As the fighting grinds on, the backlash against the pro-war nuns has continued. At a Christmas fair in the Polish city of Szczecin, Belarusian pro-democracy activists protested in front of the nuns’ stall, accusing shoppers of “supporting torture in Belarusian prisons and Russian aggression against Ukraine”. Ukrainians in Belfast warned of the nuns’ ties to the Kremlin and urged the city council not to host them again. Last Christmas, in the parish of Täby, a suburb of Stockholm, the rector allowed the nuns to flog their wares in the church corridor. But the Church of Sweden later warned that the nuns “use their income to support Russian nationalism” and “have close ties with GRU”, referring to Russia’s military intelligence service. It advised its believers “against supporting their activities in any way”.

The Saint Elisabeth Convent in Minsk refutes such claims. On its website, it says money from the sales helps orphans and funds “humanitarian aid” for residents of Russian occupied Donbas. Yet Archpriest Andrey Lemeshonok, the convent’s spiritual father, has made no secret of his backing of the invasion. He once boasted that his nuns were part of “a combat unit”, fighting for Russia’s future. Saint Elisabeth nuns, with flak jackets over their habits, have been photographed in occupied Ukraine and posing with Russian flags decorated with the pro-war Z symbol.

Four and a half years ago, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Kirill did not call for peace. Instead he called Russia’s opponents in Ukraine “evil forces”, casting the war as a metaphysical battle against what he labeled the corrupting values of the West. Since then, his rhetoric has only hardened, sanctifying the bloodshed in Ukraine. But his hawkishness is nothing new: a poisonous co-dependency between church and state has existed for centuries. Many of the patriarch’s predecessors were under the Kremlin’s thumb and in hock to the secret police. In Soviet times, not a single bishop was appointed without the blessing of the KGB. But today, more than ever before, the church acts as an instrument of Moscow’s geopolitical power projecting influence, and posing a growing threat, across Europe.

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European security agencies increasingly view Russian church networks with suspicion. An open-source investigation by the Kyiv-based Molfar Intelligence Institute in late 2024 concluded that the ROC “constructs churches near strategic facilities, government institutions, and military bases across various European countries” in a systematic effort to use religious outposts for espionage. In Bulgaria, Czechia, North Macedonia and elsewhere, “spies in cassocks” have been used as an alternative to diplomatic cover after the expulsion of Russian embassy staff following the invasion of Ukraine. In 2024, a priest from a Russian church in the Czech resort town of Karlovy Vary was expelled over suspicions of hostile activities. “We would be particularly foolish,” said one Czech MEP,  “if we did not recognize that Russia is undeniably using the Orthodox Church to carry out its hybrid warfare.”

Russia’s church has even tried to sway elections. Ahead of Moldova’s 2024 presidential poll and EU integration referendum, Russian state officials funded all-expenses-paid “pilgrimages” to Moscow for dozens of Moldovan Orthodox priests and gave them debit cards loaded with hundreds of dollars as going-home presents. In exchange, the clerics were instructed to create channels on the Telegram messaging app warning against joining the EU.

Moscow has also been quietly hoovering up strategic real estate. In Vardø, a remote Arctic town close to Norway’s GLOBUS radar station, the Moscow Patriarchate secured local approval, and even Norwegian state funding, to build a chapel. Clergy from the nearby Russian diocese of Plesetsk and Kargopol, including its bishop, made frequent visits to Vardø to unveil monuments to Norwegian partisans and consecrate Orthodox crosses. They said the chapel would serve Orthodox sailors and be a reminder of the cultural ties between Russia and Norway. But when the proposal was eventually submitted, the chapel had grown to 17 meters in height and, according to Vardø’s current mayor, the Russian bishop insisted the exact location under Nato radars had been “dictated” to him “by God himself”. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and growing scrutiny of Moscow-linked institutions, the plans were shelved.

