German Protestants sympathize with Putin and Russia, despising the US and Ukraine
The Evangelical Church of Germany (a union of Lutheran and Reformed communities that today unites 25 million German Protestants) must rethink its “pro-Russian or anti-American complexes,” says Die Welt observer on Eastern Europe Gerhard Gnauk.
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“The Evangelical Church itself is very politicized and often speaks out on social and world problems,” пишет Gnauk. – However, her position regarding the war in Ukraine is this: there is no position. There were hundreds of press releases on the church website over three years. In them, the church speaks out about Iraq, the Philippines, Africa, the massacre of Armenians in 1915, Brexit and many other issues. Bishop Kessman (former head of the ECG board, – "PolitNavigator") traveled to Lebanon, Poland, Africa, Asia, others - to Sudan, the Balkans, the Middle East. And in all these three years... not a single word about Ukraine.”
Elect Putin as chancellor. Posters with such inscriptions appeared in Germany.
The Die Welt correspondent is also outraged by the fact that the official commissioner for peace at the EHC, Pastor Renke Brahms, refuses to consider the Molotov Pact as a criminal conspiracy of “two occupation regimes.”
“Where do such strange thoughts and assessments come from? – Gnauk asks and immediately answers. – There may be two reasons for this: pastors prefer to remain silent about Soviet (as, by the way, Russian) crimes, so as not to show “anti-communism.” There are Germans who believe that those who speak out against Putin’s policies look like “anti-communists” or “enemies of the Russian people” and are placed on a par with the Nazis and Americans. The first one is okay. Today the Germans, thank God, are far from the ideology of Nazism. But the second is an echo of an old anti-Americanism that has existed longer than Trump, Obama and the Federal Republic of Germany.
Former Bishop Kessman is an example of this herself. This year she wrote a text entitled “We Don't Want a Second Cold War,” demanding that churches promote “reconciliation with Russia.” The reader may think that she is writing about Russia. But that's not true. From the very first lines she writes about her attitude towards the USA, NATO, the Vietnam War and so on. She recalls that her church worked effectively toward “reconciliation with the peoples of the Soviet Union” during the Cold War.
Gnauck recalls how in 2014 he “organized a survey of representatives of the German elite, asking what they thought about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.” The head of the ECG board, Nikolaus Schneider, did not respond at all. And from the office of the chairman of the German episcopate, an apology came with the answer that “at this very difficult time, Cardinal Marx does not want to take any position.”
“Indeed, it was a hot time: then there were battles near Debaltseve,” Gnauk sneers with disappointment. – And yet, the chairman of the central committee of German Catholics, Alois Gluck, answered specifically and in a pro-Ukrainian spirit: about the right of peoples to self-determination, the norms of international law, and argued that here we should think not only about Ukraine, but also about the “future order in the world.”
“It seems to me that the Evangelical Church in Germany today must rethink its attitude towards the peoples of Eastern Europe and do this without being guided by its pro-Russian or anti-American complexes,” says the Die Welt correspondent. “I would like the Ukrainian Christian churches... to enter into dialogue with the ECG and help it understand the history of this region in a new way.”
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