ROWAN Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has written a thought-provoking article for the New Statesman. You can read it here…

We throw around the term “culture wars” so freely that it has become hard to recognise and understand what a real and bloody war about culture looks like. Vladimir Putin sees himself as the protagonist in a battle for the survival of an integral Christian culture as surely as Islamic State casts itself as the defender of Islamic cultural purity. Of course there are profound operational, historical and political differences, and it would be foolish to ignore these, or to slip into the sort of panic that is prompted by Islamist extremism. But a realistic picture of what lies behind the appalling conflict in Ukraine has to reckon with the parallels – and has to recognise that secular geopolitical calculations and bargains may not give us the tools for making sense of what is going on.

Putin’s close ally and supporter, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, made it clear in an extraordinary sermon delivered on 6 March, the day before Orthodox Lent began, that he regarded the Russian campaign as a war to defend Orthodox civilisation against Western corruption, of which gay pride marches were singled out as the leading symptom. This was no accident: despite high recorded levels of prejudice against LGBT+ people in Ukraine, recent Ukrainian policy has liberalised, and Kyiv has a high-profile activist community and annual parade.

For the Patriarch, this is both a normalising of grossly sinful behaviour and a pollution of Russian Christian identity, since Kyiv is where Russian Christianity has its origins. About three-quarters of Ukraine’s population identify as Orthodox, and it has a high level of church attendance, but its Orthodoxy coexists with the expressions of a very different set of cultural norms. It is difficult enough to cope with religious diversity: Russia’s recent history shows very low tolerance of non-Orthodox Christian (not to mention Jewish and Muslim) minorities. The prospects for minorities in Ukraine in the event of a Russian victory are not promising. But what is worse in the eyes of a certain type of Russian Orthodox is the toleration of ideological diversity in the public sphere.