But many Russian churches have been built in sensitive spots, including in neighboring Sweden. The Church of the Holy Mother of God of Kazan in the town of Västerås, west of Stockholm, built and consecrated in 2024, is near a major airport, a water treatment works and a network of energy companies. Markus Göransson, a researcher at the Swedish Defense University, felt it was too close for comfort. “When Sweden’s defense forces undertake exercises on or near the airport… they do so under possible surveillance from the church,” he complained. Moreover, locals discovered that the plot of land for the church had been bought by Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear corporation which also, through an intermediary, funded the construction. Last August, the agency overseeing non-state religion funding in Sweden cut off state subsidies to the Västerås parish citing security concerns.

Finland, meanwhile, knows Russian pressure only too well. It shares an 833-mile border with its eastern neighbor, the longest in the EU. Decades of conflict and more recent hybrid tactics have fueled deep distrust. After the invasion, officials in the Finnish city of Turku moved quickly to close a Moscow-linked Orthodox church near a naval base, the port, government offices and Russia’s consulate. Governments in other countries have also wised up. Following the open-source intelligence findings of the Molfar report, governments across Europe are responding with sanctions, security investigations and pressure on Moscow-linked churches to cut ties with the Kremlin.

The issue is especially acute in the three Baltic states, where the Orthodox Church has become a flashpoint between a Soviet past and a European future. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are firmly anchored in the West through Nato and the EU, but all have sizable Russian-speaking populations, many descended from the Soviet era. Few attend church regularly, yet for many, Orthodoxy remains closely tied to Russian identity. In Estonia, where more than a quarter of the 1.4 million population are native Russian speakers, that makes the issue particularly sensitive. Parliament has now ordered Orthodox churches to sever ties with Moscow or face closure by the end of the year.

The sharpest confrontation to date in Estonia has been with the Pühtitsa Convent, which is a stavropegic monastery, meaning it comes under the direct authority of Patriarch Kirill rather than the local diocese. Pühtitsa’s abbess, Filareta Kalatšova, argues that the convent cannot unilaterally drop its subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate without breaking Church law. In an open letter to Parliament, she accused Estonian MPs of forcing her to commit a canonical crime. Though Martin Tulit, the Estonian official in charge of religious affairs, pointed out that the 134-year-old convent has changed its canonical affiliation before — including during the nation’s period of independence between the two world wars.

Outside Russia and occupied Ukraine, some Orthodox clerics who refused to follow Moscow orders eventually found they had other options. In January 2023,  in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, I met five unemployed priests who had been serving in a diocese linked to the Moscow Patriarchate but were defrocked for opposing the war. One had become a taxi driver to feed his family. The clerics were in limbo until the following year when Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople agreed to reinstate them under his jurisdiction. Not all the parishioners reacted well to the swap. Father Vladimiras Seliavko said many cold shouldered him and even relatives viewed him as a traitor but he “could not remain with a patriarch who blessed war criminals”. Although the Orthodox have no Pope, the Constantinople Patriarch, based in today’s Istanbul, is the closest equivalent. He is also known as the Ecumenical Patriarch and — much to Moscow’s annoyance — is seen as primus inter pares: first among equals and senior among all Orthodox bishops. Some Russian priests defrocked and forced into exile for refusing to read Kirill’s mandatory Victory Prayer have also been transferred to Bartholomew’s jurisdiction.

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In northern Europe, Poland and the Baltics, where Catholicism and Protestantism dominate, Russia’s church is widely seen as an arm of the Kremlin rather than a religious institution. The picture is very different in Orthodox eastern Europe, particularly in Serbia, Bulgaria and Georgia, where Moscow retains far deeper religious and cultural ties. Indeed, one of the challenges in countering the Russian Orthodox Church’s political influence is the hold it still has over its believers and its propensity to treat any criticism as tantamount to religious persecution. Last month, Bulgaria successfully blocked the European Union’s attempt to sanction Kirill. “The era of the Crusades is over,” said the country’s prime minister, Rumen Radev. He said he was wary of alienating millions of Eastern Orthodox believers. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church is administratively self-governing but its patriarch, Daniel, has aligned himself with Kirill’s position on the war. He warned his clergy against “inciting hatred” by labeling Russia as the “sole and unprovoked aggressor”.

