I don’t understand why Speaker Mike Johnson, by all accounts a committed Baptist, is abandoning the Baptists of Bucha, Ukraine. We all remember Bucha as the city where, two years ago, Russian invaders raped, tortured and murdered. I also remember it as the city where, 20 years ago, I went with a group of fellow Baptists to help build a shelter for families.
While there, our meals were served by members of the First Baptist Church of Bucha, and we broke bread there at the church. We also got a lesson in religious persecution from one of the elder members of the church, who told us what it was like when the Russians previously ruled Ukraine. He spoke of pastors who preached from behind drawn curtains, so when the Russia-controlled secret police interrogated and tortured church members, church members could honestly say they did not know who was preaching, and pastors could honestly say they did not know who had come to hear the sermon.
What if we had said then to the Baptists of Bucha that, 20 years in the future, Russians would again invade Ukraine, and that at a key moment in the war, when the tide seemed perhaps to be turning in favor of the Russian invaders, a committed Baptist would be speaker of the House, uniquely positioned to assure Ukraine would gain the resources it desperately needed to defend itself? I daresay they would have said, “Thank you, God! You have provided someone who will stand by us for ‘such a time as this.’”
But that’s not what is happening. To the contrary, Speaker Johnson and the 20 or so Southern Baptists in Congress are arguably among the greatest obstacles to the support of Ukraine.
On the streets of Kiev, I bought this photograph from a local photographer.
Through a translator, he explained to me the two women supporting one another were on their way to church. These two Ukrainian women, who no doubt lived through a prior Russian invasion, have long been for me a favorite image of what Christian support looks like. Yet here we are, at risk of abandoning the people of Bucha’s First Baptist Church, and millions of others, to troops who’ve shown that, when given the chance to do “whatever the hell they want to,” will.
Chris Caldwell is a member of the faculty and administration at Simmons College of Kentucky, a historic Black college founded in 1879. He also is a member of the BNG board.