by John Holbrook Jr.
A Biblical View, Blog #099 posted July 29, 2019, edited March 10, 2021.
During the Cold War, the USA’s leaders were still under the influence of Christianity to the point where Congress passed and President Eisenhower approved on July 30, 1956 a joint resolution to inscribe “In God We Trust” on the nation’s currency. At the same time, they were roundly condemning the Soviet Union’s leaders for (a) imposing atheism on the land it controlled, (b) abusing other nations, and (c) seeking to dominate the world. Now, the USA’s leaders are under the influence of Godless Secularism and are (a) imposing atheism on the land it controls, (b) abusing other nations and (c) seeking to dominate the world, and they are condemning Russia for showing signs of being God-fearing and motivated by Christian rather than secular values in their international relations and behavior.
A – Christianity role in each nation’s founding and formation
Both Russia and the USA were formed by Christianity, but in quite different ways.
A1 – Christianity in Russia
Russia was pagan until the 9th century AD, when Greek missionaries from Byzantium introduced Christianity into Kievan Rus. In the 10th century, Olga of Kiev visited Constantinople, where she was baptized. Although the rulers who followed her remained pagans, Tsar Vladimir the Great decided in the late 10th century that Russia needed a national religion that could bring with it unity, civility, and morals that fortified the realm and the family. He received representatives of several religions in Kiev and then sent out envoys to study lands that lived under Greek Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, and Roman Orthodoxy. After listening to their reports, Vladimir settled on Greek Orthodoxy, was baptized himself, and then insisted that residents in the urban cities of his empire undergo mass baptism. Thus began what became the Russian Orthodox Church.
For the next ten centuries, Russian Orthodoxy served as the national religion. It populated the land with beautifully designed cathedrals, churches, monasteries for both monks and nuns, and sacred shrines, all of which were furnished with beautiful iconography, illuminated manuscripts, bejeweled golden cups, saucers, plates, and crucifixes, and intricately carved wooden furniture and reredoses. Here, priests robed in finery and surrounded by clouds of incense conducted the rituals that sanctified the special events of family, communal, and national life, such as baptisms, marriages, burials, investitures of public officials, and coronations of the tsars.
Then in the early 20th century, Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized control of the country and, following the dictates of Marx, did their best to extinguish Christianity throughout Russia and replace it with atheism. Believers were stigmatized, persecuted, and exterminated, churches were converted to other uses or destroyed, and church contents, such as historic icons, manuscripts, and religious artifacts and furnishings were moved into museums or warehouses. Upon Lenin’s death and Stalin’s rise to power, the war on Christianity continued and produced the greatest atrocities in history thus far. It is estimated that Stalin was responsible for starving twenty million Christians to death in the Ukraine alone.
Russian Christianity survived, however, and, during the era of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (political and economic reform) and glasnost (openness) c.1986-1991, began a slow revival. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, religious freedom returned to the country, and Russian nationalists identified the Russian Orthodox Church as a major element of Russian culture. Churches were renovated, and their former contents that had survived were returned to their original locations. Moreover, although Russian Orthodoxy remained predominate, it was joined by Roman Catholicism and several strains of Protestantism.
Since his inauguration as Russian president in 2000, Vladimir Putin has often attended church services and exhibited a positive disposition toward Christianity’s revival throughout the country. It is difficult to assess the depth of his personal faith, but he has clearly indicated that a faith in God and an observance of Christian morals is important to the health and strength of mother Russia.
A2 – Christianity in the USA
Christianity arrived in Northern America from many European sources, the most important of which were the following: the Spanish explorers under Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century; the Spanish conquistadors and settlers in Florida and southern California in the early 17th century; the British colonists in Virginia and the Pilgrims and Puritans in Massachusetts also in the early 17th century; and the French colonists (a) along the waterways from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in the east to Lake Superior in the west and (b) along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico in the late 17th century. Because these Europeans were always advancing into uncultivated grasslands and virgin forests, often occupied by either dangerous animals or hostile Indians or both, the churches which they built tended to be austere, lacking in either impressive architecture or sumptuous furnishings. Services were conducted by itinerant preachers or by local pastors or laymen and consisted mostly of hymn-singing, corporate prayer, and Bible-study.