Then there is the fraught question of the church in Ukraine. The establishment of the self-governing Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2018, with the blessing of Bartholomew, was a slap in the face to Putin and his vision of the Russian World. But it was also a humiliation for Kirill. His Church, the biggest and the richest in the Orthodox world, stood to lose at least a fifth of its 150 million members, thousands of parishes and several hundred churches and monasteries. Nato encroachment aside, Ukraine’s desire to cut ties with the mother church in Moscow, to which it has been linked for three centuries, became a casus belli.

Disagreements over which Orthodox church in Ukraine is the most legitimate have not gone away. Even today, as bombs rain down on Ukrainian cities, many parishioners are reluctant to change jurisdictions to the autonomous Orthodox Church of Ukraine. They believe that it is uncanonical and that joining it means that they will be deprived of divine grace. This agenda is relentlessly pushed by the Kremlin. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, hardly an authority on matters ecclesiastical, routinely invokes “canon law” to condemn Ukrainian and Western action against the branch of the church historically linked to Moscow.

Such talk leaves parishioners particularly open to manipulation. “The church is very convenient for dictatorships”, says Father Vladimiras, one of the five Lithuanian priests defrocked by Moscow, “because any propaganda can be spread through its channels. Believers are accustomed to trusting their clergy and rarely doubt the statements of their patriarch, bishops or priests.” Recent reports in the Ukrainian media suggest Orthodox parishes in Western Europe are being used to recruit Ukrainian refugees. It is not clear how these refugees would be deployed, but it’s not unimaginable they could become Russian intelligence assets.

Throughout the Cold War, Soviet propaganda relentlessly targeted Uncle Sam. Now, Europe has morphed into Russia’s main enemy. And the Russian Church is key to Putin’s plan to destroy European liberal democracy and the institutions underpinning it. According to Kirill, the continent is mired in moral decay thanks to its acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights; Orthodox politicians and talk show hosts often use the pejorative term “Gayropa” instead of Evropa.

The war has given the Patriarch a chance to reassert his authority in a post-Soviet world as he championed the twin causes of Orthodox unity and Russian imperialism. Since the Western world “has fallen into Satanism”, in Kirill’s view, Russia functions as the Katechon — the biblical force that restrains the Antichrist. In a recent sermon he praised Russia’s atomic bomb for thwarting its enemies plans to “to destroy and enslave the Motherland”. In other words, massive military destruction is justified as an act of cosmic purification.

Europe may now have to confront this increasingly aggressive alliance of “the missile and the incense burner”, as one French theologian put it, with little help from across the Atlantic. If previous US administrations made equality for sexual minorities a pillar of American diplomacy, Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy, published last November, puts “traditional values” at its heart instead. On a trip to Texas last year for the BBC, I was struck by how some ultra-conservative Americans now see Russia as a Christian bulwark — even a model to emulate. The strategy contains little criticism of Moscow despite the mounting death toll, while voicing support for “patriotic parties”, several of which enjoy the Kremlin’s favor and, in some cases, the backing of its pliant church. For a continent already facing a resurgent Russia, Europe’s isolation on this issue is an uncomfortable prospect and one it can no longer afford to ignore.

Returning to Kyev in triumph, Vladimir proceeded to summon the whole city to the banks of the river Dnieper for a mass baptism. The year is 988. This is the founding, iconic act of Russian Orthodox Christianity. It was from here that Christianity would spread out and merge with the Russian love of the motherland, to create a powerful brew of nationalism and spirituality. In the mythology of 988, it was as if the whole of the Russian people had been baptised. Vladimir was declared a saint. When the Byzantine empire fell, the Russians saw themselves as its natural successor. They were a “third Rome”.

