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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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