You’re missing the point for why I asked the question. Yes, you can say some things about it. But it takes away so much of Russian civilization that it leaves you with very little to talk about. That’s a testament to its influence and importance. I remember getting into a debate with the British theologian Jonathan Hill once who’s actually an atheist, but theology has always interested him which is why he pursued a doctorate in it. One of the questions I asked at the beginning of our discussion was why he chose to study Christian theology and his response was “… because Christian history is world history…,” implying that its impact on societies is too significant to be decoupled every aspect of how humans live their life.
With Putin’s drinking, maybe it’s just a public perception of things. Some of Hitler’s strongest supporters of his fascist activities were actually middle and older aged women. Hitler obviously isn’t Putin, although the mainstream media here in the US is hard at work trying to convince people that he is. I’m curious, have you ever read The Plot to Seize Russia?
What evidence are you leaning on in support of the accusation? It has to be more than that he’s said inflammatory things for effect.
Tretiak
19d ago
In the US, Christianity has taken a major hit in the culture and has been severely disempowered in its message. It’s one of the things a lot of us hope to see a restoration of in the future but right now it’s progressive ideology in places like California and NYC that are the trendsetters for the rest of the country. To confuse that with Christianity however is a mistake.
Tretiak
19d ago
In the US it’s essentially a meaningless gesture. It’s violated all the time as a matter of some “sacred duty” to uphold the integrity of the office. Same as in our court system when there’s some criminal matter have you have to swear on the Bible to tell the truth. If you refuse to swear on the Bible they have you make what’s called an “affirmation” instead but in both cases, they violate this requirement so often that almost nobody takes it seriously. It’s an almost useless symbolism.
Tretiak
19d ago
I see it as Christianity extending its range into the mundane and ordinary aspects of life, and then everything more substantial than that withered and died, with a gilded facsimile painted over the top by the state. You tell me whether that's "continuing to preserve an elite status" in your books.
If you think that’s all Christianity is then your conclusion is pretty straightforward. That’s why I asked earlier in my previous comment to tell me what Russia is without any reference to Orthodox Christianity. There’s a lot about Russia that’s left uncovered, from the ordinary to the elite as well as the sacred. Sure you can say some things about it. Maybe talk about its Communist days, but Russia is insignificant without it. Most societies on Earth shared a coevolution between the state and its religious traditions.
A note on the drinking point. I once heard that Putin was very popular with women his age as a politician leading the country, specifically because he ‘wasn’t’ a drinker unlike a lot of men of his time. Do you know if that’s true? I know people had to experience Yeltsin’s woes and alcoholism. We’ve all seen his famous television speech, even in the US. I remember alcoholism in Russia was so bad at one point that the average life expectancy of a Russian male was something like 58 years, which is hard to imagine.
You can speak of governance without the state but it’s very limited in what you can say and it’s difficult to do so.
As far as the Second Coming, yes. The Christians of the first century absolutely thought he’d be coming back in their lifetimes. But this debate is usually relegated to the sphere of Eschatology and the doctrine of the Last Days. Christians have adopted a wide number of views on this throughout the centuries.
No one officially runs the church in the US. Not in the sense you may think. Most people here are a kind of very watered down, non-denominational version of a Protestant, which is basically a way of saying people just make shit up for themselves about what Christianity means to them and they pick and take what they want from the Christian references they grew up hearing. Catholics in the US still follow the Pope and the Orthodox Church does have an increasing presence here, but I know very little about it. If you search something like “Jay Dyer debate” on YouTube, he’s one of the most popular lay voices of the Orthodox in the west. Father Spyridon and Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel are also very popular in the west.
Tretiak
19d ago
It’s well known that in times of crisis and uncertainty people turn to religion and family connections to find security and stability to navigate the chaos they’re going through. Maybe religion was just a way for the mass of society to sedate themselves and find a way to get along with life.
… while the other rushed to the bottle…
I did see a YouTube video a few years ago of someone who went around parts of Russia to ask people what their religion is and one of the men actually said, “Alcoholism.” I laughed my ass off but couldn’t tell if the man was serious or not. A lot of Americans see Russians as brutish and as a group of cultured thugs. Not always in a bad way. Many Americans (especially young ones I know) love the masculine Russian gangbanger vibe they see and especially Russian accents. A couple of them intensely hate British accents and culture because they see it as too effeminate and weak.