Due to the many Christian sects that existed in America at the time, the founders of the USA in the late 18th century inserted in the Constitution a clause that forbade the federal government from interfering in religion in any way.[1] It is important to note, however, that this clause was not intended to separate Church and State, as so many secularists maintain today, but only to prevent the federal government from adopting one of the Christian sects as the national religion and forcing the states and individuals to observe it; the states and individuals were left free to adopt the sects which they preferred. Unfortunately the multiplication of Christian sects of every kind eventually led to the acceptance of every kind of religion, including atheism, which denies that God exists and argues that man himself is sovereign over the world.
A3 – Differences between Russian and American Christianity.
Paul Grenier, an essayist and founder of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy, has written two articles for The American Conservative (TAC) that I find germane to the issue that I am discussing.
Grenier wrote an article for TAC’s January/February 2017 issue entitled, “The Legitimate Differences,” in which he points out that Russia and the United States have focused on very different aspects of Christianity. “American Protestantism embraces individualism and is open to change; in many ways it has hitched its cart to the modernization project.[2] Russian Orthodox Christianity uses virtually the same liturgy today as it has for hundreds of years…. Russian spirituality is oriented to what is timeless and to beauty. American spirituality is oriented to the future and to rights.”
Although Grenier’s observations on the differences between Russian and American “spirituality” are apt to a point, I would express them differently. From the beginning, Russian leaders were interested in the ability of a national religion – specifically Russian Orthodoxy – to infuse the national culture with spirituality and uniformity.[3] Also from the beginning, American leaders were wary of a national religion because so many of them had experienced at first hand the abuses of a national religion under the heavy hand of monarchs like King Henry the Eighth of England. Thus, they emphasized Christianity’s salvific and transforming effects on the individual, partly because of the centrality of Christ’s Gospel to Christianity, but also partly, I think, because of the founders’ exclusion of the federal government from the religious realm.[4] As a result, it seems to me that, broadly speaking, Russian Christianity emphasizes the relationship between God and the community, and American Christianity emphasizes the relationship between God and the individual.
A4 – Religious developments in the 20th century
While the Russian atheists were trying to eradicate Christianity with the sword during the communist era (1917-1991), American atheists were infiltrating the critical institutions of American society (foundations, media outlets, political parties, private schools and universities, and state public schools with the intention of seizing control of them and using them to unseat Christianity from its prominent and preferential place in American life. The two campaigns have had opposite effects.
The campaign in Russia failed, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Christianity has experienced a revival in the land.
The campaign in the USA, which is still on-going, has experienced remarkable success, to the point that (a) Secular Humanism has replaced Christianity as the preferred religion, and (b) Secular Humanists feel free to despise, disparage, and dismiss Christianity and Christians at every opportunity. Moreover, if what has transpired in history is any indication, their destruction may be just around the corner. That success has come at a terrible price, however, as the culture which Secular Humanism has produced is decadent and disgusting in the extreme,[5] as well as increasingly unable to make common sense distinctions between good and evil, male and female, truth and falsehood, historic facts and fables, science and scientism, etc.
B – The impact of the above on foreign relations
B1 – Current Russian and American approaches to foreign affairs
Grenier wrote another article for TAC’s January/February 2018 issue entitled “A Conference in Moscow,” in which he describes a symposium that he attended in Moscow. Its purpose was to discuss and possibly identify the root causes underlying the current hostility between Russian and the USA. Its attendees were highly intelligent and well informed men of some distinction. Thus, it provides me with an excellent example with which to make my point.
