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I can never understand the trad Christian love for the Russian state as some enabler of Christian virtue - it's really really not the case.
Russia is a larp, pretending to be bits of the Soviet bear and the Imperial eagle whenever it suits, and as such they have made the Russian Orthodox Patriarchy an arm of that project by stuffing their mouths with gold. This is done for state aims, and many Eastern Europeans (including in Ukraine) attend churches regularly - more than Russians incidentally (which is kind of obviously true due to Ukraine's far lower muslim population for a start). The orthodoxy is another state pillar, and part of the legitimizing claims Russia projects, but I don't see much beyond that.
Russia comes down hard on those who damage churches as its popular among a fairly conservative core population that likes tradition and the larp (which I actually understand and respect), and because its a disrespect to a state arm like attacking a police station. It also lets Russia project an image of being against globalhomo too, which is popular for some and where the gay bashing comes in.
But what does being a supposedly trad Christian state actually do for morality and behaviour of the Russian system in general? They have mass muslim migration, onto a population that was already fairly muslim - 10-15% of the population (~ double to triple the poor UK), and a string of terrorist attacks to match. Homosexual rape and general degeneracy is embedded deeply into the Russian military, and the whole anti LGBT thing seems to miss out a lot - Russia is just repressed, not some trad paradise. I'm not sure Jesus would love old King Charles and his mealy mouthed words, Russia however is a few steps away from Sodom by comparison.
To be clear, this is aimed at the Russian state and high leadership of the church - I actually think a good chunk of normal Russians have solid christian convictions that are to their credit. However, that's inherited through time, was failed to be stamped out via the Soviets, and they seem to happily wage war on their very Christian Ukrainian neighbors. The Russian government itself is just very cynically using them, and burning through what it inherited - this isn't going to last long-term. Drug abuse, HIV/AIDS, divorce and spousal abuse are through the roof, that's your Christian paradise?
I'm not a fan of globalhomo, and Ukraine is going to have to navigate a minefield post war to chart its way through the various failure modes of the West, but Russia is just sad. Punching gays as strength and golden watches while the structure rots and now burns, if that's the best of the Christian project then it needs to find Christ too.
It makes sense once you recognize that it's mostly Edge-lords and Astroturf. As a general rule, sincere trad Christians aren't hanging out on "this part of twitter" and the ones who do are weird.
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“Christianity done for political aims” is the traditional form of Christianity. The State has been invested in Christianity and using it for her own influence since Constantine. Remember that America got Pope John Paul II elected as an anti-Soviet measure.
You mean the central Asian migrants that will not receive citizenship? Who cares? The problem has always been political enfranchisement and replacement. Moscow is 90% White while NYC is like 30% White.
Because the North Caucasus was always Muslim, and they took it over. It’s not because of migration. Russia’s cultural capitals are way more Russian than ours are White American.
This is like NAFO propaganda. No, they are not all secretly gay or doing secret mass rape in the military; no, the new ayatollah is not gay either. They do not have 1% of the gay culture that America has, neither do they have gay mafias in their arts scenes or in tech like America. I would prefer that we “bash the gays” than allow them the kind of power they have in the West. I know two straight men in the classical arts who have been prevented from advancing in the industry because they aren’t gay. This is common where homosexuals get into power and I am personally envious of Russia’s ability to throw them back into the closet. I actually want straight men in all influential positions, but perhaps this is a matter of cultural taste, ie I like their cultural products and their conservatism and do not like to see homosexuality celebrated in our major cities.
The Muslim immigrants ruining Europe are mostly white. Mohammad Atta and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were white. And a lot of the white ethnics (both immigrants and indigenous ethnic minorities) in Russia are Muslims in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev mold. Assimilability has more to do with cultural Christianity than it does with skin colour.
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John Paul II was elected because he was conservative and seen as a diplomat; the Soviets actually assessed him as being relatively weak on communism at the time of the conclave, and the cardinals wanted a conservative who would just stop tinkering given the disaster of Paul VI.
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I am not certain I will be able to change your mind on much to do with chronic Russian hazing and rape, both by their own and by Kadyrov's boys, here. As I recall you thought that the Bucha massacre wasn't Russian discipline immediately collapsing once in an environment where they hold power, as is common, but instead somehow Azov who decided to kill everyone post liberation and then go back and doctor satellite footage of the massacre.
However, I guess it's worth a go:
Christ being misused and twisted by politics certainly is very old, and is a factor that can bring down such states in the past. This is a failure mode, not something to aspire to for a Christian and the states they wish to live in surely?
Your Youtube link doesn't work, but as I understand John Paul II was elected for several reasons, none of which support any relevant thesis that Russia is a model for a Christian state.