“Blessing tanks” is definitely a Russian thing. People in the US would think that’s hilarious. I think you see the common culture of Christianity (per the reference to language) as something distant from belief whereas I see it as the power Christianity had over time to extend its range even into the mundane and ordinary aspects of life while continuing to preserve an elite status in other respects. But that’s independent of whether or not lay people incorporate the full aspects of a pious Christian life.
Tretiak
19d ago
I have to say that I liked the version of Christianity before the sociopaths took over better.
I’m curious who think the sociopaths here were. The ancient ones, or the modern ones?
To circle back to the commenter who brought up Tertullian earlier. Tertullian was quite the misogynist and sadist if someone has read anything he ever wrote. At least by the standards of today he is. He thought one of the greatest pleasures of Heaven was in looking over the skies and relishing the pain and torture of those who were damned.
I imagine if we went back in time and saw the early Christian community of 150ad we would be shocked at how insular they were; so much of what they do would have been explicitly Christian.
Nobody can seriously doubt this. Catholicism and the unbroken link back to the first Apostles is all predicated on the idea that the Christians of today are living exactly the way the Christians of the first century did if you were to go back in time. The two groups would be indistinguishable.
People intuitively know this is absurd and that the church has changed enormously over the centuries. The earliest liturgies weren’t even given Latin, they were given in Greek. And the changes tally in the hundreds if not thousands with the passage of time.
If you have your own feasts and rituals, then you can stave off the demons malevolent spirits socially-infectious vibes that lead the youth down bad paths, eg binge-drinking and gambling and nihilism, while promoting the good path [cf “you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons”]. If you have your own dress code, you will be saving boys endless distraction and girls ~5 hours of thought on their appearance a week (at least!). It’s really in its social form that religion successfully improves people; today it is essentially antisocial.
One of the major advantages Christianity had in its formal development was it gave people a comprehensive life script and path to follow. Today’s contemporary and modern western ethic can’t tolerate anyone that comes along and tries to pin someone down along a predefined path that tells them what to do and what they should find important. Until there’s a major restoration of paternalistic authority, I don’t really see these negative trends becoming reversed for the better. Things that were done to us as kids would get us jailed today if we did them to our own. And some of them justified. Yes. Abuse was a thing. Spanking? Apparently that’s a questionable thing now. Not to mention a host of other things.
Tretiak
19d ago
To provide a contrast in how I think about this: In people’s daily habits, lifestyle and rituals in Russia, would you say they take after the influence of Communism or Orthodox Christianity more, in either an explicit or an implied sense. Because if I remember correctly (although I can’t recall the title of the book), it was either after Stalin’s death or the dissolution of the USSR that Russians found a great sense of relief and refuge in going back the historic traditions of their church. Whether is was impactful on a grand scale or lasted very long is beside the point.
What I’m getting at is that even if most Russians aren’t explicit practitioners of the faith or attend church regularly, I would still argue their lives are full of the trappings of what Orthodox Christianity has left behind for them in the way they live their lives. You can argue it’s not meaningful if you want. You can say Orthodox Christianity is a mile wide and an inch deep if you like. Sure. Most people aren’t ideologues to an extreme extent and only have brief moments of their lives where they experience such commitments to ideas, perhaps under trying circumstances. But take away Orthodox Christianity and think of how much of the history of Russia you erase, if not the country itself, in every dimension.
Tretiak
19d ago
I don’t know how you can speak meaningfully of Orthodox Christianity without the church. That’s like speaking about governance without the state. By this logic most of Christian history the world over should be discarded and throw on the scrap heap as a grift.
The US in particular is still dominated by non-denominational Protestantism. Calling yourself Catholic in certain areas some of my relatives live in will leave people scratching their heads or looking at you with a raised eyebrow. In both Protestant and Catholic cases, a true sense of bound up spirituality in the religion exists only in pockets across the country, the same as I’d wager it does in Russia. The average American shares much more in common with the average Russian in that neither is anywhere near as religious as the average Jew in Israel or Muslim in the Middle East. If you asked me to say the Our Father in ecclesiastical Latin I couldn’t do it unlike a Muslim who could give Salat in Arabic (which was already given by Muhammad in his native Arabic, save the classical-modern distinction).
Tretiak
19d ago
And not everybody’s relationship to Christianity is devout or spiritual, which is my point. Mine is cultural and heavily intellectual. Prayer and attendance is something I’m clearly spiritually deficient in which I desire to greatly improve.
Tretiak
19d ago
According to that logic America's reaction to 9/11 showed that their true God is the God of Capitalism.
