Sergei Chapnin

A journalist and scholar of the Russian Orthodox Church, its entanglement with state power, and the believers persecuted for refusing the war.

Director of Communications, Orthodox Christian Studies Center, Fordham University

New Book

Religious Communities Under Pressure

Documenting Religious Persecution in Russia 2022–2026

Published June 13, 2026. Foreword by Dr. Rowan Williams. An examination of the persecution of religious communities in Russia during and after the full-scale war against Ukraine, grounded in documentary evidence, interviews, and theological analysis.

"A vital and courageous work. Chapnin brings together meticulous documentation with theological insight to illuminate the religious crisis at the heart of contemporary Russia." — Dr. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury

Cited by George Weigel in The Wall Street Journal, and named to his First Things Summer Reading List.

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Latest Report

Faith Under Pressure: Religious Repression and the Myth of "Traditional Values" in Putin's Russia

Policy Paper · Free Russia Foundation · August 2026

The Kremlin's rhetoric of "traditional values" is not window-dressing on a repressive state; it is the state's operating system, and the Russian Orthodox Church is its co-author. Under the pressure of the war, the doctrine has absorbed an unstated value: sacralized violence, turning a creed of family and continuity, built on a refusal of pluralism, into a "theology of dying." From this the persecution of antiwar clergy follows directly: a priest who prays for peace is not a political dissident the Church reluctantly punishes, but a heretic against this new ideological canon based on these new values. Because the doctrine makes one set of values the norm and treats any deviation as a form of ideological heresy, it amounts in practice to a renunciation of religious freedom: not a repeal on paper, but a dismantling through values discourse and the discipline that enforces it.

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September 18, 2026

Faith Under Pressure: Religious Communities in Russia After 2022

Breaking the Chains: Responding to Persecution and Human Trafficking · New Wineskins Missions Network · All Saints Anglican Church, Woodbridge, Virginia

November 14, 2026 · 2:00–3:45 p.m. CST (3:00–4:45 p.m. EST)

Russia's "Official Church" and Its Theology of War (2014–2025)

ASEEES Annual Convention, Chicago · Panel: Religious Mobilization in Russia: How Religious Leaders Justify War and Support the Russian Military

Chapnin examines the "theology of war" in Russia's "official church" — less a doctrine than a postmodern bricolage of patristic fragments, Soviet myth, imperial nostalgia, and the theology of martyrdom repurposed to sanctify aggression. He traces it through the pronouncements of hierarchs, clergy, and affiliated theologians, with a comparative turn to selected Muslim documents, attending throughout to those, in both traditions, who have refused alignment.