The Christian Right Just Reeled in Zelenskyy
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday that his nation is fighting to defend the values of life and the family. He called them the values of “normal people.”
The phrasing in Zelenskyy’s brief speech at Ukraine’s first official National Prayer Breakfast stands at odds with his past support for LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. It also comes two months after evangelicals helped his nation secure $61 billion in U.S. aid.
It’s impossible to tell whether Zelenskyy is merely parroting buzzwords as lip service to evangelicals who may hold his nation’s future in their hands. His office and embassy in the U.S. didn’t respond to my request for comment.
But as I reported last week, Ukrainian lawmakers are already caving to evangelical pressure on a potentially vital national-security bill.
And it may not matter whether Zelenskyy believes what he’s saying, as long as he’s giving the Christian right what they want. They’ve said publicly they want to make Ukraine a “Bible Belt” in Europe, in return for helping to save it.
The organizer of the prayer breakfast, and the secretive group behind it, have a documented history of using it to expand their right-wing networks and to pull politicians — and nations — to the right.
Nevertheless, America’s ambassador attended Saturday. Some congressional Democrats participated by video, too, as did Republicans, according to a release from Zelenskyy’s office.
The Fellowship Foundation, also known as The Family, has been staging these prayer breakfasts since 1953, with as much official imprimatur as they can get in any given country. They use the events to bolster their shadow diplomacy.
It’s arguably been beneficial at times. In April, Ukraine’s prayer breakfast organizer, Pavlo Unguryan, was credited with helping lead Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to allow the vote that gave Ukraine $61 billion in aid.
But The Fellowship posits no solutions without Jesus. So evangelical politics often accompany the evangelical aid.
And that has led to ruinous shadow diplomacy.
The Fellowship’s network helped kill a UN anti-corruption task force before it could take on Guatemala’s then-president, a right-wing evangelical. Last year, The Fellowship sent Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) to Uganda’s breakfast, where he rallied support for the nation’s LGBTQ+ death penalty, which itself had roots in The Fellowship’s network.
Saturday’s breakfast in Kyiv featured video remarks by Johnson and former Vice President Mike Pence. The videos have not been made publicly available.
Nor has information been released about the side events scheduled for Friday through Sunday. It’s in these smaller, so-called breakout sessions that the real work happens, such as radicalizing Mike Lindell.
Saturday’s breakfast was the first Zelenskyy addressed and the first time Ukraine’s presidential office officially sponsored it. (Zelenskyy spoke remotely to the 2023 U.S. National Prayer Breakfast as he campaigned for military aid.)
According to a transcript posted by the president’s office, Zelenskyy cast the war in Biblical terms, a battle of “good” and “evil,” a rhetorical device he has used before. But he charted new territory suggesting the war is being fought to defend conservative values:
“Now, in this war, we are defending the values that are close to every normal person — to all who respect life, who cherish the family…”
Zelenskyy thanked the Vatican for assisting with recent prisoner releases and discussed Christian churches and liberated pastors. But in a country that’s primarily Greek Orthodox, that denomination went unmentioned.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) is a touchy subject. As I reported last week, Unguryan and fellow evangelicals have pressed Zelenskyy and the Parliament behind the scenes to tank a bill that would create new legal tools to fight Russian collaborators in the UOC.
Protestants make up only 3.7% of Ukraine’s population, and only some are evangelicals. But Unguryan wields outsize influence, thanks to The Fellowship’s political network.
Unguryan has been warning Ukraine’s politicians that they risk angering American evangelicals — and jeopardizing access to U.S. aid — if they proceed with the bill.
That’s not because UOC clergy are innocent. It’s because holding any clergy accountable represents a slippery slope toward infringing on religious freedom.
“They’re just purists,” one source told me. “They believe in religious freedom even if it’s inconvenient and … it creates casualties.”
Ukrainian reporting suggested that deliberations on the bill would resume only after the breakfast was over, once an unnamed, high-ranking Republican guest had returned to the U.S.
Ironically, “religious freedom” was the casus belli that Unguryan and others used to sway Johnson; citing Russian persecution of Protestant clergy in occupied territory.
But some U.S. evangelicals balk at using the right’s ever-expanding conception of religious freedom as a shield for aiding an invading army. Former Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), then-Pres. Donald Trump’s religious-freedom ambassador, wrote an op-ed to that effect in April.
