Russian president Vladimir Putin murdered one other Christian this week. It was just one other day in Putin’s supposed project of protecting “the Christian West” from godlessness. After all, they tell me, one can’t create a Christian nationalist empire without killing some people.
Before the world forgets the corpse of Alexei Navalny within the subzero environs of an Arctic penal colony, we ought to have a look at him—especially those of us who follow Jesus Christ—to see what moral courage actually is.
Navalny was perhaps the most-recognized anti-Putin dissident on the earth, and he’s now considered one of many Putin enemies to find yourself “suddenly dead.” He survived poisoning in 2020, recuperated in Europe, and ultimately went back to his homeland despite knowing what he would face. Speaking of his dissent and his willingness to bear its consequences, Navalny repeatedly referenced his career of Christian faith. My Christianity Today colleague Emily Belz discovered a 2021 trial transcript at Meduza, by which Navalny explains, in strikingly biblical terms, what it means to suffer for one’s beliefs.
“The fact is that I’m a Christian, which normally sets me up for example for constant ridicule within the Anti-Corruption Foundation, because mostly our individuals are atheists, and I used to be once quite a militant atheist myself,” Navalny said (as rendered by Google Translate). “But now I’m a believer, and that helps me quite a bit in my activities because every thing becomes much, much easier.”
“There are fewer dilemmas in my life, because there may be a book by which, typically, it’s roughly clearly written what motion to soak up every situation,” he explained. “It’s not all the time easy to follow this book, in fact, but I’m actually trying.”
Specifically, Navalny said, he was motivated by the words of Jesus: “Blessed are those that hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they can be satisfied” (Matt. 5:6, NASB).
“I’ve all the time thought that this particular commandment is roughly an instruction to activity,” Navalny said. “And so, while definitely probably not having fun with the place where I’m, I don’t have any regrets about coming back or about what I’m doing. It’s advantageous, because I did the proper thing.”
“On the contrary, I feel an actual sort of satisfaction,” he said. “Because at some difficult moment I did as required by the instructions and didn’t betray the commandment.”
These words could appear a bit too easy. After all, an unbeliever might respond, most people within the pro-democracy, anti-tyranny movement of which Navalny was a component didn’t, in reality, imagine “the instructions” of Scripture. And Putin himself is backed by key leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, where some are as willing as any court prophets ever were to baptize his murder within the language of Christian virtue and Christian civilization. (Though there are examples of faithful dissidence too.)
But that response would miss Navalny’s point. He was not saying that Christians are courageous while unbelievers are usually not. There is ample evidence on the contrary—in Russia and other places too—to place such notions to flight.
Navalny recognized, though, that the allure of ethical cowardice when standing in courage means standing alone. A conscience can all the time reassure itself that being quiet straight away is the proper thing. Navalny recognized the phobia within the considered being left outside a field of belonging—being branded as a traitor by fellow countrymen and a heretic by fellow churchmen.
To resist the pull of that mob requires a distinct motive than a better-than-even likelihood of political “success.” Navalny recognized that one must, because the evangelical missionary Jim Eliot once put it, embrace “strangerhood.”
“For a contemporary person this whole commandment—‘blessed,’ ‘thirsty,’ ‘hungry for righteousness,’ ‘for they shall be satisfied’—it sounds, in fact, very pompous,” Navalny said. “Sounds a little bit strange, to be honest.”
“Well, individuals who say such things are supposed, frankly speaking, to look crazy,” he recognized. “Crazy, strange people, sitting there with disheveled hair of their cell and attempting to cheer themselves up with something, although they’re lonely, they’re loners, because nobody needs them.”
“And that is a very powerful thing that our government and all the system are attempting to inform such people: You are alone,” he continued. “You are a loner. First, it can be crucial to intimidate, after which, prove that you simply are alone.”
In this, Navalny not only identified his own motives for conscientious strangeness—he also contradicted the very nature of the Putinist conception of Christianity. To be “Christian,” in such a regime, is to be a Russian (or regardless of the local blood-and-soil equivalent is). To be “Christian” is to be a “regular” person—unwilling to step out of line, to show one’s conscience to any thought which may bring hardship.
After Navalny’s killing, The Free Press published letters between Navalny and the famed former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, who served time in the identical Artic penal colony during among the most dangerous years of the Communist regime. Biblical passages are quoted throughout, including Navalny joking about “where else to spend Holy Week” than within the prison complex the older man called his “alma mater.”
This was the foundation, I think, of Navalny’s moral courage, his willingness to face alone, his willingness to die. It’s not only that he knew Bible verses; the pro-Putin patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church little doubt knows more. It’s the way he appeared to know Scripture. He appeared to recognize not only the bare “instructions” from Jesus about hungering and thirsting for righteousness, about being blessed in persecution, but in addition the story behind and around them. He knew these words seem strange. He knew they sound crazy.
In the introduction to his collection of poems on joy, the poet Christian Wiman notes that early audiences of the New Testament message, offended by the strangeness of what they heard, “might thoroughly have made their way home past rows of crucified corpses designed specially to eradicate all cause for any insurrectionist hope or joy.” The strangeness was the purpose. No one can actually hear what Jesus is saying when he calls the forgotten, the persecuted, the poor, and the reviled “blessed” unless we feel why his family thought he was insane (Mark 3:21).
This might be why Navalny recognized so clearly the Putin regime’s methods of creating dissenters feel strange and crazy and alone: Navalny had seen it before, in a Roman Empire that did the identical thing with crosses.
Those of ethical courage of all faiths and no faith have every kind of motivations for his or her convictions. But—regardless of the motivation—one cannot maintain moral courage if one is unwilling to be sent away from whatever one calls “my home,” from whomever one calls “my people.” That’s the joyful irony: One never stands alone when one is a component of a much bigger story, when one belongs to a much bigger body.
The cloud of witnesses includes Elijah and Jeremiah, Peter and Paul, Maximus and Bonhoeffer, and countless others who died seemingly abandoned, who seemed crazy of their day (Heb. 12:1). It’s people like this—not from the “German Christian” Reich bishops or the Putin-cheering Orthodox patriarchate—from whom the subsequent generation of our faith is born.
The very point of “hungering” and “thirsting” is that one is prompted to see that something’s missing—that the satisfactions on offer aren’t enough. The very appetite for such things is an indication that what one is hungering for, thirsting for, is admittedly on the market.
An individual can see that, sometimes, even from a gulag. That’s strange. That’s crazy. But that’s what a minimum of one Person I do know would call “blessed.”
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
