Rod Dreher, whom I have frequently linked to on this forum, is an American member of the Russian Orthodox Church (he used to be a Catholic but left over the church's scandalous mishandling of clerical abuse. To make matters clear, I think this was a mistake on his part but I'm not going to judge him because of the sheer horror of what he came across when investigating the issue as a journalist.)
Recently on his blog, he had a post discussing some of the upheavals within the Russian Orthodox leadership (the Patriarchate of Moscow has just dismissed two of its prominent spokesmen, both of whom have accused it of getting too close to the Putin government - one of these is a conservative nationalist, the other might be considered a liberal).
www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/russian-orthodox-jesus-christ-nationalist/The liberal is interviewed here (link courtesy of Dreher). Note that, as Dreher himself points out, he appears to have a starry-eyed view of the position of Christianity/Christian democracy in Western Europe
www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/01/orthodoxy-without-christ-an-interview-with-sergei-chapninEXTRACT
The flourishing of all things Soviet is an obstacle to the formation of a modern Orthodox culture and a new Orthodox identity. If we embrace the Soviet past and take pride in it, then we should reject the heritage of prerevolutionary Russia, which the Communists destroyed by all means possible. It's one or the other.
By ignoring this choice, Russia has fallen into “hybrid religiosity,” that is, we are reviving Orthodox traditions as well as Soviet ones. This fusion leads to the formation of a post-Soviet civil religion, which exploits Orthodox tradition but in fact is not Orthodoxy.
This is a new version of “Orthodoxy without Christ.” We care very much about Russian saints and Russian greatness; we care about being a patriot. Prince Vladimir and Alexander Nevsky, for example, acquire special significance, while we somehow forget the the Gospel, and Christ Himself isn't quite so necessary.
The idea of American civil religion is relatively well-known. It, too, serves as a form of national identity with a strong messianic component, but differs fundamentally from post-Soviet civil religion: it includes God. Yes, God without a name—the Absolute, as the Supreme Intellect. But in post-Soviet civil religion there is no God at all.
Well, then, what is the fate of the “liberal” wing? How does one go about being an “Orthodox European” in today's Russia and its Church?
Of course, the “tentatively liberal” wing hasn't gone anywhere. By the way, you should avoid this artificial dichotomy between “liberals” and “patriots.” The first are better called Christian democrats, and the second, followers of the post-Soviet civil religion. Christian democrats are those who do not see themselves as isolated from European Christian civilization. Many have been to the West and have seen how the Orthodox live in Greece, the Catholics live in Italy and France, and the Lutherans live in Germany. There are aspects of crisis there as well, but Christianity in Europe is much more rooted and vigorous.
Those Orthodox who participate in global Christian culture are not especially visible. For them the profession of faith is foremost a personal choice, an action. They do not feel the need for declarations, for public demonstrations, to fight for traditional values. The source of faith is Christ Himself, not fighting for values.
And plenty of Orthodox dioceses in Russia have long-standing and positive relationships with those very same Catholics. Orthodox priests easily visit them in Europe, befriend them, and arrange student exchanges; one receives a grant, another collaborates on social projects. It just goes unpublicized in order to fend off accusations of “betraying Orthodoxy.”
There are those who want to pick fights and find enemies, and there are those who just want to labor on the Church's behalf. People who believe in Christ are peaceful.
What cautious predictions can we make today?
We are on the threshold of major changes. The biggest taboo, the ban on direct criticism of the Patriarch, has disintegrated in recent years. And it has been destroyed in the most radical possible way: not by a person off the street, but by one of his closest aides. For many years the Patriarchal court commanded some, and quietly whispered to others, that anything can be forgiven except for criticism of the Patriarch. This worked for almost seven years. It's not that everyone feared him, but that much was entrusted to the Patriarch when he was elected.
Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin broke the ban on criticism the day after his resignation, but it would be naive to suppose that it was only an emotional reaction to the Synod's decision. It's is a definite indication that trust is no longer a universal tool of church governance. The situation in the church has been destabilized, and may soon become unmanageable. But in any case, it's too early to discuss it...
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The same writer also has a critique of the Orthodox revival in Russia here, claiming it has become heavily clericalised and subordinate to the state:
www.firstthings.com/article/2015/11/a-church-of-empireEXTRACT
... Over the last generation, the appeal of the Church to individuals and society has come down to tradition—the need to preserve it, the danger of neglecting it. These are legitimate concerns. But the newly baptized ex-Soviets of the last two decades have a rigid and impoverished understanding of “tradition,” which they understand as a set of rules and regulations: when to pray and what set of prayers to read, what not to eat and what else not to do during Lent, what to wear to church, and so on. For them, tradition is not a living tradition, and an understanding of tradition as a common and personal experience of life in Christ comes under suspicion as too “liberal.”
