Chuck Ardo for BuzzFlash: Fundamentalists Can't Get Enough of Authoritarian Putin

Vladimir Putin (DonkeyHotey)

December 26, 2022

By Chuck Ardo

According to a Quinnipiac University poll taken in April of this year “More than 8 in 10 Americans (82 percent) think that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a war criminal” and “roughly 7 in 10 (71 percent) think Putin ordered Russian troops to kill civilians in Ukraine,” Yet, there is a large and influential segment of the Republican party that sees Putin as a role model.

Many American evangelicals see Russia as what a Christian nation can achieve if not unconstrained by democratic values. They view Putin’s “traditionalism” as fulfilling God’s calling while democracy fails to deliver the same results.  As far right columnist and political commentator Pat Buchanan wrote in Townhall “In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia's flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity. His recent speeches carry echoes of John Paul II whose Evangelium Vitae in 1995 excoriated the West for its embrace of a "culture of death."

Slate magazine reported that many evangelical Republicans have “overlooked Putin’s authoritarian tendencies because of his culture war stances.”  While the Heritage Society website asserts that Putin “has cleverly cast himself as a belligerent in the culture war. In doing so, he has appealed to some conservatives in America who have grown skeptical of the liberal democratic tradition inherited from the Enlightenment, which they believe contains the seeds of America’s spiritual and cultural demise.”

“Social conservatives have been focusing on the family for a long time, and Russians have frequently been at the forefront of the fight for “traditional” values. In more recent times, Russian conservatives were central to the founding and operations of the World Congress of Families (WCF), a Christian-dominated inter-confessional coalition of right-wing activists from around the world dedicated to defending what they call “the natural family,” that is, a nuclear family consisting of a married man and woman and their children,” according to Political Research Associates. Putin’s announcement that “We see many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of western civilization. They are denying the moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual” aligns with their own views.

But, as Russell Moore, director of Christianity Today’s Public Theology Project and former president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, warned “If the church is simply a cultural vehicle for national stability and pride, then one can hardly expect dictators to do anything other than manipulate it.” Moore further sounds the alarm when he says  “Evangelical Christians should watch the way of Vladimir Putin—and we should recognize it whenever we are told that we need a Pharaoh or a Barabbas or a Caesar to protect us from our real or perceived enemies. Whenever that happens, we should remember how to say, in any language; ‘“Nyet.’”

As Politico Magazine reported five years ago “American 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.”  We now know they have been successful in banning abortion and are moving to attack minority rights. “Elections belong to the people”, Abraham Lincoln said, “It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”

Enough said.