Soviet Communism tried to crush all this — but failed. And in the post-Soviet period, thousands of churches have been built and re-built. Though the West thinks of Christianity as something enfeebled and declining, in the East it is thriving. Back in 2019, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, boasted that they were building three churches a day. Last year, they opened a Cathedral to the Armed Forces an hour outside Moscow. Religious imagery merges with military glorification. War medals are set in stained glass, reminding visitors of Russian martyrdom. In a large mosaic, more recent victories — including 2014’s “the return of Crimea” — are celebrated. “Blessed are the peacemakers” this is not.

At the heart of this post-Soviet revival of Christianity is another Vladimir. Vladimir Putin. Many people don’t appreciate the extent to which the invasion of Ukraine is a spiritual quest for him. The Baptism of Rus is the founding event of the formation of the Russian religious psyche, the Russian Orthodox church traces its origins back here. That’s why Putin is not so much interested in a few Russian-leaning districts to the east of Ukraine. His goal, terrifyingly, is Kyev itself.

He was born in Leningrad — a city that has reclaimed its original saint’s name — to a devout Christian mother and atheist father. His mother baptised him in secret, and he still wears his baptismal cross. Since he became President, Putin has cast himself as the true defender of Christians throughout the world, the leader of the Third Rome. His relentless bombing of ISIS, for example, was cast as the defence of the historic homeland of Christianity. And he will typically use faith as a way to knock the West, like he did in this speech in 2013:

“We see many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.”

Putin regards his spiritual destiny as the rebuilding of Christendom, based in Moscow. When the punk band Pussy Riot wanted to demonstrate against the President, they chose to do so in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, a vast white and gold edifice, demolished by the Soviets and rebuilt in the Nineties. It is a synthesis of Russia’s national and spiritual aspirations. It’s not just Russia, it is “Holy Russia”, part religious project, part extension of Russian foreign policy. Speaking of Vladimir’s mass baptism, Putin explained: “His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilisation and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.” He wants to do the same again. And to do this he needs Kyev back.

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“The spiritual choice made by St Vladimir still largely determines our affinity today” Putin wrote only last year. “In the words of Oleg the Prophet about Kyev, “let it be the mother of all Russian cities”.

Into this religious intensity we can add some angry church politics. In 2019, the Ukrainian arm of the family of Orthodox churches declared its independence from the Russian Orthodox Church — and the nominal head of the Orthodox family, Bartholomew I of Constantinople, supported it. The Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, described this as “a great victory for the devout Ukrainian nation over the Moscow demons, a victory of good over evil, light over darkness”.

The Russian Orthodox Church furiously rejected this claim to independence, stating that Ukraine belonged irrevocably to its “canonical territory”. This led to a historic split within the Orthodox family, with the Russian church rejecting the primacy of Bartholomew, declaring that they were no longer in communion with the rest of the Orthodox family. Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov denounced Bartholomew as an American stooge. Kirill even claimed the reversion of the Hagia Sophia – originally the global HQ of Orthodoxy – to a mosque in 2020 was “God’s punishment”. The Russian Church then proceeded to set up its own Dioceses around the world, especially in Africa. “They are taking to the streets with posters saying “Thank you, Putin! Thank you, Patriarch Kirill!”” was how the Russian church’s propaganda machine described it.

Such is the centrality of Ukraine in general, and Kyev in particular, to the imagination of the Russian church, they have been prepared to fracture the centuries old alliance of Orthodoxy. Again and again, it’s all about Ukraine, the imagined site of the mother church of the Rus.

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This compliance of the Russian Orthodox church with the political goal of a greater Russia has been shameful. Officially, at least, they make a big deal out of the claim that they stay out of politics. But that has never been true. In the post-Soviet era, the Orthodox Church was handsomely rewarded, not just with a grandiose state-backed church building programme, but with involvement in lucrative business operations including the import of tobacco and alcohol worth $4 billion. In 2016, Krill was photographed wearing a $30,000 Breguet watch. He has also called Putin “a miracle of God”. When Kirill says “the Lord will provide” he could easily be talking about his lords and masters over in the Kremlin. Few churches have sold out to the state more completely than the Russian Orthodox church.

