West provokes Putin's cultural war

The Radio Lemberg website in Ukraine displays its political colours: "Kyiv Pride showed that [...] Ukraine is set firmly on its path to Europe, on its path to the West."

Putin's war in Ukraine is not principally a land-grab - it has much deeper significance for him. In fact, this is the sort of war the West does not know how to fight because it is first and foremost against the secularism and depraved sexual morality that a "progressive" agenda demands be applied in every nation, either as accepted by a suitably propagandised population or imposed by the woke elite.

Before hearing from Putin himself, two commentators address the key religious element in Putin's decision to invade Ukraine.   

First, in his just-published Substack newsletter, John Schindler, former National Security Agency analyst and professor at the Naval War College, explains why Putin’s war on Ukraine is ultimately a religious war:

As Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, explained in early 2019, “Ukraine is not on the periphery of our church. We call Kiev ‘the mother of all Russian cities’. For us Kiev is what Jerusalem is for many. Russian Orthodoxy began there, so under no circumstances can we abandon this historical and spiritual relationship. The whole unity of our Local Church is based on these spiritual ties.”

What spurred Patriarch Kirill to make that statement was the separation of much of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from Russia in early 2019 with the creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, with go-ahead from the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople (i.e., Istanbul: who is the not-a-pope of world Orthodoxy, where national churches are self-governing). This involved the transfer of thousands of parishes and millions of believers from the long-existing Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, which has been under the [Russian Orthodox] since the seventeenth century, to the brand-new [Ukraine Orthodox]. The [Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate] is self-governing under Moscow and there wasn’t much spiritual demand in Ukraine for independence from Russia, what Orthodox term autocephaly.

However, the pressures of the not-quite-frozen conflict with Russia after 2015 made church issues a political football, and Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko made autocephaly his pet project, with backing from Ukrainian nationalists, who found it offensive that the Ukraine Orthodox Church remained under Moscow, where the church is a vehicle for Putinism, Russian nationalism, and anti-Ukrainian aggression. Advocates of the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine had a valid point there, and they were also correct that, since autocephaly is the norm in the Orthodox world, why didn’t Ukraine have its own, fully independent national church?

...[T]he advocates of the Ukraine Church [...] got their wish in early January 2019, when the Ecumenical Patriarch granted autocephaly to Ukraine’s new national church. What followed was predictably messy and politicized, with fights across Ukraine over parishes and clergy. This issue is neither simple nor clear-cut: the [Ukraine Church] is considered broadly nationalist (with exceptions) while the Ukraine Orthodox Church, despite its Russian connections, has many laypeople who are Ukrainian patriots who don’t feel they belong to a “foreign” church. Moreover, this issue birthed a schism in global Orthodoxy that has reverberated on several continents, most recently in Africa. 

Above all, the schism rendered Moscow white-hot with rage. The Russian Orthodox Church viewed this as a direct attack on its “canonical territory” and on world Orthodoxy itself. The Kremlin, too, made no effort to conceal its outrage here. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov quickly denounced the Ecumenical Patriarch as Washington’s puppet: “His mission, obviously, is being prepared by the Americans and they do not hide that they are actively cooperating with him, using the slogan of ‘freedom of religion and belief’…Bartholomew’s mission, obviously, is to bury the influence of Orthodoxy in the modern world.”

A few weeks later, Lavrov added fuel to the fire by castigating the Ukraine Church as “this travesty of history, and pursuing the objective of sowing discord between Russia and Ukraine in addition to preventing our peoples from being friends are essentially a crime [by the current Ukrainian regime] against their citizens.” A few months after that, Lavrov reiterated that this tragedy was all America’s fault: the Russian Orthodox Church “is currently under tremendous pressure from a number of Western countries, primarily the United States, which set itself the goal of destroying the unity of world Orthodox Christianity.”

It’s an article of faith in the Kremlin that the creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine is an American project designed to destroy world Orthodoxy and harm Russia. It’s painful for me to state this but the Russians have good reason to think this. Unlike absurd Kremlin propaganda lines about “Ukrainian Nazis” perpetrating “genocide” against Russians, the idea that Washington wanted the split of Orthodoxy in Ukraine is a reasonable inference upon examination of recent U.S. Government conduct. What’s the evidence?

Our Kyiv embassy congratulated the Orthodox Church of Ukraine for its birth and the selection of its first primate, then the State Department in Washington amplified the same. Celebrating Constantinople’s grant of autocephaly, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hailed it as a “historic achievement for Ukraine”, which represented America’s “strong support for religious freedom”. Pompeo’s statement left no doubt about America’s backing the Ukraine Church against the [Church under the Russian Orthodox].

