Orthodox Faith and National Identity in Ukraine: Elite Ideas vs. Local Narratives

• In Event: Identity and Public Opinion in Ukraine and Russia

Abstract

Since the granting of the Tomos of autocephaly and the establishment of an independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in late 2018, some 700 parishes previously belonging to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in unity with the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) voted to switch to OCU. These re-affiliation attempts have been highly contested locally, nationally, and even internationally, given the Russian Orthodox Church’s and Moscow political authorities’ vehement opposition to the establishment of OCU. To date contestation over the creation of an independent Orthodox church in Ukraine has been analyzed from three main perspectives. The first centers on geopolitical battles over Orthodoxy in Ukraine now and in the past, as the issue of Ukrainian church independence goes back to the 17th century and has been coming to the fore at critical historical junctions such as post-WWI, post-WWII, and 1991. Another approach focuses on competing domestic political actors in Ukrainian Orthodox politics, and examines causes and consequences of their support for competing Orthodox churches, their relative power, and changes in this power over time - especially following the 2014 Euromaidan uprising and subsequent Russian aggression. A third perspective focuses on societal attitudes and dynamics. Anthropological and sociological approaches study religious life and lived religious practices of Ukrainian citizens, including fuzzy and fluid religious identities (especially among the self-identified Orthodox). This paper seeks to integrate elite-level and society-level approaches to the study of religious politics in Ukraine by comparing the content of what can be called “bottom-up” and “top-down” narratives articulated in the process of local contestations over belonging of individual Orthodox parishes.
More specifically, the paper investigates how supporters and opponents of parish transfers from UOC-MP to OCU articulate their positions, and compares these local narratives of religious and national belonging with the official positions on the parish transfer process expressed by the two competing churches themselves and by the secular political authorities (Ukrainian government, other Ukrainian political actors such as political parties, as well as the Russian state actors). In late 2018-early 2019, when the bulk of parish transfers took place, local communities often split, with some supporting their parish switching to the OCU while others preferring to remain with the OUC-MP. Parishioners repeatedly and publicly clashed over the status of their parish in venues such as town hall and parish meetings and outside the contested local church buildings. Many of these community clashes were recorded by event participants and uploaded to YouTube. I collected a database of several dozen of such videos from different regions of Ukraine, and this data offers a unique glimpse at how reaffiliation process looks like from the bottom up. The paper will analyses this dataset of YouTube videos (using NVivo software) to identify and examine key narratives for and against parish transfers existing at the level of society, and compares these local “bottom-up” narratives to the “top-down” ones generated by the leadership of the competing churches and by the Ukrainian and Russian state actors. For the latter evidence I use media reports and official documents, as well as nearly twenty in-person interviews I conducted in Ukraine in the summer of 2019.
When contesting belonging of their local Orthodox parishes, are the people echoing arguments made by political and secular elites, or do they articulate alternative understandings of Orthodox and national belonging? If there is a divergence, what are its causes and broader implications? One of my preliminary findings is that, surprisingly, local debates over parish belonging often center not on whether a given parish ought to belong to a “pro-Ukrainian” or a “pro-Russian” church (at the elite level as well as geopolitically, the OCU is commonly characterized as a “pro-Ukrainian” church, in contrast to a “pro-Russian” UOC-MP). Instead, conflict participants at the local level debate which church is the “true Ukrainian church” and why, with each side in the debate claiming national belonging. Differently put, at the level of local communities participants may experience conflict over parish belonging not as a contestation over whether the parish ought to belong to a Ukrainian or a Russian church, but as a contestation over the meaning of a Ukrainian church (and by extension the meaning of Ukrainian identity and nation). By identifying and comparing “bottom-up” and “top-down” narratives surrounding the parish transfer process the paper will thus engage not only the issue of religious belonging and religious politics narrowly, but also broader implications of the parish transfer process for the content of Ukrainian identity, the nation-building process, and the ability of elite actors in Ukraine as well as in Russia to influence these processes and their outcomes.

Author

• Oxana Shevel, Tufts University