Believe it or not people ‘do’ make that argument, and it rings pretty true to most astute observers. It’s one of the things that sucks about this society.
"How would the country react if someone blew up a public place of theirs" is an atrocious measure of their dedication to that particular public place's importance in each citizen's lives, specifically.
It’s the one people use every single day. It’s the one that lets you know you live in a bad neighborhood when people dump trash on the road or shit on the sidewalk. If some gangbanger tags the back wall of a local supermarket, nobody here gives a shit. If someone were to do that to your historical church you’d better prepare for an enormous lynch mob to come after you.
Tretiak
19d ago
Could be. But the fact that millions of Russians are spiritually apathetic has no impact on the observation that Orthodox Christianity matters enormously to them as a matter of their culture. Just because Russians aren't as committed as Jesus as the average Muslim should be with Osama doesn't mean they're faking it when it comes to the importance of their faith to them. Otherwise, try blowing up a Russian cathedral and not expecting a response. You'll quickly find out how much they're LARPing.
I actually thought you were going to cite Anne Applebaum who's pointed out similar statistics that I'm aware of. Most Russians as I understand it are cultural Christians in the same sense Americans are cultural Christians in that they celebrate Christmas as a consumer holiday, not as a way to celebrate the glory of Jesus. That doesn't mean Christianity doesn't have a significant sway in both countries. The major reason the US foreign policy establishment is in hock to Israel is because of the massive amount of financial and religious support given to them by the Evangelicals and Christian Zionists in our country, both of which are heretical. That testifies to the institutional power an even secularized Christian society has in advancing their religious causes on the international stage.
You may be surprised to know that I've never formally attended Mass or a church before (in a devout ceremonial sense). Culturally, Christianity was a 'huge' influence in my local community as is Catholicism specifically in the case of my family. It is so huge in fact, that the secular community borrows heavily from the norms and habits largely introduced by Christians as part of their daily lives, without even recognizing it. You may say that that's not unique to Christianity, but Christianity has been the standard bearer for most of our practices from the day this country was founded. I'd argue that's probably historically the case in your country as well.
As I've gotten older, I've become even more attracted to the religion in the sense of a semi-devout or at least lay practitioner. That is to say someone that does more than just profess the faith and pays lip service to it but partakes in the demands and activity of it's more serious adherents. To call your tradition a "grift" I think is an insult to your history. That it's an ideology in league with functioning of the state system isn't a surprise because that hasn't been a historical anathema anywhere in the world and to any religion that's ever coevolved with state institutions.
Tretiak
19d ago
The only "relgiious requirement" should be "the voters won't vote for you if they don't like your religion (or lack thereof)" and even that can be a big problem.
This is happening all the time anyway. People vote for their identities not the abstract contents of the legislative policies of their representatives.
Tretiak
19d ago
I don't know the specific demographic composition of Russia, bur Orthodox culture is still a very big part of their society. To assume social status doesn't matter to them in religious terms when it still retains a huge amount of cultural capital in the country is placing a large bet against common sense. It's possible I could be wrong here, but I 'highly' doubt it. And at the very least, it doesn't hurt their effort even if it doesn't help it.
I think that there is a huge equivocation when it comes to what the separation of church and state actually means. In my notion the separation means, that the state is sovereign in a sense that all the power comes from voters through legislature, executive and judiciary. In other words it is not possible for a Pope in Vatican to create some order which will be automatically valid law for people in such a sovereign state. But it is absolutely possible for such an order to be brought through standard political process and pass as a binding law.
Right. I agree with you here. I'd argue for religious requirements for political participation, much in the same way you can't be a member of the Communist Party in China without being an avowed atheist. There's actually not much disagreement I have with either the politics or theology of the twin paradigm that ruled the European continent back when it was the church/monarchy power duopoly that ran the show. The only real problem with it that I see is that it came at a bad point in history. You take a look at high tech feudal societies today like Saudi Arabia that are religiously very cohesive and absent the consanguinity in the population, what's your problem? Not that there aren't any of course but they're problems I'd gladly trade for the ones we have in the west. Or take an elective monarchy like Malaysia. Much the same thing can be said for a lot of the ways they benefit from their style of governance. Church and monarchy is better than democracy and capitalism IMO. (Come at me bros, I'm feeling bold today). You could perhaps argue industrialization wouldn't have happened under the former, but I see no reason to think that.