Pompeo’s position in the worldwide Orthodox schism was made clear by his subsequent meeting with the Ecumenical Patriarch, whom the Secretary of State hailed as “a key partner as we continue to champion religious freedom around the globe”. Neither was this a partisan project, since the position of the Biden administration on this issue is identical to its predecessor’s. Four months ago, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken also met with the Ecumenical Patriarch, reaffirming U.S. commitment to religious freedom, which in Moscow unsurprisingly looked like support for the Ukraine Orthodox Church.

Since very few Americans, and functionally no non-Orthodox ones, noticed any of this, it’s worth asking why the State Department felt compelled to take a public position on any of this. Does Foggy Bottom [the government and cultural hub in Washington D.C.] side with Sunni or Shia? What about Lutheranism versus Methodism? Who in Washington thought it was a good idea to throw its weight behind the Ukraine Orthodox Church, since anybody who knew anything about Putinism and its religious-civilizational mission had to be aware that such statements were guaranteed to raise Moscow’s ire.

That ire has now taken the form of air strikes, missile barrages, and advancing tank battalions. Just last month, Lavrov restated his government’s position that the United States stands behind the “current crisis in Orthodoxy”. As he explained without any word-mincing, Washington caused “the most serious dispute in the entire Orthodox world”, adding, “The United States of America had an immediate hand in the current crisis in Orthodoxy. They created a special mechanism, a special agency for the freedom of religious confession, which actually is not dealing with freedom but most actively set up and financed Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew so that he conducted a device for schism, particularly in Ukraine, in the first place, for creating there the schismatic, uncanonical Orthodox Church of Ukraine.”

We should not indulge Muscovite conspiracy theories nor countenance Russian aggression. However, the facts are plain enough. Simply put, by recognizing the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and hailing its creation, Washington changed the Kremlin’s game in Ukraine, making Putin’s long-term plans for his neighbor untenable. Without a united Orthodox Church across the former lands of Rus, answering to Moscow, the “Russian World” concept falls apart. 

Every secular geostrategic challenge cited as a reason for Putin’s aggression – Nato expansion, Western military moves, oil and gas politics – existed in 2014, yet Putin then chose to limit his attacks on Ukraine to Crimea and the Southeast. What’s changed since then that makes his effort to subdue all Ukraine seem like a good idea in the Kremlin? The creation of an autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019, with official American backing, is the difference, and Moscow believes this was all a nefarious U.S. plot to divide world Orthodoxy at Russia’s expense. Clearly Putin has decided that reclaiming Ukraine and its capital, “the mother of Russian cities”. for Russian Orthodoxy is worth a major war. Make no mistake, this is a religious war, even if almost nobody in the West realizes it.

See more on this perspective as Rod Dreher reports from Hungary.

It is existential — it is about identity.

Second, Stan Grant of Australia, a long-time international journalist and global analyst, has pertinent observations in a piece under the headline "Russia's Ukraine invasion is not just about borders or power. For Putin, it's about identity".  

Grant lays it out simply:

This is the sort of war the West does not know how to fight. It is not just about territory, or borders, or resources, or power. It is existential — it is about identity. 

Vladimir Putin has made it clear Ukraine is part of the soul of Russia. And he is prepared to crush the souls of Ukrainians to achieve his ends.

Yes, Putin has made security demands, he wants the West out of what he sees as Russia's sphere of influence. He wants a cast-iron guarantee Ukraine can never join Nato.

But it is the "why" that is more important than the "what" here. Why? Because to Putin, there is no Ukraine without Russia. They are one.

Grant goes deeper:

Putin [...] sees Ukraine as Russian land essential to Putin's idea of Russkiy Mir (Russian World). It is about Russian language, culture; it is blood and soil. It is mythological. Russkiy Mir is holy; central is Russian Orthodox faith. 

To Russian nationalists like Putin, Ukraine's capital Kyiv is the mother of all Russian cities. This is why Putin famously called the collapse of the Soviet Union "the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the twentieth century". It is oft repeated, not as often understood.

Reclaiming the essential unified identity of the people within the Russian "space" is most important for Putin, according to Grant:

Putin doesn't want communism back, he wants Russia back. The catastrophe wasn't the collapse of Marxist-Leninism, it was the suffering of the people. 

Russian-speaking Slavic people were cut adrift — as Putin sees it — from mother Russia.

Why can't the West fight this? Because the West doesn't even understand it. The West is meant to be a place beyond identity. 

This is everything the West is not. The modern West grew out of Reformation and Enlightenment. It was about liberation. In the West we change citizenship, we move countries, we swap or abandon religions.

Pluralism and multiculturalism have been hallmarks of progress. We celebrate diversity as a strength. But the success of the West poses harder and harder questions. 

