Name: Christian Nationalist Military Defeat
Uploaded: 2022-10-14T11:12:01+00:00
Duration: 35 min 53 s
Description: Highlights discussed: "The Spiritual Lessons of a Christian Nationalist Military Defeat" https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/frenchpress/the-spiritual-lessons-of-a-christian/ Putin has spent years tyin

1 year ago

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Highlights discussed:

"The Spiritual Lessons of a Christian Nationalist Military Defeat"

https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/frenchpress/the-spiritual-lessons-of-a-christian/

Putin has spent years tying himself to the Russian Orthodox Church and portraying himself as a defender of Christian civilisation. All the way back in 2014, former National Security Agency analyst John Schindler was sounding the alarm about Putin’s “Orthodox jihad.” Putin forged an ideological “fusion” between the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the FSB. The ROC even dedicated a church at the FSB’s Moscow headquarters.

ROC agitprop, which has Kremlin endorsement, depicts a West that is declining down to its death at the hands of decadence and sin, mired in confused unbelief, bored and failing to even reproduce itself. Patriarch Kirill, head of the church, recently explained that the “main threat” to Russia is “the loss of faith” in the Western style, while ROC spokesmen constantly denounce feminism and the LGBT movement as Satanic creations of the West that aim to destroy faith, family, and nation.

Whatever else you think of him, Putin is telling the God’s honest truth here.
See, this is the thing. Putin, Orban, and all the illiberal leaders that our baizuocracy loves to hate are all completely clear and completely correct on the society-destroying nature of wokeness and post-liberal leftism. (Emphasis in original.)

In the run-up to the Ukraine war, Tucker Carlson condemned “hatred” of Vladimir Putin and famously asked, “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” In a podcast just prior to Russia’s invasion, Steve Bannon declared “Putin ain’t woke. He’s anti-woke.” His guest, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, said, “The Russian people still know which bathroom to use.”

The danger of a focus on Christendom rather than the radical personal renewal and redemption that is the heart of Christianity is exactly what Søren Kierkegaard identified in his Attack on Christendom. In a series of essays, Kierkegaard aimed directly at the malignant impact of the Danish state church on authentic Christianity, and his complaint applies across other churches in other nations. I’ve written about this before:

The University of Chicago’s Russell Johnson has argued that “for Kierkegaard, an essential part of the Christian life is self-examination and imitation, finding oneself confronted by Christ and beckoned to follow.” But as Kierkegaard himself wrote, “The imitation of Christ is really the point from which the human race shrinks.” In that sense, he was profoundly pessimistic. “If there is emphasis on this point,” he wrote, “the stronger the emphasis the fewer the Christians.”