Apparently one of the conferences attendees, Paul Robinson, Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, set the framework for the discussion as follows. He drew a sharp distinction between the expectations with which the two nations approach formulating foreign policy. I will characterize the distinction as follows:
• Russia proceeds on the basis that there should be one set rules that govern its interactions with all other nations and that the objective of its diplomacy should be agreement between it and other nations concerning what those rules should be.
• The USA, on the other hand, proceeds on the basis that there should be two sets of rules and that, because it is preeminent in world affairs, it has the right – and the duty – to establish what they should be and to whom they should apply. The first applies to nations that exhibit the proper degree of subservience to the USA and at least some willingness to amend their stance on individual human rights in order to conform to the USA’s views on the subject. They will be treated as valuable – although junior – partners to whom civility and even friendship are owed. The second applies to nations that refuse to exhibit the proper degree of subservience to the USA and put the needs of their communities above the rights of their individual citizens. Such nations, I would add, can be treated as implacable enemies to whom incivility and even hostility can be shown. Even worse, they may be isolated, undermined, attacked, and even destroyed without significant moral pangs.
B2 – The irony in the current situation
As the title of this essay states, the ultimate irony in this situation is that, to a great extent, Russian and the USA have switched places. The USA is now doing everything that we condemned Russia for doing in the 1950s.
B3 – What each nation can expect
When I compare the Russian and American approaches to foreign policy, two things strike me.
• Neither nation’s leaders are considering that God’s sole criterion for blessing or cursing a nation is whether or not it is honoring God and his commandments (see my blog of July 22, 2019). They share the erroneous assumption that a nation’s treatment of God has nothing to do with its peace and prosperity. Thus, to use a naval metaphor, I will state categorically that they are polishing the brass on their respective ships of state while those ships are steaming full speed ahead into harm’s way.
• The USA is worse off than the Russians. If Professor Robinson’s descriptions are accurate, Russia’s approach to foreign affairs is somewhat reasonable, equitable, and peaceable, whereas the USA’s approach, is definitely arrogant, self-serving, and belligerent. I still cringe whenever I think of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s reference in 1998 to the USA as the world’s “indispensable nation.” Since then I imagine that many other nations have become tired of Americans constantly preaching to them, meddling in their internal affairs, and even coercing them with economic and military sanctions. I wouldn’t blame them if they now regard the USA as the world’s “dispensable nation.”
Americans, particularly Americans in leadership positions, need to remember the warning in KJV Proverbs 16:18 – “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall….” We had better wake up soon or we will suddenly find our country in shambles. In fact, in many respects we are already there. Read the passages in Deuteronomy 28 concerning God’s curses on a nation that dishonors and disobeys him (verses 15-68) and then just look around you.
© 2019 John Holbrook Jr.
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[1] Few Americans today have studied the Constitution and realize that it has one objective – limiting the powers of the federal government so that it cannot curtail the freedoms or frustrate the wills of the states and individual citizens in any way. Unfortunately, under the influence of presidents like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson and Supreme Court justices like Earl Warren, most of what goes on in Washington today is unconstitutional. The city is filled with people who think they know better than the American people themselves how the affairs of the nation should be conducted – to say nothing of their desire and determination to become rich and powerful at the taxpayers’ expense.
[2] Indeed. The desire to appear au courant and comfortably aligned with modern science and scholarship has caused many clergymen to doubt first the Bible’s inerrancy and then the Bible’s authority, at which point they have left the narrow and difficult path that leads to life and moved over to the wide and easy path that leads to destruction (see Matthew 7:13-14). Worse, the majority of their congregants have followed after them, and much of what is still called “American Christianity” is now apostate.
[3] The individual’s need for Christ’s atonement for his or her sin took back seat.
[4] What American Christianity stressed was the Christian Gospel.
[5] I include in this indictment all forms of artistic expression, such as architecture, cinema, dance, designer-dress, drama, literature, music, painting, photography, sculpture, etc., as well as every day language in both public and private settings.