Beyond liturgy and piety, other traditions were revived: respect for the family, opposition to abortion, the banning of homosexual practice and propaganda. These measures are seen as asserting traditional Russian mores in opposition to the decadence of the West. They seem to add up to a healthy Christian conservatism. But this is rhetoric, not living tradition. The actual statistics in Russia are disastrous: 640,000 divorces to 1.2 million marriages in 2010; sixty-three abortions per hundred live births in 2011. The supposed revival of Russian morality is propaganda, not a genuine effort of social renewal. It is a way of elevating Russia over the allegedly more corrupt cultures of Western Europe and North America—a way of talking once again about East versus West, us versus them. The West is constructed as not just a political and economic enemy, but a spiritual one as well. This sort of thinking is the general line.
In today’s Russia, pre-revolution traditions are difficult to recover. Too much time has passed since 1917. Too many generations have been born and died, too many institutions and repositories of tradition have been eradicated. Thus, to invoke the Russian Church’s traditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries requires us to engage in historical reconstruction rather than to nurture beliefs and practices that are ongoing. The pre-revolution Christian traditions are dead, and they will not be revived.
In the current patrimony of Russia—whether cultural, historical, social, philosophical, or religious—there is only one tradition that is being passed on to the next generation. It is the Soviet tradition. Hence the appeal of everything Soviet, not just for the elderly but for the young. The return of this tradition in recent years, perhaps best described as neo-Soviet, is the best proof that little else is left alive in Russia.
And so the Church Revival, which in its 1.0 phase sought to revive pre-revolution Christianity, has become Church Revival 2.0, a post-Soviet civil religion providing ideological support for the Russian state. The Russian Church has become a Church of Empire, with ecclesiastical practices and institutions shaped accordingly. We seem to be at the dawn of a new epoch in Russian Orthodox history, one that in all likelihood will be known as “neo-imperial.”
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In order to give the other side, Dreher and some of his comboxers link to pro-Russian Orthodox language sites in English. Reading these strongly reminds me of my first experience of reading actual SSPX material after having relied on the sanitised view of the SSPX given by Michael Davies.
Those who read this forum will know that I don't subscribe to the idea that the Ukranian nationalists are all-good and that the pro-Russian elements in Ukraine have no legitimate concerns. The description in the first link (from an American Orthodox site) of some of the more unsavoury ultra-nationalist elements connected with the Maidan protests is quite accurate, for example. We should also remember some of the horrendous crimes historically associated with the Ukrainian nationalist movements of Simon Petylura (early 1920s) and Stepan Bandera (1940s).
Furthermore, George Weigel, who is criticised in the piece, has IMHO some very dodgy elements in his thinking, namely a largely uncritical attitude towards the American social model, which he seems virtually to equate with the Will of God, and a cops-and-robbers attitude towards Ukraine (nationalists all good, Russophiles all evil).
Nevertheless, what strikes me about the ORthodox piece is its mirror-image of these faults. Note, for example, how it implicitly equates Ukrainian nationalism with the Greek Catholic Church, although (as Mr Chapnin's piece points out) many Ukrainian Orthodox, including some in communion with the Moscow Patriarchate, are pro-independence. Its use of the concept of the "Russian world" (Russky mir) also implies that the Ukrainians "properly" belong to this Orthodox "Russian world" whether they like it or not, and that it is for the Russians and not the Ukrainians to decide this. It also utterly fails to acknowledge some of the historic crimes which underlie the hostility of many Ukrainians towards Russia, such as the 1930s famine and the suppression of the Greek Catholic Church by the Russian Orthodox Church in alliance with Stalin's atheist regime (which even some Orthodox commentators, such as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, have described as a crime for which that Church should make formal repentance).
www.aoiusa.org/patriarch-kirill-and-russian-orthodoxy-deserve-respect-not-insults-an-open-letter-to-george-weigel/EXTRACT
Far from a throwback to Soviet-era practices—as you have suggested, both in your own words and though uncritical quotation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’s (UGCC) Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk (“Ukraine Rising,” National Review, Nov. 10, 2014), the close cooperation between Church and state in Russia today is more reminiscent of the pre-1917 symphonia, the Orthodox standard throughout our history since the time of Byzantine Emperor Theodosios I in the late fourth century. That organic instead of adversarial understanding of the sacerdotium and the imperium united, harmoniously albeit with some tension, in a single Christian commonwealth is obviously antithetical to the neo-Jeffersonian principle of strict “separation” of church and state, now political dogma in virtually all Western countries imbued with the notion of secular liberal democracy...