Moscow has an official Muslim population in the 1-2 million range, comparable with Paris, and many more unofficial migrants as you point out that will certainly push it much higher. Relations are not great, which boils into open war in the past, and terrorist attacks here and there. You might say the same about the west, but this is the same story, not a solution by the Russians.
Rape is endemic in the Russian military, including as hazing "Dedovshchina" where it is extremely common. All forces struggle with some incidents worldwide, but the Russian structure is famously bad for it since forever. For example: Russian recruits sold for sex, 1500 army sexual assaults reported in 2019 which must be a floor, and that only came to light after a guy snapped and shot those who were raping him.
We also have many incidents in the war, both by and inflicted onto Russians, but possibly the one you'll most be interested in was the Russian soldier raped by Kadyrov's troops who are used as barrier troops and left to run rampant over their Christian charges, who then hung himself. Not sure if you read Russian, but a rough translation is: "Goodbye. love, in the time that I am here I have seen hell. There were not so many deaths in Chechnya or even Afganistan. seas of human meat. but that is not why i depart. We here, Russian people, are nobody, and Chechens rule. They drink, are lawless and rape, they despise everyone and no ones doing anything about it. Kitty, they took all the money you sent and they did a thing to me. This is to let you know that I resisted. Remember that you and me owe nothing to anyone. This is the only way out. See you after death"
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My experience as a European member of a conservative church is that this is mostly an online and political phenomenon and doesn't represent people who actually go to Church. It might be different in the USA, I don't have any info on the ground from over there, but over here in the Netherlands right wing populist politicians will exhibit sometimes the trad love for Russia and they will make some vague remarks about our country being Christian or whatever, but none of those politicians actually go to Church and if you push them all of them will admit they are cultural Christians and don't actually believe any traditional Christian dogmas. Just like you can get more liberal politicians to sometimes dress up progressive politics with vaguely Christian language about love or whatever, the right wing populists will dress up their anti Muslim sentiment with some vague rhetoric about us being a traditionally Christian nation or whatever. In both cases it is just superficial rhetoric trying to appeal to some cultural memes and doesn't really mean anything. In practice, people who vote for those parties mostly don't actually attend Church regularly and people who do attend Church regularly almost never vote for those parties. Maybe in other countries actual trads are more tempted to vote for the right wing populist parties as the lesser evil, but in the Netherlands having no electoral threshold and proportional representation in our parliament, we are spoiled with not just one, but two actual traditional Christian political parties and almost everybody who regularly attends a theologically conservative Church votes for them and both of these parties are not pro Russia.
In America russophiles are a bit more fringey than they are in Europe, because our right traditionally defines itself with strong russophobia, but also the right wing populists get the church attending vote.
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I have always been fascinated by Christian political parties. The idea seems repulsive to me both as an American (due to separation of church and state) and as a Christian (I'm from a tradition that sees even voting as borderline sinful).
Do you think Christians should completely abstain from politics? In the end somebody has to run the country and I cannot imagine a version of Christianity that doesn't at least espouse some values that will inform how Christians think a country ought to be run. If you think Christians should completely abstain from politics, what do you think Constantine or Clovis should have done after converting to Christianity? How should a country be governed when almost all of its citizens profess Christianity, like most Western countries up until quite recently?
Jesus clearly teaches political quietism in the New Testament, and historically most radical Christian "back-to-the-fundamentals" movements are politically quietist (like the Amish). The first modern capital-F Fundamentalists were obviously not politically quietist (the extent of mass government-backed secular education in America c. 1900 made already it a lot harder to be politically quietist if you didn't withdraw completely from the wider society like the Amish do), but there is no discussion of secular politics in The Fundamentals.
Politically active Christianity is, obviously, almost as lindy as politically quietist Christianity. I think this is because Jesus doesn't say why he is preaching political quietism, so it isn't obvious how "don't be a Zealot and render unto Caesar" translates to contexts other than living as a religious minority in a pagan Empire.
The most common view between the time of Constantine and the present was "Christians should not seek political power unless it is explicitly thrust upon them by Divine authority" - the exception is broad enough to cover the political power of the Church, Divine Right kingship and appointed authority under it, religious visionary leadership like Joan of Arc, and even Cromwell and his major-generals.
"Democracy good" is an idea that largely skips from pagan Athens (and, to a lesser extent, the Roman Republic) to the explicitly anti-clerical French Revolution without touching the intervening Christian millennia. The first country to see itself as both Christian and democratic is Jacksonian America. I don't know enough about the political thought of the medieval and early modern Christian republics (like Venice or the United Provinces) to comment, although I note that American republicanism was established by men whose Christianity was somewhat heterodox (especially Jefferson) and looked more to the Roman Republic than any of the usual Christian examples.
