Russia is Waging Spiritual War in Africa

You’ve heard plenty about Russia’s territorial expansion. But the Russians aren’t stopping there. In Africa, the Russian Orthodox Church is pioneering ecclesiastical expansionism. By offering gifts—not theological persuasion—it’s winning over priests and parishes from the Patriarchate of Alexandria, which covers all of Africa. The Moscow Patriarchate poaching African Orthodox Christians from its very own brethren is less odd than it might seem, because it’s a geopolitical move—and part of an ongoing battle within the Orthodox Church over Ukraine.

J. Peter Pham is one America’s most experienced Africa hands—and an ordained Episcopal priest with a doctorate in theology and a postgraduate degree in canon (church) law, along with more worldly credentials in economics, political science, and international law. When Pham travels to Africa, where he served as the U.S. special envoy for the Great Lakes Region as well as the first-ever Sahel envoy in the Trump administration, he visits churches and speaks with fellow clergy from all kinds of denominations.

In recent months, Pham has been witnessing an extraordinary development. “I’d heard about the Moscow Patriarchate wooing priests away from the Patriarchate of Alexandria,” he told me. “Whenever I traveled in these areas where I’d heard it was happening, I started looking into it. And it turns out it wasn’t just one or two isolated cases. It was a large number of African Orthodox clergy who had been part of the Patriarchate in Alexandria and had been recruited by the Moscow Patriarchate. It was very systematic.”

As their names suggest, the Patriarchate of Alexandria and the Patriarchate of Moscow are related. The Patriarchate of Alexandra, which is based in the famed Egyptian port city, looks after the African continent’s Eastern Orthodox Christians, outside of traditionally Orthodox Ethiopia, who are thought to number around 1 million.

It’s a storied Patriarchate that traces its origins back to the times of Jesus Christ and Mark the Evangelist. Like the Russian Orthodox Church, the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria belongs to the Eastern Orthodox Church, which is led by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Traditionally, Alexandria ranks immediately after Constantinople and has oversight over Orthodox Christians across the African continent.

The Patriarchate of Moscow, which leads Orthodox believers in “Moscow and all Rus,” per its official title, can claim no such storied origins. But for centuries, it’s been one of the most practically powerful bodies in Orthodoxy, and today it commands power unknown to most religious denominations. Not only does it have some 90 million members in Russia and other former Soviet republics, it’s also so closely linked to the Russian state that it virtually functions as an arm of the government. Patriarch Kirill, who like his predecessor Alexy II, was a KGB informer for the Soviet authorities, has enthusiastically supported the war in Ukraine.

But the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been standing up to Kirill and his Patriarchate—supported by Patriarch Bartholomew himself. Bartholomew is the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople and thus “first among equals” in Orthodoxy, despite being headquartered in a city, Istanbul, with almost no Orthodox believers left. The Patriarchate of Constantinople derives its status from once being the heart of Byzantium, but its practical power, and funding, come because two-thirds of American Orthodox Christians are under its jurisdiction.

In 2019, Bartholomew issued a decree allowing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to separate from the Moscow Patriarchate. In October 2018, while the decree was being prepared, Moscow declared that it was no longer in communion with Constantinople, and it broke with other Patriarchates, including Alexandria, in the months that followed. Russian state authorities began spying on, and harassing, Constantinople, which—because of its uncertain position in Turkey—is highly vulnerable.

But despite much pressure from Moscow, Bartholomew has doubled down on his support for Ukraine. “The desire for unity and cooperation has been destroyed by a new ecclesiology coming from the north: a new theology of war taught by the sister-Church of Russia, as it tries to justify an unjustified, unholy, unprovoked, diabolical war,” he declared last September. He went on: “It was within the rights and duty of service of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to grant autocephaly [ecclesiastical independence] to the Church of Ukraine with its 44 million people. We have no intention of subjecting the Patriarchate’s decisions and initiatives to judgment by this new ecclesiology.” Most of the other Patriarchates have followed Constantinople’s lead, including Alexandria.

