Christian nationalism operates not only by placing religious symbols alongside political slogans. It can also operate by retrospectively constructing tradition.

This is the conclusion reached by Sergey Shumylo, director of the International Institute of the Athonite Legacy, while researching the history of the “prophecies” of St. Lavrentiy Chernigovskiy, which are invoked by ideologues of the “Russian World.” The scholar presented a paper on the subject at the international academic conference “Christian Nationalism, War and Hospitality: Christians on the Borderlands of Central and Eastern Europe in Times of Global Tension,” held on September 18–19, 2026, in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Sergey Shumylo recalled that Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has repeatedly cited St. Lavrentiy Chernigovskiy, a Ukrainian ascetic of the first half of the 20th century, in support of his concept of the “Russian World.” At the Third Russian World Assembly in 2009, Kirill quoted a statement attributed to St. Lavrentiy: “Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are Holy Rus’.” The quotation in full reads: “Just as it is impossible to divide the Holy Trinity, so it is impossible to divide Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. This is Holy Rus’.”

The author of the paper believes that this claim was constructed “retroactively.”

“The statement attributed to St. Lavrentiy is absent from the earlier written tradition of his life and teachings. It appears only in a substantially revised edition published in Moscow in 1994 by Kheruvim Degtyar, a controversial religious figure who presented himself as a disciple of St. Lavrentiy,” the study says.

The author argues that, in the case of St. Lavrentiy Chernigovskiy, textual evidence indicates that the key “prophecies” about the inseparability of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus originated not in the first half of the 20th century but in the ideological milieu of the 1990s.

“This mechanism is important for understanding Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism operates not only by placing religious symbols alongside political slogans. It can also operate by retrospectively creating tradition: contemporary political projects are projected into the past, attributed to saints or sacred history, and then brought back into the present, endowed with the authority of religion,” the scholar concludes.