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Over the past few weeks, the United States of America reversed course on the Russian invasion of Ukraine in multiple ways: siding with Russia in a United Nations resolution, freezing aid to Ukraine in its defense against Russian forces, and hosting a televised Oval Office repudiation of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.
As many have noted, the geopolitical, military, and diplomatic costs of attacking allies and appeasing enemies are incalculable. As American Christians, though, we should also consider the moral cost of surrendering Ukraine.
In most situations of foreign policy, the moral questions are usually debatable, if not murky. Hawks and doves usually agree on the underlying ideals and values to be defended but disagree on the best prudential way to achieve them.
Sometimes, however, those ideals and values are definitively tested. In those moments, what’s at stake is not just the survival of nations or even of the world but the consciences of those who align themselves with what is unquestionably wrong.
Through most of the first half of the 20th century, the American left—or at least its most fervent sector—defended, if not communism itself, then certainly the Soviet Union and its promise of a revolutionary utopia of equality and justice. Often, this was done with a “I don’t agree with everything the Soviets do, but they’re not as bad as they’re portrayed” type of waving away of reports of atrocities committed by the Soviet state.
George Orwell famously defined the ideology at work here when he wrote, “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
Orwell was especially harsh on the communism of his fellow British. He noted that no real revolutionary feeling—an actual tearing down of the status quo—existed in the England of his time.
“It is only natural, therefore, that the English Communist movement should be controlled by people who are mentally subservient to Russia and have no real aim except to manipulate British foreign policy in the Russian interest,” he concluded. “The more vocal kind of Communist is in effect a Russian publicity agent posing as an international Socialist. It is a pose that is easily kept up at normal times, but becomes difficult in moments of crisis”—because the brutalities of the USSR have to be justified in ways that can make them seem morally consistent.
“Every time Stalin swaps partners, ‘Marxism’ has to be hammered into a new shape,” Orwell continued. “The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.”
The moral cognitive dissonance of all this was on display every time Stalin swapped partners. Those who were “heroes of the Revolution” were suddenly enemies in the show trials. Fascism was an evil—until the signing of the Hitler–Stalin Pact. It was then an evil once again when Hitler and the Soviets split.
In time, the facts many had always known became indisputable: about the Soviet starving of Ukrainians, for example, and the encampment and murder of dissidents. Those who were anti-anti-Communist had to find a way to either ignore these atrocities or to justify them, without repudiating previously stated ideals or admitting that they had been morally compromised by their own ideology.
In his analysis of the American religion of the first half of the 20th century, historian Martin E. Marty (who died last week) noted the anguish of Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes in preaching a sermon in 1940 titled “Why We Liberals Went Wrong on the Russian Revolution.” Holmes, who was widely known in his day, was a “man of the left” and had defended for years the Soviet Union and its promise of a just society.
But the Hitler–Stalin Pact left Holmes shaken. He came to describe his defense of the USSR as “the supreme disillusionment” of his life. “I have been deceived, deluded and disgraced,” he said, “sold out by those I trusted most; and I am as deeply afflicted as I am utterly disgusted by what has happened.”
“[Holmes] faulted himself and his fellows for not having properly read the signs of the times,” Marty wrote. “Liberals, in their concern to fight economic injustice, he said, had permitted evils to go on which ‘in our own hearts we knew to be wrong.’”
“Sometimes ‘we’ had fallen to doctrines which hold that the end justifies the means,” Marty wrote of Holmes’s confession. “It was the Hitler-Stalin Pact which, as Holmes saw it, stripped away the last veils of self-deception from the eyes of liberals, and set them ‘steadfastly against the cruel and bloody regime which they should have uncovered years before.’”
Now here we are again—with another defense of a bloodthirsty, empire-seeking Russia, led by murderers and oligarchs in their illegal invasion of a neighboring country, kidnapping children and killing Ukrainians, with a Russian Orthodox Church cheering it on as a “holy war” of Russian Christendom against the decadent Western world.
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Previously pro-Ukrainian voices now have to find a way to shift with the ideology, convincing others that something has changed beyond the price of tribal admission. Zelensky, they might say, was rude for wearing battle fatigues instead of a suit to the Oval Office (while not objecting to Elon Musk wearing a T-shirt and ball cap in the same place).
Or, they might argue, Zelensky is a dictator because Ukrainian law pauses elections during wartime (when one could just as fallaciously argue that the US is a dictatorship because there are no presidential elections in the four years between when the Constitution specifies they should take place).
Some Christians even suggest that Ukraine is opposed to religious liberty—when virtually every religious minority testifies that the reverse is the case, that Russia, in fact, is the persecutor of evangelical Protestants and even of Russian Orthodox clergy who will not toe the Putinist line.
Perhaps most dangerous of all, in terms of what it does to the consciences of those arguing this way, is the suggestion that Ukraine is fated to lose. They have no cards left to play, the claim goes, so the free world should side with the eventual winners—or at least do nothing to stand in their way.
Those who are now castigating Ukraine don’t even pretend that doing so is moral. Instead, they seem to argue for a worldview in which everyone is equally corrupt and murderous, so the US should simply divide the world up into spheres of influence, regardless of who is being plundered or murdered in the process.
Political scientist Mark Lilla recently explained the psychological state of this moral worldview in terms completely separate from the Russia-Ukraine war, through—ironically enough—one of Russia’s greatest intellectual and literary giants, novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.
“In so many of his novels we meet seemingly wicked characters who are really only in despair, their original goodness having been robbed by someone or by circumstances beyond their control,” Lilla writes. “And to cope with the trauma, they convince themselves that there is no such thing as goodness, becoming prostitutes or rakes or drunkards or revolutionaries, reveling in their baseness. But then they are undone when they meet genuinely good people and grow to hate them.”
Dostoevsky was not the first to see this psychological dynamic. Millennia earlier, the Book of Genesis gave us the account of Cain and Abel. Cain, enraged that God had accepted Abel’s offering while rejecting his, murdered his brother. When interrogated by God, Cain believed his violence was hidden safely in the past. But God says, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground” (Gen. 4:10, ESV throughout).
The apostle John, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, explained to the early Christian church what was happening in this ancient account by saying, “We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous” (1 John 3:12).
Legally, Ukraine belongs to Ukraine. Morally, a people have a right to defend themselves from the extinction of their people and the taking of their land. The Bible tells us of another murdered man—Naboth the Jezreelite—who lost his land unjustly.
King Ahab demanded that Naboth sell his vineyard to him, but Naboth replied, “The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers” (1 Kings 21:3). The king went home “vexed and sullen,” until his wife, Jezebel, worked to frame and execute Naboth on made-up charges so she could take his land.
It’s odd to me that some of the same people who will use the epithet Jezebel for women who wear yoga pants or teach Sunday school take no notice at all when they themselves defend the same sorts of real crimes that Jezebel actually committed.
Decisions about war and peace are often morally complex. But in this case, the defense of the indefensible is happening through a social Darwinist argument that is already hollowing out much of American life. Such a view says that the power to do something is itself a moral justification—or even worse, that moral considerations are themselves a sign of “virtue signaling” and weakness. We have seen before where this leads.
For Christians, it demands some questions: Who would you rather be, Naboth or Ahab? Abel or Cain? The answer to these questions might not solve the war in Europe, but it will reveal something about you.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
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