Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies by David P. Gushee

Author:David P. Gushee [Gushee, David P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eerdmans
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Retooling a Thousand-Year-Old Dream

One term surfacing in media reports for the project Putin is undertaking is Russkiy mir—“The Russian world,” a thousand-year-old concept recently retooled. In a March 2022 post, the Economist describes Russkiy mir as “a previously obscure historical term for a Slavic civilization based on shared ethnicity, religion and heritage. The Putin regime has revised, promulgated and debased this idea into an obscurantist anti-Western mixture of Orthodox dogma, nationalism, conspiracy theory and security-state Stalinism.”10

Religion scholar John Burgess speaks of the Holy Rus’ tradition, tracing it back to the conversion of Prince Vladimir in 988. Vladimir was converted to Byzantine Christianity through a visit to the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. He brought the Orthodox faith back home. His “warriors and their families were baptized in the Dnieper River,” in Kyiv. Orthodox Christianity became the point of unity for the tribes of the region and the cultures that developed there. Kyiv eventually fell to the Mongols. Constantinople was decimated by the Muslims in 1453. These developments “further strengthened Moscow’s conviction that it had inherited the mantle of defender of true Christianity. The mythology of Moscow as the Third Rome [after Rome and Constantinople] was born.”11

Out of these cultural elements, a renewed Holy Rus’ dream appears to have emerged. This dream is of a reunited Slavic, or at least Russian-speaking, world, under the hegemony of Russia and characterized by traditional Russian Orthodox religion and moral values. Here Russia once again pitches itself as a defender of Christian civilization, but this time against the decadence of the Western liberal democracies. This project begins with Russia and territory to be reclaimed by Russia. Under the Russkiy mir label, it has been described by a former official of the Moscow Patriarchate as “the post-Soviet civil religion.”12 It is especially prominent in the Russian military and security services, as well as in the Orthodox hierarchy, and it is increasingly visible in the speeches of Putin himself.

While there is a distinctively Russian dimension to these themes, they also resonate elsewhere. An authoritarian male Christian head of government resolutely stands athwart history, sets his feet firmly in holy national soil, and resists left-liberal ideology in order to defend not just one formerly Christian nation but Christian civilization itself. Homosexuality is taken to be the primary symbol of godless decadence that must be resisted. Democracy is sacrificed to this project, in part because Western liberal democracy is now understood to be a Trojan horse for godless left-liberalism, and in part because a Christian holy war to defeat the enemies of God is far more important. Various versions of this account animate the politics of every country we are considering in this book. Many millions of Christian people find such visions compelling.

The Economist describes Mr. Putin’s mind-set since the invasion of Ukraine as follows:

He is said to have lost much of his interest in current affairs and become preoccupied instead with history, paying particular heed to figures like Konstantin Leontyev, an ultra-reactionary 19th-century visionary who admired hierarchy and monarchy, cringed at democratic uniformity and believed in the freezing of time.

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