Ho ho, let's roll up our sleeves and get stuck into that one! "Democracy good" perhaps, but in pagan Athens it's not democracy as we know it, Jim. Participation confined to free, male, Athenian citizens, and the definition of who was an Athenian became more rigid over time (you had to be born of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother, otherwise out of luck). You could lose your civic rights, and this might even become a heritable disqualification:
"Also excluded from voting were citizens whose rights were under suspension (typically for failure to pay a debt to the city: see atimia); for some Athenians, this amounted to permanent (and in fact inheritable) disqualification."
Some (such as Plato) thought democracy itself was suspect, others considered it could be good and bad forms, "true" democracy was distinguished from "rule by the mob" (which, of course, is always the danger and probably the form of this distinction today is "populism is the bad form of democracy").
Democracy as we think of it, the will of the people, one man one vote, everyone who is a citizen has a voice and there are no racial or gender disqualifications to citizenship, may not have "touch[ed] the intervening Christian millennia" but (a) democracy as we think of it likely would not have been recognisable to the Athenians and (b) some kind of limits, councils, advisors, parliaments, etc. did occur in the Christian era. Take our friend Henry VIII, he had parliaments which had to at least notionally agree with and consent to his desired policies, and he didn't always get his way, even though those would not have been "democracy as we know it".
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Groups like the Amish do not have this tension, and I think the ideal Christian behavior is far closer to the Amish than it is to the modal American/European Christian.
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All that is kind of true but how can a country with state sanctioned, state-promoted pride parades even be anything but anti-Christian? Both the medium and the message are pretty explicitly anti-Christian? How can a country with legal gay marriage be considered Christian, never mind divorce rates?
Even if Russia's goal is just vaguely seeming to be against globohomo, that's still way closer to Christianity than the Western countries who are promoting, spreading, directing globohomo.
I don't believe in the 'based trad Russia' meme. But in terms of social vice, it's hardly worse than America or the West generally. Abortions: 13.1 per 1000 vs 14.4 in America, 20 in UK. Russia is number 7 in drug deaths per capita but America is far ahead at number 1 worldwide, 4x Russia.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-rates-by-country
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/drug-use/by-country
Trying but mostly failing to be anti-LGBT in the military seems a lot more Christian than promoting LGBT and diversity in the military. However cynically Putin may use Christian rhetoric he's 10x more Christian than the average Western leader who's mentally redefined Christianity to mean 'more leftism but with cross aesthetics'.
Vladimir Putin who swore he was an Atheist to join the KGB for decades and is on record (via hot mike) of hoping tech not Jesus will make him immortal? That Vladimir Putin? He's against western Liberalism and LBGTQ+ sure but that doesn't make someone a Christian. By that standard Joseph Stalin was a Christian.
I will take 50 Stalins before the rule of Big Red and Greta Thunberg or whichever stand in with the politics of Merkel/Jean-Claude Juncker
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He's a Hirsi Ali Christian: i.e. Christian because it's the only thing they see that can push back against liberalism (and, in Hirsi Ali's case, Islam and the alliance it's made with the left) and provide an alternate civilizational narrative.
This is obviously very different from communists, who think they already have said narrative.
He makes the same cultural noises every European leader does. But he's no more Christian then the liberal Western Europeans. Nor are Russians anymore religious then Western Europeans. Putin suppresses quite a bit of Christianity as well, Evangelical missionaries are not welcome in Russia。 America is a far more religious society then Russia.
Making the noises and then doing globohomo stuff seems worse than making the noises and keeping globohomo out/maintaining some semblance of Christian values.
But YMMV I'm not a Christian so maybe I don't value enough the value it places on the spirit rather than the form.
But, if you were a (Orthodox) Christian seeing your faith fade who would you rather support you? A leader like Putin or someone like Talarico that'll come up with some doctrine about how Genesis 1 means transing kids? Or a Stalin who just outright wants you gone?
Better an emperor driven purely by pragmatism than an outright heretic Buffalo Bill-ing your religion or someone hostile to the concept entirely, surely?
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Do you consider restricting marriage to be between a man and a woman such a core part of Christianity that it beats all the rest of Christian practices and virtues, or lack thereof? It's hardly even exclusive to Christianity. Any run of the mill jungle tribe faith practices heterogamy.
Yes, marriage is a very important ritual in Christianity and public life generally. Who can marry whom is one of the most fundamental pillars of society! You used to need an act of parliament to divorce. Henry VIII had no end of religious problems with marriage.
The state has basically reduced marriage to a tax strategy and a party.
Furthermore, it's not like everyone is abiding by all the rest of Christian dogma on usury, fasting, work on the sabbath, lust, abortion, licentiousness and only gay marriage slipped through the net.
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