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Catherine Wanner , associate professor of history and religious studies at Penn State, first went to Ukraine in 1990 to research the nation-building process, and ended up seeing that Ukrainians' attention was turning not so much to politics as to spirituality. "There is no denying the simultaneity of the resurgence of religion and the demise of socialism," she writes in her newest book on Ukraine, Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism. Since the early 1990s, Ukraine has become not just the "Bible Belt" of the region, but a hub of evangelical church life (such as Sunday Adelaja's Pentecostal megachurch), education, and missions.

How did evangelicalism become such a big deal in Ukraine?

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and a discrediting of an atheist policy and a realization that the secularization of Soviet society was perhaps a mistake, there was renewed interest in a variety of religious traditions.

Evangelicalism in particular garnered a lot of interest after the collapse of Communism, first because it was so anti-Soviet — in the former Soviet Union as well as elsewhere, such as in the United States — and secondly, because huge numbers of American and other Western missionaries came to the former Soviet Union. That assisted in the development of not just awareness of evangelicalism, but even of evangelical infrastructure like seminaries and printing of all kinds of religious literature.

The third reason I would say was the charitable outreach of both evangelical missionaries as well as of evangelical communities, and that charitable outreach was very much appreciated and urgently needed, given that after the collapse of Communism, the social service sector pretty much suffered a similar level of collapse.

Fourth, evangelical prescriptions on morality — what is right and what is wrong — arrived at a moment when the population was quite prepared to hear them.

There are more evangelicals now than there were then. Who are today's Ukrainian evangelicals?

The people who are filling evangelical churches these days are overwhelmingly new converts, and that's because after the collapse of Communism, it was possible to immigrate to the United States as a refugee, if one could prove a history of past persecution, which a great many evangelicals could. Which created something of a quandary back in the former Soviet Union. At precisely the moment when there was all this interest in religion and in particular in evangelicalism, experienced clergy and longstanding believers by and large immigrated.

What would American evangelicals find familiar in a Ukrainian church and what would be different?

Current churches in Ukraine still tend to be more conservative and traditional. Pentecostal churches tend to be much more traditional and practice a form of moral asceticism that's very strict.

So would women wear headscarves, for example?

Yes.

And what about the music?

The level of musical talent and the really enormous numbers of members who participate in the musical life of the church is really, really impressive. A great many of these churches have a whole variety of choirs and a whole variety of musical programs, sometimes even orchestras and the like.

And what about individual members' level of involvement?

During the Soviet period it was routine for communities to insist that their members attend four services a week. And their services usually last at least two hours. They found under capitalism in a post-Soviet society that it's very difficult to make those kinds of demands on their members' time. Still, that number of services is generally offered, but the rigid expectation that one will attend all four services has been somewhat relaxed — reluctantly.

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January (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52