Last year, on the anniversary of the baptism of the Rus, Kirill preached to his people, urging them to stay true to Vladimir’s conversion and the blood of the orthodox martyrs. He told them to love “our homeland, our people, our rulers and our army”.

The Western secular imagination doesn’t get this. It looks at Putin’s speech the other evening, and it describes him as mad — which is another way of saying we do not understand what is going on. And we show how little we understand by thinking that a bunch of sanctions is going to make a blind bit of difference. They won’t. “Ukraine is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space” Putin said. That’s what this is all about, “spiritual space” — a terrifying phrase steeped in over a thousand years of Russian religious history.

In days that seem unprecedented, we cling to the familiar. I do, anyway, and Christmas has been familiar to me all my life. The excitement and the anticipation that I felt as a boy is felt now by my young son, and I can live vicariously through him: the lack of sleep, the mince pies for the reindeer, the presents waiting, if he’s lucky, under the tree. Christmas has its rituals, and we don’t have many shared rituals left in the modern West.

But the rituals disguise the radical strangeness of the claim that Christmas makes, and the radical strangeness of the religion that makes it. That God took human form, that he was born into persecution and poverty, that he came to put the world back into its right shape. That this God does not demand burnt offerings, but will instead sacrifice himself to correct our errors. That He shows us a path both straight and narrow and leaves it to us to decide whether to follow it. A virgin birth in a cave, a risen corpse and an empty tomb: there is no sense in any of this. None of it is normal, even by religious standards. It is some kind of revolution.

But here we are, celebrating it with turkey and crackers, and yet not really celebrating it, because — well, because this is now, and that was then. We all know that Christmas has become a commercial horror show: complaining about this is another part of the ritual. We all know that most of us will barely genuflect towards the Christ whose mass this once was: hearing bishops lamenting this is also as traditional as watching the Queen’s Christmas message, or refusing to watch it and reading the Guardian in the corner instead.

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The West has lost its roots

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The world has been upended these past two years, and it feels to me as if the ructions, which are far from over, are not merely temporal. It feels like we are being shaken out of some slumber; as if the spirit is on the move. Perhaps I feel this way because of the unexpected turn my life has taken, coincidentally or not, during the corona era. Just over a year ago, much to my own surprise (and initial resistance) I became a Christian. Some people might call it a “conversion”, which always sounds a bit shiny-eyed to me, but I didn’t really feel like I’d converted to anything. I felt like I’d come home. I can’t explain it, though I keep wanting to.

It is always ridiculous to write about religion. When I say “ridiculous,” I mean “dangerous”, I think: dangerous in the West, anyway, which is the only part of the world in which the rejection of religion and the denial of God has ever really taken off. This does not seem to be working out well for us, but try talking about that in public. Since I became a Christian, and as the daily practice of the faith has deepened my understanding of it, I have found it harder and harder to relate the Christian worldview to the worldview I used to have, and which the culture around me encourages in us daily. This is not just a Christian problem: everyone I know who follows a faith seems to understand it. It might just be a manifestation of how new I am to this, and how inadequate my understanding is. Still, the gap between the world and the Way — as the early Christians called the path of Christ — seems more and more like a widening gulf.

This will be my first Christmas in the church. The Orthodox church, into which I was baptised just under a year ago, has a deep and old and demanding practice around this festival of light. For the last forty days, we have been fasting: today the fast is broken. A child is born, and everything has changed. The birth of Christ marked the beginning of a new age. The Orthodox church talks of Jesus of Nazareth as the “second Adam”. The first human messed up by rejecting God — by choosing control over communion, and falling into self-love. The incarnation of God in human form corrects the error: we get a second chance to turn from ourselves and look to the greater whole.