It is as you say the secularists have definitely succeeded in muddying the waters that don't even blur but rather draw up a distinction that religion has no place in politics. Laws against murder specifically can be morally justified without recourse to divine commandments. You can justify them by natural law. You can justify them by moral sentiment. You can justify them by social consensus. You can justify them almost any way you want to. I suppose if you tried to anchor that law through religious justification that's where you'd piss off the non-religious segment of the population. Then again our mere existence is enough to piss them off in the first place. I'm all for disregarding their opinion. If they want to argue in basis of facts and evidence then let us come to the table. Until then, "butthurt," is not a defense. I'm passing legislation whether they like it or not. They have no problem requiring me to tolerate degenerate influences, they in turn can tolerate the 'horror' of Christian hospitality and charity and the Stalinist demand that they observe common decency in the community.
I've heard of Patriarch Kirill's collusion with Russian state agencies before but wondered if that was just a western smear and accusation against him. But in a way, it just repeats the same pattern most Christian states have done throughout the centuries. There was always massive interplay between state and religion. The religious authorities were always seen as a keeper of public opinion and the psychological, spiritual and material welfare of the people. Any ruling political elite/class had to be seen as having the approval of the religious body. I don't really share your opinion on this but I do understand it.
Maybe Russia could reverse their demographic decline with what Ilia II did in Georgia by promising to baptize every third child. That seemed to stem and reverse the population drop off. Being godfather to millions of children across the country is quite a job for the clergy however. Good luck on the logistics with that.
I've always balked at most Protestant notions of belief and conviction in the US. Their doctrinal and interpretive anarchy across tens of thousands of different sects perfectly exemplifies what's wrong with their thinking. Not too long ago this debate was pointed out to me by a relative that I found funny as fuck. Watching the Catholic (Gordon) and Dyer (Orthodox) bully the Protestant (some random dude) I couldn't help but laugh at, while he kept trying to insert himself in the discussion to remain relevant to the debate. And then later this debate by Gordon and Dyer again I could tell was largely unintelligible to most people. It took me a couple days to get through but I enjoyed it solely for the bloodsports.
Theologians like WLC think as far as separation between church and state go that Christianity should always and forever remain independent of the state and that the strength of our belief should stand on its own merits. I think he's wrong about this. Several states in the world if you go back in time were massively Christian save for the later influence and spread of Islam which came to preside and dominate over a majority Christian culture and way of life. Turkey has always been one of my favorite examples of this. And Christianity historically (in addition to Islam) didn't largely become influential through Jesus' preachments in the NT. It spread through war, military and economic might; and force. For better or worse, I think any honest person has to admit the state has a relevant role to play in promoting religion, lest you end up getting dominated by the religion of those who think opposite to you. My historical/biological lineage is rooted with the Nordics in Scandinavia, although individually I'm a born and raised American. Maybe that’s why I’ve always intensely loved the cold weather, even before I could speak. I still have relatives over there who my extended family maintains ties with and when I see what's been going on with Muslim migration, I can feel my adrenaline pumping. I've got a few grenades of my own I'd like to let off if harm comes to their doorstep. You're living in our home. The men need to put their Viking helmets back on and reintroduce the Blood Eagle to a few people.
In the Catholic corner as a counterpart to what's going on in Dearborn, St. Mary's in Kansas has become something of the Mecca for traditional Catholics (SSPX), in an interesting way almost similar to what the Jews also have with places like Kiryas Joel. Novus Ordo Catholics are continuing to decline as one should expect, but the traditional corners of our faith are booming with huge families that I hope in the future will come to dominate and overturn the crisis of what's been happening in the church. A restoration of a real commitment to Mere Christianity in the US would be a wonderful thing to have as it would rebuild communities and bring people together. I continue to hope and pray for better days in the future ahead.
Tretiak
20d ago
Fuentes is a breath of fresh air for disaffected citizens and the undercurrent political culture of the Internet but if I had to pick a constituency to win an election, Ben Shapiro still has more sway in turning out voters for his cause, even though he and I would agree on practically nothing.
Tretiak
20d ago
Words lose their original meanings quickly when you’re operating with ulterior motives like Ben is here. Calling someone else a coward for platforming a person with views you deem abhorrent when you’re the person who refuses to debate him is… an interesting inversion of the English language.
I say this only half joking but does smoking count? People that smoke aren’t trying to kill themselves unless they’re probably smoking a carton a day, but you know nonetheless you’re slowly killing yourself every time you light up.
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