The work has become a book

Religious Communities Under Pressure

Some of you read a short post I published here in February. It announced a fundraising campaign and, with it, a promise: that the documentation of religious persecution in Russia would continue, that new cases would be added month after month, that the people in them would not be forgotten.

Today I can tell you what that promise became.

It is a book — Religious Communities Under Pressure: Documenting Religious Persecution in Russia 2022–2026 — and as of today it is available on Amazon. What began as months of quiet recordkeeping, and before that as a single conference paper in April 2025, is now 160 pages: more than 115 cases, each set down with names and verifiable sources, in detail that makes them impossible to wave away.

I want to say something about what is actually in it, because I did not write a martyrology. I wrote an anatomy.

The hardest thing to convey to readers outside Russia is not that believers are persecuted — it is how. By whose signature a priest loses his vocation. On what stated grounds, and how those grounds differ from the real ones. How the secular and the ecclesiastical courts can each move against the same person for the same refusal, until the line between state power and Church discipline grows hard to see. That mechanism is the spine of the book. I followed it through court records, through diocesan decisions that were never meant to be read, and through conversations with people who carry these events in their own bodies and memories.

There is one conviction underneath all of it, and I will state it plainly. A great many Christians around the world still imagine Russia as a defender of the faith — a fortress of Christian values holding out against a godless West. That picture is false, and the people in this book are the proof. The genuine witnesses to Christian conscience in Russia today are very often the ones being punished by the Church that claims to embody it. To look away from them while admiring their persecutors is a moral error I wanted to make harder to commit.

If you need a sign of how current this remains: on June 15, the European Union sanctioned Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov) of Crimea — frequently described as Putin’s confessor — for lending the language of faith to the war. I closed the manuscript with his case among the last entries. The record does not end; it paused only long enough to be printed.

A book like this is never the work of one person, and I am thankful to more people than I can list here.

I am especially grateful to Dr. Rowan Williams, who gave the book a foreword I will treasure — generous and unflinching, wiser than anything I could have asked for.

I am grateful to those who endorsed it in public, knowing the cost of association with such subjects: Archbishop Elpidophoros of America, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and John Chryssavgis.

And I am grateful to every one of you who answered that February post — those who gave, those who shared it, those who held these people in prayer. You helped carry the work to this point. The book is, in a real sense, partly yours.

What I ask now is different from what I asked then. In February I asked for help to continue. Today I ask you to read — and to let the reading be its own kind of support. Buying the book is not only how you encounter these stories; it is how you help keep this work alive and carry these names further than I can carry them alone. If it moves you, put it into someone else’s hands.

Here it is:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H5G277LW

The documentation goes on. New cases are already waiting. But for one day, I wanted to mark that the witness made it onto the page — and to thank you for helping it get there.