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It is, as I say, a strange story: frightening, glorious, thrilling, radical, impossible, repulsive to some. Jesus remains the most controversial man in history, and his followers have always been looked at, like him, through narrowed eyes. Here in the West we are still emerging, both psychologically and structurally, from a period in which Christianity was associated with authority: with power and Popes and state churches and holy wars. Now that this authority has been overthrown, Christians are increasingly regarded again as they were for the first four centuries of their existence: with suspicion, if not open hostility.

Some Christians regret this, and long for the return of a West in which church and state again hold sway in tandem: a world of faith, in which the people live, at least in theory, by the way of the cross. I understand this: it’s an enticing vision. I would like to live, I think, among the symbolic splendour of the high medieval Christian world. Certainly I’ve never felt comfortable in this one. But for better or worse, that world is not coming back, and it seems right that a faith built on sacrifice and renunciation should again require some of its followers. Throw down your nets and follow me. If the world hates you, know that it hated me first. The Way was never supposed to be comfortable. Christ and power don’t mix.

This is how it seems to me, but I am still new. One thing I have learned though — or had brought home to me, because I knew it before I became Christian — is the necessity of ritual in a human life. One reason I joined the Orthodox church, despite being an Englishman who lives in Ireland, was because of its deep understanding and practice of this. We reject ritual in the modern West. We don’t see why we should submit to any authority or respect any tradition. We believe that every one of us can invent the world anew. We are wrong about this, as we are about much else.

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The rituals of the Orthodox church are sometimes florid and always long, and like Christianity itself they can look strange or off-putting from the outside. But the first time I attended a divine liturgy, I knew where I belonged. Something had happened to me that I couldn’t put my finger on. This service, largely unchanged for 1600 years, has a spiritual and psychological impact that can’t be outlined in essays or explained in words at all.

Church rituals, like those of all religions, fit into a wider pattern — that of the ritual year. As a Christian celebrating my first real Christmas, I have come late to the realisation of how much this matters. I think this is why many Western Christians hanker for the Christendom that is gone: not because they desire power, but because of the container, the guiding light, that the ritual year offers, and because they see what we have lost by abandoning it. Christmas, Lent, Easter, Whitsun — we still know the names, but we are long detached from the symbolic pattern they provided, and the understanding of our place in the universe that they formalised in daily life. What comes together in the bread and the wine, changed into the flesh and the blood — this can never be replaced with turkey and sherry.

Something is missing here, and not just for Christians. I have come to believe that humans are above all religious animals. If we do not have a religion, we will make one for ourselves, or substitute politics or ideology for it, to assuage our need for ritual, worship and meaning. But ideology or self-help can’t fill the gap, because what is missing is the thing we are all fleeing from, like the fire it is. The real meaning of Christmas, I think, and maybe the real meaning of all faith, is simply: look up. Raise your gaze. When we lose the religion that made us, and the rituals that contained it, however imperfect those things were, we lose our understanding of the heart of the matter, the thing we turn from and scorn and then are returned to because nothing else will fit into the empty space in our hearts: God.

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Good, say the atheists, about time. I disagree. I think that understanding that there is something higher than us — that we are part of a greater pattern, that a higher intelligence is at work, that we are not in charge and that this is good. I think that without this understanding we find ourselves back in the garden, tasting the apple all over again, every day of our lives. We choose self over other, control over communion, power over sacrifice. Of course we do: we all do. We want to walk that way. But I think we can see now where it is leading us.

Like I say, it is ridiculous to write about religion. Ridiculous for me, anyway. But there is nothing else I can say today. It is deep winter, but some light is rising. It has been rising for a long time. Everybody should celebrate today, whatever they choose to raise a glass to. It has been a hard year. I will try to turn my scattered mind, before the feast and after, to the words that made us, and which still linger in the air, waiting to settle on the holy and the profane, the weak and the strong, the willing and the broken and the unsuspecting:

 Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.