In part 1 “The Making of a Portable Faith System” I trace the historical evolution of a post-Soviet evangelical diaspora faith culture to show how it adopted scalable Western ministry models to create a system of “guarded belonging” that uses the language of love to systematically exclude LGBTQ lives existance and nature. (Pelkmans, 2009; Wanner, 2007; Coleman, 2014)
In part 2 “When Belonging Has a Price” I explore how post-Soviet diaspora faith uses a repeatable script of “protection” to turn LGBTQ exclusion into a non-negotiable requirement for belonging. By blending Soviet-era shame with modern Russian state propaganda and Western ministry models, the community frames queer identity as a “Western infection” that threatens family survival. (Healey, 2017; Human Dignity Trust, 2014; Human Rights Watch, 2022; Reuters, 2022)
Now I want to finish the arc with what I think the reader deserves to know. Not just theory, not just history, not just my feelings. I want to show how the script actually moves, and what it does when it reaches a family.
If Part 1 was about how the system formed, and Part 2 was about why LGBTQ people became the target, Part 3 is about the delivery system and the cost.
This is not another overview. This is where it becomes real life. Not politics. Not theology. A repeated message that turns into “common sense,” and then into distance inside a family.
I am writing this so the reader cannot dismiss it as personal drama or distant politics. I want the mechanism to be visible.
A small note on intent: I am not writing this to turn anyone into villains. I want to show I have lived through the effects of that double message. Warm words, cold distance. Love offered, conditions attached. Concerns that sound gentle, but reduce a person through a prism of someone else’s understanding, no acceptance, arm-length distance.
If I write only memoir, the reader can dismiss it as personal drama. Everyone has those in their lives, it is a part of human experience. If I write only history, the reader won’t connect to it fully as it can keep it at a safe distance. I am writing this part because I want to remove the escape hatch. I want to name the mechanism, and I want to name the cost.
What it looks like when the packaged performative faith reaches a family
Before anything else, I want to be honest about something that is easy to forget. Once conflict takes over, the people in my extended family are not my enemies, they began as family.
Some moments were warm, some were serious. Other moments carried a kind of gravity that made you want their approval, even when they were not saying much in return. There was a sense of order, a sense of moral seriousness, a sense that certain things mattered and should not be mocked.
Then the center of gravity shifted. For many people, faith did not enter as a hobby. It entered as a mechanism for restructuring and re-interpreting reality in exchange for the feeling of safety. It gave language to fear. It gave rules to chaos. It gave certainty when everything else felt unstable. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many families were rebuilding the meaning in their lives, not just a budget or a career. (Pelkmans, 2009)
I do not dismiss that hunger. I understand it. But I also saw what it changed, something that I could not verbalize out loud for many years. The definition of “safe” had a small font disclaimer. It changed who got to define truth and how love was allowed to be perceived.
A quiet role shift happens when someone becomes the carrier of certainty in a family. They stop being only a relative and become a gatekeeper. They decide what is acceptable and what is to be considered “normal.” They decide what is “healthy” and what is “dangerous.” Sometimes they do it loudly from their pulpits and sometimes they do it with a soft voice and a prayer tone in private.
The most painful version is the gentle one. What I had to realize is that the script did not arrive as a boot. It arrived as performative concerns:
- We worry about you.
- We pray for you.
- We love you.
- We want you to be well.
- We want the family to stay united.
Then, slowly, it becomes:
- Do not talk about that.
- Do not name yourself.
- This is unacceptable.
- You need to choose.
Over time a person becomes an issue, his being becomes a topic, a problem to solve. And once you become a problem to solve, your humanity becomes negotiable trade. You lose your whole.
The mechanism lens: a case study in media and partnership
I am going to be blunt, because this is where people pretend the harm is accidental. It is not accidental.
In the Russian-speaking diaspora world, a huge amount of cultural and moral messaging is not formed locally. It is imported through media. Through gatekeepers and authority figures the information is repeated and amplified through networks, reinforced by authority. (Coleman, 2014; Ebaugh & Chafetz, 2000)
A sermon preached in one place is watched in another. A “discussion show” filmed in one city shapes the language in churches across the ocean. A clip circulating in a family chat becomes “common sense” without anyone asking where it came from, and what credibility it holds.
