Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered some remarks last week during the Orthodox celebration of Easter, which the Orthodox call Pascha. “Our hearts are full of fierce anger. Our souls are full of fierce hatred for the invaders and all that they have done,” the president of Ukraine said. “Do not let the rage destroy us from within. Turn it into a good force to defeat the forces of evil.”
There can be little doubt that the forces of evil are very much at work in Ukraine. A neighboring autocrat has decided to invade a sovereign nation to feed his insatiable ego, leaving unspeakable carnage in his wake.
The invasion itself qualifies as a war crime, but Russian soldiers have compounded the evil by targeting civilians, some of whom were killed with their hands tied behind their backs.
Both countries, Russia and Ukraine, are ostensibly Christian. Vladimir Putin claims to be a pious member of the Russian Orthodox Church. His monstrous actions suggest otherwise.
Among his other sins — let’s call it what it is — Putin has ignored entirely the long Christian tradition of “just war” theory, which dates at least as far back as St. Augustine and St. Aquinas, and arguably to the Bible itself.
Just war theory governs how and why wars are fought. Theologians and political theorists have altered the criteria for just wars over the centuries, but there is general consensus that the violence of warfare is justified only when several criteria are met.
First, the warfare must be declared openly by a sovereign authority. It must also be a defensive war, or a war to address grave injustice, and it must have a worthy goal: the pursuit of justice, for example, not self-interest. According to just war criteria, force must be used as a last resort, and the action must have a reasonable chance for success. Finally, care must be taken, as much as possible, to shield civilians from collateral damage.
Putin’s gratuitous invasion of Ukraine meets none of these criteria (with the possible exception of the first, although Putin appears to have declared war unilaterally).
The United States and other nations have called out Putin’s depravity and the butchery perpetrated by Russian troops, especially the targeting of civilians. The search for moral high ground, however, is a tricky matter, and American denunciations of Putin would carry more weight if the United States itself were not guilty of violating just war criteria.
I’m thinking here not so much of the distant past — the violence against Native Americans, for instance, or the Mexican-American War — but more recent history. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 did not meet just war criteria, and this despite the fact that the man who ordered the military action, George W. Bush, also claimed to be a Christian.
The war in Iraq was not a defensive war, nor was it an action of last resort. Countless civilians perished in the bombings of Iraq. To make matters worse, the United States, at the direction of the president, engaged in torture, or “enhanced interrogation,” of enemy combatants. These are actions that clearly violated the Geneva Conventions, which established international standards for humanitarian treatment during war.
I’m not suggesting moral equivalency between Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush; Putin represents by far a greater threat. But the fact remains that both men led their nations into battle and did so by flouting just war theory, one of the central teachings of the Christian tradition, a tradition that each claims as his own.
Furthermore, and tragically, each has his own religious sycophants and enablers. Putin enjoys the full support of Patriarch Kirill and the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. Here in the United States, the religious right effectively elected and reelected Bush, and evangelical leaders vocally celebrated the invasion of Iraq.
(When I was writing Thy Kingdom Come in 2005, I contacted eight religious right organizations for their positions on torture. Only two replied, and neither condemned the Bush administration’s use of torture. The president of one organization worried that the “anti-torture campaign seems to be aimed exclusively at the Bush administration,” thereby creating what he characterized as a public relations challenge.)
Sadly, the United States’ war in Iraq in 2003 compromises our moral authority in condemning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine two decades later. Putin has every right to point his finger back at us and say, “Hey, you did it too.” The invasion of Iraq not only mired the nation in a protracted, unwinnable struggle, one that failed to meet just war criteria, but it also ceded the moral high ground.
The Biden administration is right to condemn Putin’s heinous behavior and stand with the people of Ukraine as they fight what Zelenskyy calls “the forces of evil.” American denunciations, however, would carry more authority if the United States came to the matter with clean hands.
“Today, we still believe in the new victory of Ukraine, and we are all convinced that we will not be destroyed by any horde or wickedness,” said Zelenskyy, who was born to Jewish parents, at Kyiv’s St. Sophia Cathedral. “We are overcoming dark times,” he continued, “but we are fighting for a luminous idea. On our side there is the truth, the people, the Lord and the higher heavenly radiance.”
Randall Balmer is the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College.