With little hope of shifting the rest of Orthodoxy, Moscow has turned to Africa. For the past few years, the Russian government—usually aided by the Wagner Group, which is now rebranded as the Expeditionary Corps—has energetically been expanding links with African governments. Wagner props up regimes and is rewarded not just with cash but lucrative commercial opportunities too.

And for the past 18 months or so, Russian Orthodox bishops and priests have also been making their way to Africa in search of new opportunities. They are in search not of commercial contracts but of priests who can be persuaded to defect from Alexandria to Moscow. The defections bolster Russia in Africa and allow Kirill to strike a blow against Bartholomew and those who, like Patriarch Theodoros II of Alexandria, support Bartholomew’s recognition of the independence of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

Moscow’s ecclesiastical campaign in Africa is not subtle: In 2022, the Moscow Patriarchate established an “African Exarchate” based in Moscow. According to Bishop Konstantin of Zaraisk in Russia, the acting exarch, more than 200 African priests have joined the Russians. Pham has spoken with several of them in Central and Eastern Africa. “In theory, the Russians’ recruitment of African Orthodox priests is based on canonical arguments about the propriety of Constantinople granting recognition to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and Alexandria agreeing with the decision,” Pham explained. “But none of the African Orthodox priests I’ve spoken with have brought up any such reasons with me. Most of them, if they had anything negative to say about the Patriarchate of Alexandra, it was about lack of material support.”

In an interview posted on the Exarchate’s website on Feb. 25, Konstantin discussed these material needs: “For instance, the purchase of a tent is an urgent matter in one place, while a land problem must be solved in another, or the point at issue is premises and maybe even a church building. … We must see what can be done and find monetary and human resources.” Pham recently spoke with an Orthodox priest in eastern Congo who has decided to join the Russians, “and it came down to getting a motorcycle so he can get around. Others have received a roof for the church or help with starting a chicken farm. These are legitimate needs, but they hardly rise to the level of theological or canonical principle.”

The Alexandria Patriarchate may have been inattentive to its parishes’ needs, or it may simply not have the funds to assist. Like Constantinople, it enjoys historical status but has very little power in its home country of Egypt, where the roughly 300,000 remaining Orthodox Christians are a tiny minority. Either way, Russian clerics have spotted an opportunity and are taking advantage of it.

When the Patriarchate of Alexandria defrocked Moscow’s first exarch, Moscow simply appointed a second bishop to the post. Last month, Alexandria defrocked him, too, after he rather provocatively set up a church in Cairo—territory that has belonged to the Patriarchate of Alexandria since the times of Mark the Evangelist. It has also defrocked two other Russian priests in the “Exarchate.”

In the interview on the Exarchate’s website, Konstantin, the acting exarch, unsurprisingly defended the ecclesiastical expansion and blamed Constantinople. Konstantin recently led a delegation of Russian clergy to Africa, where they visited some of the newly converted priests and their parishes. Konstantin also baptized 30 Tanzanians. Crucially, the Exarchate also looks after the interests of Russians in Africa. If the Patriarch of Alexandria were to attempt more forceful action, he would risk a fight with the mighty Russian government.

By incredible coincidence, this ecclesiastical expansion is taking place in parallel with Russia’s other efforts in Africa. “My conclusion is that this is an orchestrated attempt by an arm of the Russian state to exploit conditions which are real to score a propaganda victory and gain influence in yet another sphere, the ecclesiastical one,” Pham noted. The Central African Republic was the first African country to host the Wagner Group—and to legally recognize parishes switching from Alexandria to Moscow.

The Alexandria Patriarchate has seen plenty of strife in the two millennia of its existence. Mark the Evangelist, its founder, suffered a gruesome death at the hands of pagans in Alexandria. In the 5th century, the early Christians’ Council of Chalcedon led to a schism that subsequently caused a large number of Christians in Egypt to leave the Alexandria Patriarchate and form the Coptic Church. Droughts, coups, and civil wars have claimed African Orthodox lives. Believers have been persecuted and killed by Muslim rulers. But the Patriarchate of Alexandria has remained steadfast, not just in Egypt but across the African continent. In Moscow, though, it has encountered a novel and even more powerful adversary from within the ranks of its own church.