I thought “A Faith Under Siege” was most interesting not for what it showed about Ukrainian Christians, but for what it showed about evangelical Americans. That there would be people with no other ties to Ukraine willing to fly to a war zone and assist people through proselytizing is especially intriguing in the modern conservative landscape (I suppose it’s also unfair of me to look at a story about people being targeted and hunted by a foreign enemy and say “oh look at those nice Americans who are coming to help! Aren’t they so much more interesting?”).
Clearly, the documentary’s producers seemed to think its religious audience was bought in to Russian propaganda about Ukraine, citing Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin and other right-wing news sources that amplify claims villifying Ukraine. However, I’m not sure whether this is actually the case. I haven’t been able to find good and recent polling on this issue, and there are some interesting counterexamples. Speaker Mike Johnson, for instance, reversed his stance on a $61 billion foreign aid package to Ukraine in April 2024 that he had initially opposed. Johnson changed his mind after meeting with Ukrainian Christians who painted the war as a spiritual struggle (I would also put Johnson in a different bucket of religious Republicans than Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has many other dynamics at play).
This volunteerism is an interesting slice of U.S. influence separate from the significant funding role our government plays, as Trudy Rubin documents. I’d be interested at a ballpark of how much ad-hoc support Americans offer in this vein. The New York Times ran a story on Sunday about Americans who join the Ukrainian military but couldn’t pin down a specific estimate, nor did those interviewed express any particularly religious motivations for joining. Deb’s reporting about Ukrainians who volunteer to shoot down drones and pay for it themselves was also interesting. It would not be inconceivable to see these people set up a GoFundMe and promote on social media, where anyone in the world — especially Americans — could make a contribution.
Given the reaction that religious Americans have had to the war in Ukraine, I think it’s interesting to think about the (lack of) reaction from similar groups about the war in Gaza. It’s certainly not an apples-to-apples comparison, especially with Christian Zionism — the evangelical idea that the existence of Israel fulfills biblical prophecy — at play. It’s also not clear that Israel has been systemically targeting Christian churches in the same way Russia has, although that hypothesis might be worth some investigation. But a deadly strike on a Christian church is a deadly strike in a Christian church. If Colby Barrett calls the war in Ukraine “an attack on religious freedom and believers everywhere,” what would he say about Gaza?
