The Role of Political and Electoral Technologies in Continuing the Church and Civilization Schism in Ukraine

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the church schism in 2018 on the change in the civilizational identity of modern Ukrainians. Modern Ukraine is in the zone of the conflict of Russian and Western civilizations, openly expressed since 2014. One of the strategies for resolving the conflict appears to be changing the civilizational identity of the enemy by transforming the cultural core of civilization, which also includes religion and religious practices. The transformation of the civilizational core in Ukraine occurs through the instrumentalization of religion, which turns into a way to solve the internal and foreign policy problems of the modern Ukrainian government. This article studies the history of the establishment of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in 2018, the reception of tomos from the Constantinople Patriarchate and the confrontation between the OCU and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), which acts as a conductor of the Russian civilization's influence. The internal goals of the Ukrainian government, achieved through a church schism, include reducing the consolidation of society and strengthening its own position in a fractured society. Their foreign policy objectives involve reducing the cultural influence of Russia, excluding the Russian part of the Ukrainian society from receiving the Russian civilization's values and changing the civilizational identity of Ukrainians. One way to change the civilizational identity of Russians in Ukraine while formally preserving the Orthodox religion in the country involves promoting eucharistic ecclesiology, which is not historically rooted in the Orthodox Church and has been developing since the mid-20th century as an alternative to the universal ecclesiology. The latter assumes that the universal church is not reduced to the sum of its parts, that the criterion for correct faith is the unity of the episcopate, and that maintaining the integrity of the empirical church is one of the values of church communion. Eucharistic ecclesiology presumes that the fullness of grace is contained in each experiential community united by the common Eucharist. Eucharistic ecclesiology aids in instrumentalizing the church and turning it into the spokesperson for the secular interests of communities, which is already happening in Ukraine. This article shows that despite the church schism itself does not remove Ukrainians from the Russian civilizational space, it includes church communication into the foreign policy of reducing the Russian cultural influence in Ukraine and changing the civilizational identity of its inhabitants.