Churches in the Ukrainian Public Square

Abstract

During the winter of 2013–2014, hundreds of thousands protested in Kyiv against the regime of Viktor Yanukovych. As a result of the clashes with police, over one hundred civil protesters lost their lives, and hundreds were wounded by the troops loyal to the president, who eventually had to run away from Ukraine. Those events, which have been branded as “the revolution of dignity,” are unthinkable without the presence of the churches at the Maidan—the central square of the Ukrainian capital. Any picture of the Maidan missing the churches would be incomplete and incorrect. The Maidan was not only a political and social event, but also a religious phenomenon. It explained itself in religious terms and articulated its demands through religious symbols. More importantly and less obviously, it created a new matrix of relationship between the churches and society in Ukraine. This article explores some aspects of the new matrix. The role of the Ukrainian churches in creating a new model of their relationship with the public square, which was shaped by the Maidan, is rather passive. Most churches failed to fit religious expectations of the Maidan. Reactions of some of them are still inadequate to the social awakening of the Ukrainian people: instead of embracing the changes that the Maidan brought to Ukrainian society, they closed themselves in self-imposed ghettos, and preserved in those ghettos the pre-Maidan ethos. The churches received and still receive the Maidan and its outcomes differently. Their differentiation in this regard widens the existing gap between them. New strategies of rapprochement of the churches with the Ukrainian public square and between each other should be elaborated. This article concludes with suggestions for such new strategies.

Orthodox Christianity and Gender

“…The memorial space was sacralized (Wanner 2017; Zorgdrager 2016b), as were the Maidan protests themselves, as a "Revolution of Dignity" ( Dymyd, 2014;Fylypovych and Horkusha 2015). The civic uprising of Maidan transformed the role of religion and religious institutions in Ukraine (Hovorun 2015). At Maidan, religion, including Orthodoxy, went public.…”

“…The war revived and sharpened older, unresolved conflicts between the churches. The situation of transition with a weak central government caused the churches to return to their traditional patterns of behavior: mutual distrust, defining identity through differentiation, competition, and conflict (Hovorun 2015;Krawchuk 2016;Kalenychenko 2018a). As religious discourse and practices became intertwined with nationalism, ethnicity, language, and geopolitics, this type of top-down public Orthodoxy can be better called civil religion, as in Bellah's original (1967) understanding.…”

Literary history as provocation of national identity, national identity as provocation of literary history

“…The European affiliation of Ukrainian literature, its 'kinship with Western culture, literature and art' is emphasized, as is the rapprochement achieved in Early Modern cultural institutions of Ukraine between 'the Byzantine Orthodox East' and the 'Roman Catholic West' (2014: 6) and, more generally, the ongoing influence of Christian religiosity upon Ukrainian culture. It is difficult not to detect in these formulations allusions to the Euromaidan's pro-European orientation and its much remarked-upon ecumenical religiosity (Kozyrska, 2014;Hovorun, 2015;Wanner, 2014). Likewise, a discourse that refers to the historical 'struggle for Ukraine's independence' or the 'struggle of the people for statehood, for a national church, culture, education and language' cannot be disconnected from the context of the war, conceptualized as a battle to protect from neo-colonial aggression the sovereignty, political and cultural, that was the recent culmination of a protracted and painful process of national evolution.…”