Some Democrats have helped to expand the meaning of “religious freedom.” And some continue to abet the prayer breakfast movement. Pres. Joe Biden has legitimized it by participating under pressure from Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), The Fellowship’s most visible Democratic ally.
Congressional Democrats joining Saturday’s breakfast remotely include Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Reps. Juan Vargas (D-CA) and Mike Quigley (D-IL).
Vargas attended in person in 2021, prompting an LGBTQ+ group to warn that he was being misled about the event’s putative apolitical nature.
Quigley, the Illinois Democrat, participated in a Washington news conference with Unguryan during the runup to this year’s U.S. National Prayer Breakfast.
And Blumenthal met with Unguryan and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in Washington earlier this year.
Also participating via video Saturday were Senate Chaplain Barry Black and House Chaplain Margaret Kibben. (Kibben, at least, has been invited before, but declined to discuss it with me when that invitation became public.)
A number of Republican participants also have history with Unguryan. House Ukrainian Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), another previous Unguryan guest, is quoted in Zelenskyy’s release. So is Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE).
Notable among the remote participants is Walberg, who was there in person in 2019, extolling the event’s value to the Christian right. Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) is another Fellowship insider who participated remotely Saturday, along with Fellowship insiders Sens. James Lankford (R-OK) and Jerry Moran (R-KS).
Two in-person audience members in the background of the Zelenskyy speech resemble additional Fellowship insiders. Seated next to each other, with blue and red ties, they look a lot like former Reps. Tony Hall (D-OH) and Jim Slattery (D-KS).
Hall, an ant-hunger crusader, often mixes that work with international travel and Fellowship networking. Slattery’s Ukraine ties most famously center around his lobbying work. He continues to be active with the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast.
Biden’s ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink, legitimized Unguryan’s breakfast in person. The State Department did not respond to my request for comment, but referred to Brink’s Tweet about the event.
In that Tweet, Brink said she attended “to underscore our collective support for Ukraine’s fight for the lives, values, and freedom of its people.”
What those values are, remains unclear. But support for LGBTQ+ rights has surged in recent years. And Zelenskyy has been a vocal defender, as he has of reproductive rights.
But if he has cast the war as a battle for the values of normal people before, it’s not evident from a search of the presidential website. Nor has he framed respect for life or the family the way he did Saturday.
That rhetoric, however, isn’t new to The Fellowship.
When Unguryan led a religious parliamentary group, it listed as one of its main goals “organizing the National Prayer Breakfast in Ukraine; [and] protection of the institution of family and marriage as the basis of society.”
Unguryan, a long-time crusader against LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights, has a history that I’ve chronicled before of using both U.S. and Ukrainian prayer breakfasts to bolster his right-wing network.
He isn’t mentioned anywhere publicly as the organizer of Saturday’s breakfast, but that’s in keeping with The Fellowship’s preference for both secrecy and the suggestion that its events are official, regardless of how true that is.
But I’m told Unguryan’s still running the show. He appears briefly in a cutaway during video of Zelenskyy’s speech, apparently working rather than listening. And it appears to be Unguryan who takes the stage after Zelenskyy.
It’s not clear why Protestant evangelicals should run an ecumenical religious event in a country where they are such a tiny minority that they’re outnumbered by non-believers. The most obvious explanation is that Zelenskyy needs the backing of the U.S. evangelical politicians Unguryan that The Fellowship has added to his contacts.
Zelenskyy’s own history features little to suggest a personal affinity for religion, let alone the public nature of The Fellowship’s Christianity.
In 2020, he told the Times of Israel that he grew up in “An ordinary Soviet Jewish family. Most Jewish families in the Soviet Union were not religious.”
The interview included this exchange:
Q: Is religion important to you now?
A: (Pauses.) I had one attitude when I was a boy, and another now. I never speak about religion and I never speak about God because I have my own personal opinion about it. Of course, I believe in God. But I speak with him only in those moments which are personal for me, and important, and where I feel comfortable in those places.
I couldn’t find a previous instance of Zelenskyy quoting The Bible. But on Saturday, he offered a passage from Ecclesiastes. It’s about needing others to defend yourself.
“For it is written,” Zelenskyy said, without identifying the source, “‘Though one can be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.’”
Jonathan Larsen is a veteran reporter and TV news producer, having worked at MSNBC, CNN, and ABCNews. You can support his independent reporting with a subscription or one-time donation: