The main challenge of the 21st century is the challenge from the Godless secular world. But today, we Christians and Muslims, starting from our religious beliefs, can resist this tragic trend in the development of civilization, which forces God out of human life and imposes a different worldview where there is no God, just as they tried to do during the Renaissance.
—Patriarch Kiril of Moscow (International Economic Forum, Kazan, May 19, 2023)
The 14th International Economic Forum was held May 18-21 in Kazan, capital of Russia’s Muslim-majority Republic of Tatarstan, welcoming thousands of registered attendees from 85 countries—including the Taliban. Also dubbed “Russia and the Islamic World,” the event centered on themes such as “Russia and countries of the Muslim world in the new matrix of international economic relations,” “Diplomacy of a new multipolar world,” and “Technological sovereignty as a guarantee of sustainable development in the modern world.” Just a day earlier, Moscow and Tehran inked an agreement to build a railway connecting the northern Iranian cities of Rasht and Astara—a key segment of the emerging International North-South Transit Corridor (INSTC), which will further integrate Russia and India, via Iran. Neither event received much press coverage in the Western sphere.
Strikingly, the Kazan Forum featured Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) as the keynote speaker. “Patriarch Kirill wants to speak with representatives of the Islamic world; he has a personal interest in it,” an unnamed Tatarstan official reported. The Patriarch’s comments emphasized the multi-confessional nature of Russian civilization, as well as the shared challenges faced by Russia and Muslim nations in relation to the West. In his speech on May 19th at the Kazan City Hall, the Patriarch remarked:
Why does the Russian Orthodox Church maintain such close relations with the Muslim Ummah in Russia and abroad? I repeat once again: because our fundamental values are not just very similar. The Orthodox, like Muslims, strive to do as God commands. We commit ourselves into the hands of God, and this is the main starting point. We evaluate ourselves to the extent that our deeds coincide with the will of God, and it is this desire to place ourselves under the will of the Most High that forms the basis of our being. Moreover, we are conservative in a good way: Orthodox and Muslims resolutely reject attempts to establish sin as some kind of social norm or as one of the options for human behavior.
The Patriarch continued:
Probably the most dangerous thing for human souls and, in general, for the fate of the whole world is the confusion of concepts, which is now becoming the norm of Western civilization. The concept of sin is gone, and instead the concept of the variability of human behavior is being introduced. A person is given the right to choose options for his behavior without any connection with the idea of God, and without any connection to the idea of Divine commandments. In other words, I do what I want. Are there any restrictions? Yes, it is impossible to violate secular legislation, but there are no norms limiting human permissiveness based on moral principles in modern Western civilization.
Russia’s Return to Orthodoxy
Long gone are the days when Christian America faced off against the “Godless Soviets” of yore. In a twist of irony, the ROC casts Moscow’s “Special Military Operation” (SpecOp) in the Ukraine as a battle between Christianity and the Antichrist, each fallen soldier for Russia having his sins absolved in the hereafter. Russian State media is laden with content on America’s “social degeneration,” focusing on themes such as gender reassignment of youth, Drag Queen Story Hour and the propagation of LGBT values. And though commentary such as that provided by the Patriarch this week has been issued by Church officials for years now, the ROC’s backing of the SpecOp is understood by our experts in only the most cynical terms. The ROC must be an instrument to serve Putin’s “imperial ambitions," they declare. Putin and the oligarchs simply crave power and wealth (while the latter have their yachts seized), so It goes. Could the ROC actually be central to Russian policymaking? Are Putin’s initiatives perhaps coordinated in line with Church guidance? If that’s the case, the SpecOp is no longer merely “Putin’s War,” and removing Putin would do little to stop it.
Like China, Russia experienced its own tumultuous partnership with the Western paradigm. The 1990s are remembered by many In the former USSR as a time of freedom, but also of chaos. Following a decade of disastrous privatization schemes and military decay, Putin’s rise to power marked a shift towards renewed government oversight and nationalization of key industries under market conditions. The elites stayed rich, but the general well being of the population improved as well. Order and higher living standards coincided with renewed authoritarianism, in the form of “managed democracy.” And for a time, Russia sustained rapid growth under global integration, concurrent with State expansion and military modernization. That came to a tentative end in 2014, and a definitive end in 2022. Russia has moved slowly away from the West for decades, and all the while, Russians gradually returned to religion, with the percentage of citizens identifying as Orthodox Christian rising from 31 percent in 1991 to 72 percent in 2008. By 2017, only 13 percent of Russians reported they do not believe in God. At the same time, countless churches and monasteries have been built and rebuilt, partly or entirely at State expense.
If Russia belongs to the Western civilizational “onion,” it does so as its own leaf, sprouting deep from within our common Medieval core and growing outwards in a different direction. Though alphabetic and Christian, the Russian Orthodox sensibility diverges from Catholicism and Protestantism in many ways. Russia never experienced a print-induced Reformation, for example, and the attempts of Peter and Catherine to thrust Russia into the Enlightenment were always thwarted by this reality. While the split in Christianity goes back millennia, in our own lifetime we may observe that the ROC never capitulated to the liberal-secular paradigm in a way that Catholicism did, post-Vatican II, moreover. This may be, in part, because of the Church's long standing isolation. Cold War CIA attempts to infiltrate Russia focused on the structures of Soviet governance, rather than on the ROC. Exhortations from scholars like James Billington to heed the centrality of the Church to Slavic civilization went ignored by American policymakers and experts, who preferred to analyze the Kremlin via Freudian psychology. Persecuted and marginalized in Soviet times, the Church returned to prominence only amidst the sudden disintegration of the USSR in 1991, meaning that the ROC seldom interacted with our paradigm directly in the 20th century. Today, Orthodoxy remains a thoroughly Medieval religion.
A Gnostic Russia?
The East-West schism in Christianity dates back over a thousand years, stemming in part from the Eastern practice of Hesychasm, or “keeping stillness,” as a means of transcendence via meditation and prayer. Western Christianity dismisses the belief that God’s “energy” can somehow be witnessed by human eyes through intensive self-deprivation and prayer, opting for a sharper delineation of the human body, which dies, and the human soul, which is eternal. Catholic sacraments, for example, do not confer divinity. Some Eastern Christians, however, strive to connect with the "Uncreated Light." Further back, ascetic gnostics of the early Church may have found safe haven in Kiev (and, thence, in Muscovy) following the Conquest of Constantinople. Long since deemed heretical by the Fathers of the early Church, they had nowhere else to flee. Others have observed the churches’ conflicting approach to the Holy Trinity, with Catholics attempting to understand and delineate the exact roles of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, versus the Orthodox view that the human mind could never possibly comprehend His being. In short, part of the division separating Europe is between cultures shaped by “rational” Catholicism in the West, and “mystical” Orthodoxy in the East.
The gnostic “spark of divinity” provided a critical point of departure between Eastern and Western Christian sub-spheres, coloring everything from scientific development to philosophical trends in Orthodox lands. Soviet socialism was atheistic in principle, but gnostic in practice, building upon late 19th-century Russian Cosmist efforts to decipher Universal Truth and attain immortality through science. Intriguingly, Eastern Hesychasm may present an analog to Chinese Daoist Neidan alchemy, as both are metaphysical and aimed towards mastering the workings of the Universe within this life through intense introspection. Indeed, the Chinese and Russians may both have an emerging framework for science rooted in metaphysics and natural theology, while in the West, we adhere to Enlightenment-era positivism and empiricism. Our scientific method is reduced to material- and kinetic causality, while abandoning formal and final cause (in Aristotelian terms). In the emerging Spiritual Civilizations, scientific discovery will be reunified with formal and final causality, and initiated within the structures of traditional morality. As Enlightenment science has largely stalled and failed to improve our happiness or answer the deeper questions of existence, many in the West turn to a different ideology for solace.
The Church of Social Justice
The Church of Social Justice is television’s answer to God and Marxism, replacing both traditional morality and modernist collectivism with concepts geared toward boundless self-fixation and fantasy. Reality can be whatever we imagine as long as we “believe,” and we can all live our own “truths.” Simply put, today’s liberal concepts amount to little more than vice spun as virtue, but they serve the existing order, and anyone who doesn’t join the bandwagon is promptly dismissed as a racist, a transphobe, or a Russian agent. Spanning a mishmash of causes, from hysterical "climate action" to "anti-fascism," the Church of Social Justice resonates mainly with individuals whose minds and souls have been warped by years of technological escapism and the experience of constantly retreating from the rigors and responsibilities of life into the “inner trip” facilitated by television viewing and gaming. Traditional norms centered on duty and discipline are abhorrent to folks who have been conditioned by electric mediums to prize consumption and extreme individualism above all else. Yet the Western Sphere’s abandonment of Christian virtue is hundreds of years in the making, and was curiously touched upon by the Patriarch this week in his Kazan remarks:
The foundations of this model of thinking were laid back in the era of the European Renaissance. In secular historical science, the Renaissance is perceived as a positive phenomenon, but in fact it was a very dangerous turn in the development of Western civilization. In the Middle Ages, God was at the center of human life. Probably, many of you have traveled to Western Europe and seen the huge Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals that dominated the architecture of medieval cities. And it's no coincidence! The most majestic buildings were temples, and this testified that faith in God was at the center of people's lives. Gothic architecture itself—those spires directed to the sky—testified to the dynamics of the development of the human personality, in which the goal is God, and everything rushes toward God. But then came the so-called Renaissance. What was the Renaissance? A revival of what? It was the revival of paganism and pagan Roman culture. Instead of Gothic cathedrals, temples began to be built reminiscent of ancient buildings. And who is at the center of everything? If earlier God was in the center and it was necessary to aspire to Him, then at this time the idea arises that a person is in the center of everything.
