BEING HUMAN

As an evangelical Christian living through russia’s invasion of my homeland, I was appalled by the title of that article, which suggests that our firsthand testimony of what is being done to us belongs on the same scale as the misinformation delivered in a putin puff piece.

Millions of our people have been driven from their homes, killed in attacks aimed at civilians, and left watching their cities shelled into rubble. We have buried far too many innocent people, among them children, elderly parents and pregnant mothers. And that title treats our documented experience of death and destruction as a supplementary perspective that explains rather more, or rather less, than a propagandist’s hot takes.

Here is the logical problem at the centre of it. To say that one thing explains less than another presupposes that both are explanations, differing only in degree. The comparison therefore grants Carlson’s interview a standing it never earned, since propaganda does not explain events at all, but obscures them, and historical revisionism about Poland starting the Second World War explains nothing whatsoever. Ukrainian evangelicals, meanwhile, have been giving factual accounts of what they saw with their own eyes, with testimony running back to 2014. Placing these two on a single scale of explanatory power quietly promotes the weaker item, because the reader concludes that the interview has some value, merely less of it.

The two sources also differ in kind rather than in quality. On one side sits external, monetised commentary from men with an agenda, shaped by revisionism and by the dehumanising of a whole nation. On the other sits internal testimony from several hundred thousand Ukrainian evangelicals reporting what happened to their own families and their own streets. A comparison between them creates a false choice, in which detached pundits offer competing explanations of realities that civilians here have been documenting reliably for a decade. And in coverage of human suffering, that kind of balance has a cost, since every time propaganda is set beside eyewitness testimony as a rival account, the propaganda gains.

Vague words carry that damage. “Explains” and “less” fail the standard of precision that reporting on trauma requires, and they leave the reader with the impression that a one-sided interview pushing falsehoods suffers only from a shortage of explanatory power. What it actually does is deny the gravity of a humanitarian crisis through a misleading moral comparison.

So my request to Christianity Today is a simple one: avoid framing that suggests parity between partisan pundits and civilians living through a full-scale war. Ukrainians read CT in English as well, not only Americans.

If a headline must draw a contrast, then contrast the imperial aggression tearing our families apart with what we are actually asking for: faith, dignity and self-determination on our own land. We seek prayer and support so that we can survive this war and go on fulfilling the Mission that has not changed, and we ask that propagandists, including those who call themselves Christian, stop cloaking atrocity in false equivalence. Ukrainian blood spilled by russian weapons speaks for itself.

Peace be with you.

Taras Dyatlik, Ukraine
719 days of the russian full-scale war against Ukraine