We would argue that, since AD 2000, the Russian neo-symphonia has begun to tip in favor of the Church, not the state, and praise God the Holy Trinity for that! The comprehensive document titled, Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church, produced by the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate under the leadership of Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfayev)—whose moral character you have besmirched—is the gold standard of contemporary, yet very traditional, Orthodox social ethics. Other ecclesial initiatives have provided the main impetus for recent Russian laws—decried, alas, by Western liberals—to curb propagandizing and proselytizing of young Russians by “gay rights” advocates, reduce the enormity of abortions in post-Soviet Russia, and protect the sanctity of religious temples from unwanted intrusions by miscreant groups like “Pussy Riot.” In addition, the Russian Church has established a profound inter-confessional collaboration with U.S. evangelicals to promote strong families and traditional marriage between one man and one woman alone.
None of those accomplishments was possible throughout most of the twentieth century. As each of the co-authors of this open letter have acknowledged often in print, Russian Orthodoxy had to endure the godless Soviets for 74 years, including the shameless betrayal of faithful confessors and martyrs by Orthodox hierarchical collaborators with that regime. For you to compare that horrific era to the miraculous re-emergence and moral integrity of the Church since 1991 is shameless.
Whatever criticisms one might have of the symphonia model, blanket condemnation is hardly appropriate as we witness the trend in our own country, where Christianity is increasingly marginalized, moral vices are officially promoted as virtues, and abortion “rights” and homosexual “rights,” in particular, are now key components of U.S. foreign policy—a trend we are sure you deplore no less than we...
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EXTRACT
Patriarch Kirill, Metropolitan Hilarion, and other prelates of the Russian Orthodox Church have been consistent on two points with respect to Ukraine. First, they voice support for Russia’s policies. Second, they call for restraint in what they see as a deplorable, fratricidal conflict, which pits the Russky Mir against itself.
You need not accept their point of view. Perhaps based on your own religious heritage, you may prefer to believe that the UGCC is “a safe-deposit box of Ukrainian national culture and identity,” despite the mere 15%, at most, of Ukraine’s population who identify as Catholics (Latin or Eastern rite). Underlying the current conflict are some sharp as yet unanswered questions: What exactly is Ukraine (“Borderland”) and who are Ukrainians? Are they an aspiring part of (an increasingly godless and libertine) “Europe” defined in Brussels or an integral part of the Russky Mir? Who was on the “right” or “wrong” side of World War II? Ukrainians themselves are at odds on these questions, largely along regional and confessional lines.
When Ukraine became an independent republic in 1991, those questions lay dormant under a deceptively calm surface. But they remained a fatal weakness in the very fiber of the new state, along with an unbelievable level of oligarchic corruption. The unconstitutional unseating of the flawed but democratically elected government in February 2014 shattered what was already a fragile unity. That, not some mythical Russian aggression, has torn Ukraine apart..
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Even more problematic is this English Orthodox site. Note, for example, in this piece (to which Dreher links to give the other side) how the writer denounces the two individuals recently disciplined by the Moscow Patriarchate as heretics without ever explaining (other than by repeating abstract terms, which appear to be the ROC equivalent of "neo-Catholic") in what these heresies consist:
www.pravoslavie.ru/english/89207.htmWorse still is this piece on the same site, hailing Russia's present foreign policy as the product of a profound Christian revival:
www.pravoslavie.ru/english/87785.htmEXTRACT
...Russia’s main adversaries may have at their very heart, as the powers that be in ultimate control, occult secret societies whose members seem to have made a Faustian bargain in exchange for the baubles of the world. America’s endless wars seem to have been predominantly directed by members of Yale’s Skull & Bones fraternity. Practices of child abuse amongst the highest levels of the British establishment are now coming to light, suggesting, if they are ritualized, some kind of Satanic religious devotion. We contend not against flesh and blood indeed.
At the very heart of the Russian Weltanschauung, then, steering its soul, is the Russian Orthodox Church. And the worldview that the Church seeks to inculcate in its flock is a profound awareness of the spiritual nature of things, both in the personal life of the individual as well as in the world around him. Russians, both in the common man as well as in the highest levels of leadership, appear aware of the ultimately spiritual nature of the confrontation they are facing on the global scene. And it goes without saying that their main adversaries, the hidden powers that be in the West, are equally aware of the spiritual nature of the confrontation, even as their own populations, complacent in their secular humanism, remain oblivious...
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In other words, this gentleman is suggesting that the US and the EU are not merely more or less corrupt and degenerate (which God knows they are), but they are actually run by conscious servants and worshippers of the Devil - and that by comparison President Putin and his ecclesiastical allies, whatever their faults, can only be seen as servants of God and no-one could have any legitimate reason for siding with the West against them. This is a recipe for utter subservience to Vlad & Co.