The successes in expanding and strengthening of the Church looked impressive but said nothing about the content of the faith that took shape in the 1990s and 2000s. Calling the revived faith in Russia traditional Orthodoxy was rather naive, though over decades it has become commonplace to say so.

The main problem is attributable to the fact that the ROC reluctantly and extremely ineffectively approached catechesis and religious education. The overwhelming majority of those who had joined the Church and been baptized retained both the worldview and habits of the Soviet era. Thus, a synthesis of Orthodox and Soviet emerged, which in 2011 I called “post-Soviet civil religion.” It combines elements of the Orthodox tradition, usually superficial and formal, and standard Soviet imperial content.

This synthesis was rather organically accepted by the state bureaucracy and a significant section of both society and the ROC itself.

There is an element of chance that this synthesis was successful, though you can’t deny that overall the post-Soviet civil religion turned out fundamentally well constructed, providing reliable mechanisms to channel religious ideas and historical myths into deeply secular post-Soviet society. The Commandments, which serve as guidelines for the life of a Christian, have been replaced by so-called “traditional values.” At the same time, the struggle for traditional values both in Russia and around the world has assumed the significance of an apocalyptic battle. The defense of traditional values has become the raison d'etre for many Christian organizations in Russia and the content of their activities, as well as an important element of domestic and foreign policy.

The concept of “Holy Russia” is no less effective, becoming in the secular context the “Russian World.” At the level of communication, the Russian language plays the central role in that, but in determining the general geopolitical contours of the “Russian World,” the most important contribution belongs to the ROC. It is the “canonical territory” of the ROC that has turned out closest to the contours of the “empire” that Vladimir Putin aspires to rule directly and indirectly.

This is precisely the meaning of the phrase about Russia “rising from its knees”. These words were first spoken by Boris Yeltsin when he became president of Russia as a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, but they took on their contemporary meaning much later, in a Putin speech eight years later: "Russia might rise from its knees and whack [someone] good.”

Putin's Russia affirms itself not through a convincing vision of the future, but by justifying itself with history. A powerful source of self-justification from the 20th century was the Victory in World War II. However, the idea of war as a tragedy, as a crime against humanity, is nonexistent in the new myth. Under Putin, Victory Day celebrations have become a lavish demonstration of Russian exceptionalism. An important element of this ritual is the entirely pagan worship of the Eternal Flame and the mass march (a secular "cross procession") with portraits of those who died in the war, which represents a cult of heroic ancestors instead of the cult of venerating saints more familiar to the Orthodox tradition.

Back in 2005, Archpriest Georgy Mitrofanov, a leading Christian publicist in Russia, called this cult of the Victory “pobedobesie” (“Victory obsession”). However, his warnings went for naught.

The para-religious justification of the war that it will bring victory over evil remains an important element of “patriotic” journalism in Russia.

Alexander Prokhanov, editor-in-chief of the Zavtra newspaper, wrote this on Easter 2022:

Contemporary Russian theology and religious thought were caught completely off guard by these developments, and the attempts to substitute the Gospel with a "national-Christian ideology" received the full support of the official Church. Here is what Alexander Schipkov, a leading ideologist of the post-Soviet civil religion and a close adviser to Patriarch Kirill, wrote during the war:

Schipkov's article was published in the official newspaper of the Duma and reprinted without any comments on the website of the Moscow Patriarchate. It fully conforms to the general line of Russian propaganda – that the war is not being waged by but against Russia, that it wasn’t Russia that attacked a neighboring state, but the forces of the collective, openly "Nazi" West that are waging a hybrid war on Russian territory.

Such a plunge into darkness couldn’t help but trigger rejection by the dioceses and self-governing Churches that had been more open to the West or were weighed down by constant ideological pressure from ROC officials. Since the war started, several parishes in Western Europe have broken with the ROC and joined the Ecumenical Patriarchate, while a substantial number of parishes outside Russia have stopped commemorating the name of Patriarch Kirill at services – all this being a sign of categorical disagreement with the position of the ROC in relation to the war in Ukraine.

Judging by the speeches of Patriarch Kirill, he refuses to take this disagreement seriously: Ukraine has become something abstract for him, a distant land where a people that is “one with the Russians” lives, though this people isn’t worthy of support, sympathy or love. The patriarch couldn’t find a single warm word for the victims of the war and hasn’t expressed condolences to the families of dead Ukrainians. Moreover, in early May, when Russia's aggression against Ukraine had been going on for more than two months, Patriarch Kirill preached:

Three weeks after this sermon, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which for three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union had remained part of the ROC, convened a Council, the highest institution in the Church, and expressed its disagreement with the position of the patriarch and declared its independence from the ROC.