own religion?
If support for the war were merely connected to ignorance or misunderstanding resulting from exposure to Russian propaganda, they could perhaps be persuaded otherwise by the testimony of fellow believers and friends from Ukraine whom they had trusted before the war. However, this is not simply a matter of misconceptions, but of embracing a new goal-setting in defiance of their previous religious experience and relationships with fellow believers. This new goal-setting is accompanied by a particular type of collective emotional experience – a quasi-religious experience.
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The Goal-Setting of Social Institutions
Why is Russia unable to abandon military expansion? This is connected to its goal-setting, namely the messianic idea of gathering lands. Goal-setting is an orientation toward a goal or mission that gives meaning to existence.
There are two types of goal-setting in social institutions:
The goal-setting of some institutions is expressed through supporting the internal life of a community, communication among its members, and the satisfaction of their needs. Examples include hobby clubs or regional associations, whose existence is justified simply by maintaining a shared space for communication and mutual support.
The goal-setting of other institutions lies in something external to the internal life of the community. For example, a political party has meaning only insofar as it implements a particular political program. If this task is not fulfilled, the party loses its reason for existence, even if its members still enjoy meeting and socializing with one another.
A similar distinction can also be observed at the level of states. Some states are oriented toward internal development, the welfare of the population, and peaceful coexistence with their neighbors. Others structure their existence around a particular mission. Such states are prepared to wage aggressive wars, even when doing so is destructive to themselves.
Every religion exists in two dimensions: in the inner lives of people as a spiritual tradition, and in external public life as a religious social institution. However, as a social institution, religion differs from secular institutions precisely in the nature of its goal-setting.
The goal-setting of secular institutions exists within the social sphere. They address specific political, economic, or cultural tasks and help organize public life. The goal-setting of religious institutions is oriented toward a higher realm – that is, toward transcendent being beyond everyday life. Their ultimate purpose is connected with human salvation, liberation from suffering, or overcoming the meaninglessness of existence through turning toward a higher reality.
Because of this, under normal conditions religion and secular society can coexist without interfering with one another, since they pursue different aims in social life and in relation to transcendent being.
The Messianic Idea of Russia Distorts Religious Goal-Setting
Under conditions of dictatorship, the Russian authorities demand complete loyalty from social institutions, including religious ones, as well as support for the war against Ukraine. In these circumstances, religious organizations face a choice: either adopt a neutral position, thereby risking marginalization and repression, or adapt themselves to the demands of the authorities. However, such adaptation requires altering religious goal-setting in such a way that the goal of religious salvation comes to be viewed as secondary to a supposedly higher objective – the fulfillment of Russia’s historical mission.
As a result, an ideology emerges that is religious in form but political in its goal-setting, and which can be classified neither as a religion nor as a secular worldview. At its core lies a fusion of religious practice with political messianism, allowing it to be characterized as a quasi-religion.
As early as the fifteenth century, during the confrontation between the Principality of Moscow and Novgorod, the messianic idea of the “gathering of lands” began to take shape. Initially, it received Orthodox religious justification through the concept of “Moscow as the Third Rome.” Later, during the Soviet period, it was reinterpreted within the framework of atheistic communist ideology while retaining its expansionist character. The current situation demonstrates that support for this messianic idea is not unique to the Orthodox Church, since it is shared by representatives of many different confessions, including Protestants, Muslims, and Krishnaites.
The Russian Quasi-Religion
Most Russians are convinced that they live in the most peace-loving country in the world – one that has never attacked anyone, but has only repeatedly been subjected to external aggression. In other words, they regard all wars fought by Russia as defensive, while the expansion of Russian territory resulting from these wars is interpreted as the liberation of other peoples and their voluntary reunification with Russia. Put differently, Russians perceive aggressive wars as the just restoration of world order. Only by becoming part of Russia, in their view, do other peoples acquire the true meaning of their existence.
In order to justify war within a religious context, it is necessary to portray the enemy not merely as a political rival, but as the embodiment of absolute evil and an enemy of God. As a result, the surrounding world comes to be perceived as a kingdom of evil opposed by Russia. The West is portrayed as the incarnation of evil forces seeking to destroy traditional values, religion, and the “Russian world.” Consequently, the idea of human salvation is replaced by the idea of struggle against Western civilization.
In religion, movement toward a higher transcendent principle may be accompanied by spiritual struggle against dark otherworldly forces that hinder human salvation. In a quasi-religion, however, the image of these dark forces is projected onto Western civilization as a whole. Ukraine is viewed as an apostate that has fallen away from Russia and sided with evil, and therefore must either be brought back by force or destroyed. For this reason, Russian believers not only refuse to listen to their Ukrainian fellow believers, but recoil from them with religious horror, as though they were people who had crossed over to the side of demonic forces.
As religion is gradually displaced by quasi-religion, inner religious experiences are replaced by experiences resembling psychological dependency. They can be compared to addiction: a person experiences euphoria from participation in a “great mission,” but when confronted with the truth and moments of mental clarity, they undergo something akin to withdrawal symptoms. This, in turn, provokes aggression toward anyone attempting to convey truthful information to them. As a result, they once again return to listening to propagandists in order to regain the euphoric state.
On the basis of this quasi-religious experience, adherents of different religions develop a new shared identity with all those who recognize Russia’s mission as the highest value, while excluding their Ukrainian fellow believers from this community. The round table discussion “World Religions Against the Ideology of Nazism and Fascism in the 21st Century,” held in the building of the State Duma of the Russian Federation on March 29, 2022, clearly demonstrated how representatives of different confessions unite around a dualistic perception of the world based on the opposition between “us” and “them,” good and absolute evil. Through their speeches at the round table, they effectively proclaimed a new quasi-religion in relation to which their traditional religious differences were regarded as secondary. Since these speeches did not provoke any significant critical reaction from their followers, it can be concluded that this quasi-religion has become one of the most important social factors shaping religious consciousness in Russia – a factor that cannot be ignored.
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