This is why the case study matters. Not because one program controls everything, but because one program can reveal the pattern.
Take a Russian-language religious talk show format, similar to the roundtable discussions of Light Under the Lamp now fully archived on YouTube. Or any of the shows on the local self-described regional media network, including radio broadcasting, print and digital platforms. The mechanics are familiar. It presents itself as dialogue, sometimes even as debate, and it invites the viewer to feel thoughtful and mature. It often frames topics as “concerns” for family, children, and society. It uses the language of love, care, and responsibility.
The Great Media Group is a Pacific Northwest media network that says it serves Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking communities across Oregon and Southwest Washington. Their radio station broadcasts on KXPD 1040 AM and they also publish and produce print and digital community content. Any one of the gatekeepers can and do utilize the media network to spread their message to the audience. (The Great Media Group Inc., n.d.; The Great Radio 1040 AM, n.d.)
I’m not naming that to accuse anyone of hate. I’m naming it because this is a tool that shapes community reality. When the same themes repeat across programs, clips, and conversations, people stop hearing them as messaging and start hearing them as “how the world is.” That is one of the ways rejection can travel with the diaspora, even when the people involved believe they are simply protecting family and tradition. (Ebaugh & Chafetz, 2000; Hirschman, 2004)
But when LGBTQ topics enter this format, a recurring move appears across many diaspora media spaces:
- LGBTQ life is framed as threat.
- LGBTQ identity is treated as contagion.
- Visibility is treated as recruitment.
- Acceptance is treated as surrender.
- Disagreement is treated as spiritual danger.
The viewer is not simply given an opinion. The viewer is trained emotionally to accept it. A key part of this training is moral inversion. Harm gets renamed as protection. Exclusion gets renamed as responsibility. Control gets renamed as love.
The script travels best when it feels like duty. And this is where partnerships matter. Diaspora media is not a single broadcaster shouting into a void. YouTube platform offers global audience. Social media provides opportunity. It is a network effect. Speakers appear on each other’s platforms. Clips are reposted. Sermons are syndicated. Guests cross-pollinate audiences. The same phrases appear in different mouths. (Coleman, 2014)
In that environment, the message becomes less important than the repetition. Repetition is what turns opinion into atmosphere, making people feel like “everyone knows” something, even when it was planted. Repetition is what allows a family member to look you in the eye and speak with calm certainty while saying something that breaks the relationship. (Coleman, 2014)
This is what I mean when I say the script is portable. It is designed to travel through ether. Performative message propagates effectively.
The accelerant lens: when state messaging becomes the loudest amplifier
At a certain point, this stops being only church culture. It becomes louder because Russia turned “traditional values” into a state messaging project. (Human Dignity Trust, 2014; Reuters, 2022; Human Rights Watch, 2023; Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2023)
So, when the state frames LGBTQ visibility as a threat, a huge number of ordinary people feel they have official permission to escalate. Not because they suddenly became different people, but because the moral environment around them changed. Things that were morally and ethically unacceptable became acceptable and, for lack of a better word, allowed.
Even outside state borders, this messaging floods the Russian-speaking information space, which shapes what diaspora communities hear, repeat, and normalize, including diaspora communities in the United States. (Human Rights Watch, 2023; Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2023)
That is how someone in Vancouver, Washington can be affected by a moral panic manufactured thousands of miles away. That is how a broadcaster or a digital creator in Portland, San Diego, or Florida can feed a worldview back into families across continents.
This is not geography. This is signaling. This is not ‘over there.’ This is here.
Why discrimination travels with the diaspora
Now I want to say something carefully, because I do not want to insult diaspora communities. I am part of one and I understand what it gives and what it protects.
In many diaspora communities, church is a center where immigrants do not have to explain themselves every day. It is also an agent of authority. When a community feels surrounded by assimilation pressure, the church becomes the sanctuary that protects cultural identity. (Ebaugh & Chafetz, 2000; Hirschman, 2004)
Can’t take the Soviet out of evangelical. LGBTQ sexuality becomes one of the easiest targets to police, because it is tied to family, and family is tied to survival. Exploiting those vulnerabilities forces the tragic logic:
- If the community thinks it is under threat, it searches for a boundary.
