Missionaries of Faith and Culture: Evangelical Encounters in Ukraine

Abstract

In this article, Catherine Wanner explores the historical factors contributing to a greater degree of religious pluralism emerging in Ukraine compared to Russia and Belarus and illustrates some of the cultural and political consequences of these more permissive policies. Using the intersection of foreign missionaries and evangelical communities in Ukraine as a lens, this article draws on historical and ethnographic evidence to argue that faith-based communities are sites of cultural innovation where the legacy of Soviet culture blends with values and practices born of other historical experiences to shape notions of morality and attitudes toward the state. Evangelical communities in this traditionally Orthodox land increasingly represent robust social institutions that offer new sources of self-definition, belonging, and communal life that are at once intensely local and broadly transnational in orientation.

Views of the West: Transnationalism in contemporary Ukrainian Baptist churches

“…For example, although Wanner (2003Wanner ( , 2004 has written about some of the issues examined here, such as the reception by churches Views of the West 337 of changing forms of attire, in the context of eastern Ukrainian churches, and has found similar results to my work regarding western and central Ukraine, because of the small sample size I cannot state that there are no regional differences in how churches accept change. Within my own study, missionaries were viewed more warmly at the Kherson church in the south than at the Vinnytsa church in central Ukraine, and although that distinction could have regional roots, it is also possible that the personalities of the respective pastors set varying tones for their congregations.…”

“…This mixed welcome of foreign missionaries in Russian and Eastern European churches has been widely noted elsewhere (for example, Giblett, 2000;Negrut, 1999;Wanner, 2004). Negrut writes about the 'range of opinions from unselective acceptance to unselective rejection of foreign missionaries by East European Christians' (Negrut, 1999, p. 10).…”

“…Here I do not trace the genesis or development of these transnational religious networks, an examination of which has begun elsewhere (Caldwell, 2004;Long, 2005;Wanner, 2003Wanner, , 2004. Instead, I focus on how the Ukrainian participants view those transnational relationships.…”

Assessing the Impact of Religious Registration

“…After Russia abandoned the official Soviet ideology of scientific atheism and passed legislation guaranteeing that all religions were equal before the law in 1990, the door was opened for a host of new religious groups, including a flood of evangelical and Pentecostal Christian groups. But as the new groups’ audience and membership rapidly grew, support for allowing virtually all groups to register began to wane (Froese ; Koesel ; Sarkissian ; Shterin and Richardson ; Wanner )…”

Geopolitical Proselytizing in the Marketplace for Loyalties: Rethinking the Global Gospel of American Christian Broadcasting

“…As one religious broadcaster noted, in the Arab World, "Satellite television is [people's] door [to] the outside world, because many of the governments control all the programs that they see inside their countries" (Woodling, 2003, p. 132). Even in those countries of lesser state control (see, e.g., the situation in Russia as detailed by Wanner, 2004), the religious and, in turn, geopolitical battle for hearts and minds rages on.…”