There were some here in the US, particularly a few on the Religious Right, who failed to appreciate the extent to which the Pussy Rioters’ decision to stage their brief event in a cathedral was not just some childish blasphemy, but a very deliberate protest against the way in which the Russian Orthodox church was using, and being used by, the Putin Regime, a process which some might consider to be rather more of a descration than a few seconds of mime near an altar.
Now here’s this from Window on Eurasia:
President Vladimir Putin at Valdai and Patriarch Kirill at the more recent World Russian Popular Assembly chose exactly the same themes: “isolationism and the opposition of Russia to the West, Russia’s moral supremacy over other countries and especially ‘rotten’ Western democracy, and Russia’s special path as a great power.”
Taken together, Roman Lunkin, a leading Russian specialist on religious affairs at the Institute of Europe of the Academy of Sciences, says, these constitute “a farewell to democracy,” something that Kirill has been promoting since long before he became patriarch but that until now Russian leaders would not have permitted themselves to say so explicitly…
In speech after speech…Kirill has spoken about the unique qualities of the Russian people and about “the need to build a corporate Orthodox state on the basis of the concept of ‘Russian civilization.’” Earlier, he spoke about democracy only as “the harmonization of the interests of the authorities and the people.” Now, he has dispensed with that.
Moreover, this year as he has in the recent past, the patriarch rejected the notion of universal human rights and said that “the observance of traditional moral values and way of live” must have “primacy,” even if that requires the use of force by the state itself, views that have attracted many Russian nationalists to his side, even if they are not especially religious.
And, Lunkin continues, “it is no accident that the patriarch cited the philosopher Ivan Ilin who spoke for the establishment of a corporate-social strata national-orthodox state” and who infamously but consistently “greeted at the outset national socialism in Germany” under Adolf Hitler.…
The Eastern Orthodox who tend to be liberal in the US on politics like Frank Scaeffer complain about the religious right but they are limited more to certain US states. Most religious right are not as interested in a merging of church and state as our the Eastern Orthodox who still live in the age of Justinian.
Anyways, the Orthodox churches have complain about the west starting with Charlemagne who got the favor of the pope. To many Eastern Orthodox mainly those in the Orthodox countries Catholics and Evangelicals are into masonry and so forth. In orthodox countries there is still bad blood even over Roman Catholics because of the 4th Crusade which sack Constantinople in 1204. I’m not kidding but many young white males who were evangelical are attracted to the Orthodox Church since its Church service is more in the age of Justinian than being current. They like things historical and most orthodox are either liberal or moderate and a few are Paleo-Conservatives or libertarian not Neo-Conservative like Evangelicals hence the attraction in the USA for being Eastern Orthodox.