Article published in Foreign Policy, May 5, 2024
Religions aren’t just spiritual communities. They’re also businesses.
On Feb. 24, 2022, nearly 3,000 Russian battle tanks, accompanied by many thousands more troops in trucks and lightly armored vehicles, invaded Ukraine. Inside the tanks were thousands of young people, many barely more than schoolchildren, who had been ordered into battle to defend an idea. It was fundamentally a nationalist rather than a religious idea, but it had been supported by some heavy religious artillery the previous day in a fiery sermon by Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Over the following weeks and months, Kirill would redouble his rhetoric in support of the war. He urged soldiers to fight as their patriotic duty and promised them that “sacrifice in the course of carrying out your military duty washes away all sins.”
In the days and weeks to follow, priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic churches would use prayer and biblical exhortation to stiffen their compatriots’ will to resist. And among the outpouring of support and offers of military and humanitarian supplies, many thousands of rosaries have been manufactured and delivered to Ukraine to raise the morale of both civilian refugees and front-line troops. Rhetoric and rosaries are just two of an immense variety of religious technologies deployed throughout the ages to harden the resolve of young people—usually men—ordered into combat...
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Illustration : Photo de James Coleman sur Unsplash
