Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: How US Christian Nationalists Learned to Love Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church
March 15, 2020
By Bill Berkowitz
Since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, America’s Christian Nationalists have courted the Russian Orthodox Church, and more recently, a bromance with Vladimir Putin. Now, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, these relationships are in jeopardy. Franklin Graham, a major Putin supporter, is unlikely to respond to texts from his buddy, Vlad. Even Dr. Ruth won’t be able to patch things up anytime soon.
Americans United’s Rob Boston recently wrote that “During the Trump presidency, Christian nationalists tripped over themselves to makes excuses for Trump every time he kowtowed to Putin. They dismissed allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. When a Russian operative infiltrated the National Prayer Breakfast, they yawned.”
According to UC Riverside Department of History Professor Georg Michels, “At the beginning of the war Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, gave a sermon in which he emphasized the God-given unity of Ukraine and Russia; he also denounced the ‘evil forces’ in Ukraine that are out to destroy this unity” (https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/03/09/missing-piece-about-putin-and-ukraine).
In a February 2019 Politico story headlined “How Russia Became the Leader of the Global Christian Right,” Casey Michel wrote, “[A]merican fundamentalists bent on unwinding minority protections in the U.S. have increasingly leaned on Russia for support – and for a model they’d bring to bear back home, from targeting LGBT communities to undoing abortion rights throughout the country.”
Pat Buchanan was one of the first far-right political commentators to identify Putin’s Russia as a potentially strong ally in the international culture wars, in a piece he wrote for Townhall in 2014. “In the new war of beliefs, Putin is saying, it is Russia that is on God's side. The West is Gomorrah,” Buchanan wrote (https://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2014/04/04/whose-side-is-god-on-now-n1818499).
Buchanan added, “In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity.”
The Jan-Feb. 2014 newsletter from the social conservative Rockford, Illinois-based World Council of Families, maintained that number one of its list of the "ten best trends" in the world in 2013, was "Russia Emerges as Pro-Family Leader." The WCF is an outgrowth of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, and it is vehemently anti-gay (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/how-russia-became-a-leader-of-the-worldwide-christian-right-214755/).
The Southern Poverty Law Center identified the WCF as “one of the key driving forces behind the U.S. Religious Right’s global export of homophobia.” "While the other super-powers march to a pagan world-view," wrote WCF's Allan Carlson, "Russia is defending Judeo-Christian values.
In a recent Religion Dispatches story headlined “A Twisted Love Story: How American Evangelicals Helped Make Putin’s Russia And How Russia Became The Darling Of The American Right,” Katherine Kelaidis explores a relationship that began after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, American evangelicals saw an opportunity, and began numerous “mission trips to Moscow and Bible-buying fundraisers for St. Petersburg,” (https://religiondispatches.org/a-twisted-love-story-how-american-evangelicals-helped-make-putins-russia-and-how-russia-became-the-darling-of-the-american-right/).
Kelaidis, who focuses on early Medieval Christianity and contemporary Orthodox identity in non-traditionally Orthodox countries, writes that evangelicals were generally positively received, with little “hostility from the Russian Orthodox Church.”
The influx of Protestant American converts, many from the evangelical tradition, but also conservative mainline Protestants, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, radically changed the face of Orthodox Christianity in America. Once a church almost exclusively made up of immigrants and their descendants, these Americans with no historical ties to Orthodoxy, became a majority in a number of Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States and brought with them their cultural baggage—most importantly the Culture Wars.
Apparently taking pages from the playbook of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, “the Russian Orthodox Church has positioned itself as the leader of the conservative/traditionalist position, not only in Russia, but around the world. Putin’s [recent] speech made clear that Russia doesn’t see itself as challenging the West and its values; rather, Putin’s Russia is positioning itself as the last and rightful guardian of what the West once was and what it ought to be again, a Christian culture centered around family, faith, and “traditional values” that have been abandoned in the face of secular modernity.”
Has the relationship between Christian Nationalists and Putin’s Russia been permanently damaged by his invasion of Ukraine? “Christian nationalists may now claim to stand with the people of Ukraine,” Rob Boston wrote, “but those words ring hollow. They’ve been sleeping with the enemy for too many years to switch sides now.”
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