Having swapped Perpetual Adoration for “perpetual indulgence,” our Church of Social Justice could never germinate in the soils of cultures where traditional morality and religious devotion hold sway. Thus, liberal eschatology advances itself globally through regime change—such as the 2014 Euromaidan coup. While the average Orthodox Ukrainian finds many of today’s fashionable Western-liberal social trends every bit as repugnant as does the average Orthodox Russian, ultranationalists in Kiev will take all the help they can get. And so, Western efforts to transform Ukraine into a pro-NATO, anti-Russia bulwark are predictably overlooked in mainstream media narratives, but remain crucial to understanding Moscow’s Church-backed SpecOp. The 2018 separation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the ROC, for example, was impermissible to Moscow, which views Ukraine, Belarus and Russia as being a single “spiritual space.” There was no “Ukraine” in pre-modern times, but Malorusiya (Little Russia), many Russians will assert. And while State Department desk clerks mock Russia as being historically junior to Ukraine, Russians understand Kievan Rus as the progenitor of Slavic civilization, with Kiev akin to Rome for the ROC. Most Eastern Ukrainians, overwhelmingly Russian-speaking and relegated to life in that country by the whims of Soviet cartographers and Marxist bureaucrats, probably would prefer to be part of Russia.
The West in Crisis
Though public sentiment throughout NATO countries appears increasingly averse to the prospect of antagonizing Russia further, Western elites are determined to shore up the globalist paradigm. Moreover, the Church of Social Justice maintains a strong foothold in Western Europe, where rainbow banners flutter alongside Ukrainian flags, Pride paraders demand more arms transfers to Kiev, and frantic “climate activists” deface landmarks and artwork in museums to draw attention to their anxiety. But yesteryear’s dream of a “United States of Europe” is fading fast. The European alliance is faltering, as industrial systems reliant on cheap Russian energy unravel and historic animosities rise to the surface. The German Chancellor has been forced to plead with the Chinese—yet another “regime.” The French are increasingly discontent with the Germans. The Italians are increasingly discontent with the French. Washington writes a blank check for Kiev, at all costs to our own economy and defense system. And while the West blames Putin for our woes, the wider world moves on. China, India, South Africa and most other countries outside our sphere are happy to do business with Moscow. Moreover, crypto and metaverse players have great ambitions, and protecting state sovereignty is not one of them. The Kremlin could win or lose territory in the Ukraine, but its larger strategic goals may already be secured.
Moscow, meanwhile, seems poised to endure a protracted military operation and endless new sanctions, sacrificing greater wealth as part of the Western system in favor of other pursuits. Indeed, the Kremlin knows they can stay the course with the consent of the population, as Russians are inured to hardship and to limited opportunities for traveling abroad—after all, "life is still better than before Putin!" At the very least, Moscow will find ways to procure the necessary technologies and spare parts from China and elsewhere, while otherwise possessing all of the resources required to withstand isolation. Indeed, living standards and consumption across Russia are still only minimally impacted by sanctions at this point. More importantly, being cut off from globalism may facilitate long-term Kremlin-Church objectives, setting the stage for renewed nationalism, traditionalism and religiosity in a more insular and less secular society. Russians, like Chinese, might wind up poorer in their own Spiritual Civilization, but also more content and united. Russia, Belarus and Ukraine may even be reunified within a generation into a new Holy Rus, with onion-domed churches and rural monasteries proliferating as social norms revert to pre-Soviet modes of life. In any case, there will be no Pride parades on Red Square, and no Drag Queen Story Hour at the neighborhood biblioteka.
Self-assured that they stand on the “right side of history,” ideologues in Western policymaking circles will respond to Russia’s inevitable advances in the Ukraine with their usual eschatological zeal, rendering nuclear escalation a greater risk than ever. Our current administrators could also lash out at China or North Korea, for example, sure as ever that any non-liberal regime is but a nudge away from collapse. Meanwhile, the state of the Western Sphere grows increasingly precarious, and not just in terms of our spiritual decay. More countries will find ways to circumvent the dollar and trade amongst themselves. More countries will turn to China for technology, investment and developmental aid, instead of to us. More countries will procure energy and mineral resources from Russia to help fuel their growth, as well as aircraft and armaments to aid in their defense. More countries will ignore policy recommendations from places like Washington and Brussels. And all of us will have to contend with the economic, social, and psychological challenges arising from digitalization and AI. Eventually, the Church of Social Justice will implode in the glare of digital memory under the weight of its own lies, contradictions and absurdities, though not before causing tremendous damage within and without our borders. In our next installment, we shall explore life beyond today’s collapsing paradigm and the real choice that lies before us: the Church of Data, or God.