- If it needs a boundary, it searches for a visible symbol.
- If it finds a symbol, it turns a person into a test.
That is how LGBTQ people become the price of belonging. Not always through hatred, but through fear and image management, that is a performative love “We love you but hate your sin.” This is the sentence that breaks families while pretending it is saving them.
What harm it does you ask? This is the moment I had to face, and it is one of the reasons this series exists. There is a specific kind of injury that happens when you are told you are loved, but also told that your life must be cut out and you must repent to protect your and your family’s moral image. That is not love. That is management or a reputation strategy.
That is performative love used to protect a system, not a person.
I want to say this plainly: when a family asks a queer person to disappear so the family can feel stable, the family is not choosing stability. The family is choosing the script.
And the queer person becomes the price.
What I refuse to do in response
I refuse to become a reflection of someone else’s opinion. I refuse to write this as a revenge project. I refuse to flatten my family as a dysfunctional unit, with me as a villain. That would be next level of dehumanization, and I am done with that.
On the same note, refusing contempt does not mean I have to accept harm. So, my boundary as of today is simple:
- I will not argue for my right to exist.
- I will not negotiate my humanity.
- I will not shrink to make others comfortable.
- I will not translate my life into acceptale language just to earn a seat at the table.
- I will stay honest. I will stay calm. I will stay present when I can.
- When presence requires self-erasure, I will step back.
That is not punishment. That is self-respect. This is why this belongs on mikhailoparin.com
If I continue beyond this, the next step is not more accusation. It is more clarity.
I want to move on with building my life, write about what really matters to me, and continue my quiet empathy as my mom once said “always with hope.” I would continue that thought with “against all odds.”
- I want to write about boundaries without hatred.
- I want to write about grief without collapse.
- I want to write about the kind of honesty that does not turn into stone.
Some of us do not get the family our parents hoped for. But we can build a life standing in truth, relationships chosen with care, and a moral clarity that does not require anyone’s permission.
See you in the next post!
References
Coleman, S. (2014). Only dis-connect: Pentecostal global networking as revelation and concealment. Ethnos, 79(3), 363–385. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2012.718232
Ebaugh, H. R. F., & Chafetz, J. S. (Eds.). (2000). Religion and the new immigrants: Continuities and adaptations in immigrant congregations. AltaMira Press.
Healey, D. (2017). Russian homophobia from Stalin to Sochi. Bloomsbury Academic.
Hirschman, C. (2004). The role of religion in the origins and adaptation of immigrant groups in the United States. International Migration Review, 38(3), 1206–1233. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00233.x
Human Dignity Trust. (2014, April 24). Russia: The “anti-propaganda” law (Briefing). https://www.humandignitytrust.org/wp-content/uploads/resources/Briefing_on_Russias_federal_anti-propaganda_law.pdf
Human Rights Watch. (2022, November 25). Russia: Expanded “gay propaganda” ban progresses toward law. https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/11/25/russia-expanded-gay-propaganda-ban-progresses-toward-law
Human Rights Watch. (2023, November 30). Russia: Supreme Court bans “LGBT movement” as “extremist”. https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/30/russia-supreme-court-bans-lgbt-movement-extremist
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2023, November 30). Russia: UN Human Rights Chief deplores Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw “LGBT movement”. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/russia-un-human-rights-chief-deplores-supreme-courts-decision-outlaw-lgbt
Pelkmans, M. (Ed.). (2009). Conversion after socialism: Disruptions, modernisms and technologies of faith in the former Soviet Union. Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781845456177
Reuters. (2022, December 5). Putin signs law expanding Russia’s rules against ‘LGBT propaganda’. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-signs-law-expanding-russias-rules-against-lgbt-propaganda-2022-12-05/
The Great Media Group Inc. (n.d.). The Great Media Group Inc. https://thegreatmediagroup.com/
The Great Radio 1040 AM. (n.d.). The Great Radio 1040 AM (KXPD 1040 AM). https://www.thegreatradio.com/
Wanner, C. (2007). Communities of the converted: Ukrainians and global evangelicalism. Cornell University Press.
Mikhail Oparin 