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I did not call "my tradition" a grift, and certainly not the broader kind of traditions that stem from Christianity without being explicitly recognized as religious. I called the church, as in the government-adjacent institution, a grift.
Regarding Christmas as a consumer holiday, it might provide some perspective that while in the Catholic West, as I understand, Christmas is synonymous with the winter holidays and New Year's Eve is an afterthought, in Russia New Year's Eve is synonymous with the winter holidays and Christmas is an afterthought. It is not nearly popular enough to be a consumer holiday.
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).
You can speak of governance without the state pretty well. There's the king far away in the capital, and then there's your local lord who actually determined the minutia of your life. Totalizing nation-states are recent.
And maybe I'm not very well-versed in Christian theology (rather, not at all), but I don't recall Jesus Christ saying anything about the Pope and the cardinals and Patriarchs being very important for Christianity. Didn't people believe, back then after his death, that the Second Coming would happen within their lifetimes?
I'll take you up on your word. Now that you mention it, by the way, I realize I have no idea who actually runs the church in the US.
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.
That's also the impression I got, and the fact that Christianity in the US is so "headless" and the Presidents still swear on the Bible and pay general lip service to it makes me think the Christian tradition in the US is a lot stronger than in Russia. Even if Russian clergy have swaggier drip.
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.
In that case it looks like what you describe as Christianity being a profound part of Russian daily life looks like useless symbolism to me, and vice versa regarding my impression of American life.
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.
In the US, and correct me if I'm wrong, the progressive ideology considers the church important enough to take it over - gay/female priests, permissive doctrine, etc. In Russia the progressives are generally either milquetoast or militantly atheist.
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