Exposing children to the trauma and the horror of war leaves psychological wounds that last, since their brains are still forming and they have none of the emotional maturity that processing such experiences would require. Witnessing violence and destruction and death produces post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, and lasting difficulty in forming healthy relationships as adults, so the responsibility for protecting their innocence and their wellbeing falls on us.
For a great many evangelicals in russia and in the collective West, though, making something great again, something entirely depersonalised, and defending so-called traditional Christian values, equally depersonalised, is worth more than the tears of children who are living through an aggression.
Children are a sacred gift from God, entrusted to our care. In Matthew 18:6 Jesus warns that anyone who causes a child to stumble would be better off with a millstone hung around his neck and drowned in the depth of the sea, and He told His disciples to let the children come to Him and not to hinder them, since the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these (Mark 10:14). There you have God’s heart toward children, and our duty to nurture them and keep them safe.
Exposing children to war contradicts God’s desire for shalom, meaning wholeness and peace and relationships that hold together. We live in a fallen world, and it still falls to us to shield the vulnerable as far as we are able, which is what all the prophets cry out about. Drawing children into a war robs them of the safety and the stability they need in order to develop a healthy spirituality rooted in the love of God.
As adults we carry a moral and spiritual obligation to build and sustain an environment where children can know the abundant life Jesus spoke of (John 10:10) rather than the toxic culture of a war. By keeping them away from that destruction we affirm their inestimable worth, model the ethics of God’s Kingdom, and give them their best chance of growing into spiritually and emotionally healthy people.
And what will become of this generation of Ukrainian children, when even we as adults feel so exhausted and devastated by the war and its consequences, surrounded constantly by death and funerals and ruins? Instead of the joys and the wonders of childhood, they are being pushed into a harsh reality of fear and grief and trauma, because somebody decided to become great again, because somebody decided to defend Christian values by trying to annihilate an entire country and nation, and because somebody believes, including a good many in the collective West, that russia and putin and the Russian World genuinely represent the Kingdom of God and its values. By killing Ukrainian children? Why?
Even while we feel overwhelmed and helpless in front of suffering on this scale, we draw strength from our faith and from our commitment to the inherent dignity and worth of every child, and to the Mission that has not changed. By fighting for their future and investing in their healing, we hope that the scars of this war will not define them, and that their resilience and their courage and their hope will be the foundation on which a better tomorrow gets built.
May Your Kingdom come, O Lord. Keep your children away from the war, and we wish you a silent night.
Taras Dyatlik, Ukraine
765 days of the ongoing full-scale russian war against Ukraine, waged to make the Russian World great again
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