The political separation
of “Church and State” in U.S. constitutional law, a doctrine that is of
jurisprudence (judicial decision) rather than theology and thus does not
straddle and therefore demarcate the political and religious domains as qualitatively
distinct from a neutral standpoint. Furthermore, the question of what makes the
religious domain distinct (and unique) from all others is the pole from which a
religious functionary’s (or religionist) leap into the political garden from
the Garden of Eden can be detected. The trouble worsens if the criteria from
one domain in imposed and overlaid in the overreaching into another
domain, as if the criteria that is determinative in one domain were valid in
another. In fact, the eclipsing itself of the other’s own criteria on their own
“turf” is unethical. The legitimate sovereignty of a domain’s own criteria in
that domain over criteria indigenous to other domains yet superimposed renders
any supervening overreaching as both erroneous—as in going off-sides in
football (soccer)—and unethical because the criteria indigenous to a given domain
should not be disrespected within their own domain. In other words,
encroaching is presumptuous. If these ideas strike the reader as novel, even
strange perhaps, then I am keeping within the confines of my mission in writing,
as I look to a new dawn in which the ideational tyranny of hitherto reigning yet
questionable assumptions ist zerstört because they have been discredited,
which is not to say that every extant assumption should be eviscerated
and expunged for lack of substance. For example, Russia’s Patriarch Kirill, the
head of Russia’s Orthodox Church, went out on a tree limb, far from his religious
tree’s trunk, by formulating and spreading “revisionist propaganda to justify
the war in Ukraine” while the invasion was underway.[1]
The history and legitimacy of a bygone Russian empire (not the U.S.S.R.) properly
belong to the political rather than to the religious domain. Being schooled in
theology does not give even a high religious functionary the knowledge on which
to presume to be an expert in political history and international
relations. The resentment in the E.U. and U.S. at the patriarch’s intrusion into
a domain that is not an extension of the religious domain was not merely from
opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also from an intuitive sense
that the domains of religion/theology and politics/government are distinct and
thus require different knowledge-sets and have their own respective criteria
and distinctiveness.
The full essay is at "Russian Patriarch Kirill."
1. Jorge Liboreiro, “Oil, Cod, Kirill: Friction Points Emerge in New E.U. Sanctions Against Russia,” Euronews.com, 26 June, 2026.