Liberal democracy is staggering under the weight of growing inequality, contested rights and political tribalism.

What binds us? We appear ever rootless, not rooted.  

Not everyone, of course. Roots matter to some, but liberal democracy can leave us unmoored: it hollows out our communities, it mocks tradition, banishes faith from the public square.

Liberalism elevates the individual to the point of alienation. The scholar, Patrick Deneen, charted this decline in his book, Why Liberalism Failed [2018]. It has lost its moral and political core, he argues:

"Today's widespread yearning for a strong leader, one with the will to take back popular control over liberalism's forms of bureaucratized government and globalized economy, comes after decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and political habits essential to self-governance." *

The modern West is less village square than city centre. Yes, there are "somewheres", as the British writer David Goodhart put it, but inexorably we seem to be on a journey to "anywhere".

This is a demographic, economic and cultural fault line that runs through the liberal pluralist West and it is increasingly political. It is a battle over what the West is, and who is prepared to defend it.

It cuts across religious freedom, LGTBQI rights, race, gender and class. It divides the rural from the urban.

And Vladimir Putin sees it as a weakness. He has castigated the West for its culture wars and its corrosive identity politics.

Putin tells it as he sees it!

Finally, the extent to which Western modernity holds no allure for Putin and Russian patriots is made clear in a speech he gave in October last year in Sochi to an international audience. He first turned his gaze on global difficulties created by late capitalism, including the lax response to climate change, and to the pandemic, where national self-interest often takes precedence over helping poor nations.  

But he also spoke to "the importance of solid support in the sphere of morals, ethics and values" in "the modern fragile world".  Dramatic changes are occurring, Putin said:

We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this.

Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.

Listen, I would like to point out once again that they have a right to do this, we are keeping out of this. But we would like to ask them to keep out of our business as well. We have a different viewpoint, at least the overwhelming majority of Russian society – it would be more correct to put it this way – has a different opinion on this matter. We believe that we must rely on our own spiritual values, our historical tradition and the culture of our multiethnic nation.

The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society.

The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause, but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into ‘reverse discrimination’ that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin colour.

I specifically asked my colleagues to find the following quote from Martin Luther King: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by their character.” This is the true value. However, things are turning out differently there. By the way, the absolute majority of Russian people do not think that the colour of a person’s skin or their gender is an important matter. Each of us is a human being. This is what matters.

In a number of Western countries, the debate over men’s and women’s rights has turned into a perfect phantasmagoria. Look, beware of going where the Bolsheviks once planned to go – not only communalising chickens, but also communalising women. One more step and you will be there.

Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether. Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracised. “Parent number one” and “parent number two,” “’birthing parent” instead of “mother,” and “human milk” replacing “breastmilk” because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times.

Not to mention some truly monstrous things when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa. That is, the teachers actually impose on them a choice we all supposedly have. They do so while shutting the parents out of the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can upend their entire life. They do not even bother to consult with child psychologists – is a child at this age even capable of making a decision of this kind? Calling a spade a spade, this verges on a crime against humanity, and it is being done in the name and under the banner of progress.

Well, if someone likes this, let them do it. I have already mentioned that, in shaping our approaches, we will be guided by a healthy conservatism. That was a few years ago, when passions on the international arena were not yet running as high as they are now, although, of course, we can say that clouds were gathering even then. Now, when the world is going through a structural disruption, the importance of reasonable conservatism as the foundation for a political course has skyrocketed – precisely because of the multiplying risks and dangers, and the fragility of the reality around us.

This conservative approach is not about an ignorant traditionalism, a fear of change or a restraining game, much less about withdrawing into our own shell. It is primarily about reliance on a time-tested tradition, the preservation and growth of the population, a realistic assessment of oneself and others, a precise alignment of priorities, a correlation of necessity and possibility, a prudent formulation of goals, and a fundamental rejection of extremism as a method. And frankly, in the impending period of global reconstruction, which may take quite long, with its final design being uncertain, moderate conservatism is the most reasonable line of conduct, as far as I see it. It will inevitably change at some point, but so far, do no harm – the guiding principle in medicine – seems to be the most rational one. Noli nocere, as they say.

Again, for us in Russia, these are not some speculative postulates, but lessons from our difficult and sometimes tragic history. The cost of ill-conceived social experiments is sometimes beyond estimation. Such actions can destroy not only the material, but also the spiritual foundations of human existence, leaving behind moral wreckage where nothing can be built to replace it for a long time.

The reality of Russian fears about the woke agenda in the West was highlighted by a participant at the conference Putin had addressed. Margarita Simonyan, a Russian journalist and prominent media personality, made this comment in the process of asking a question:

Mr President, as a mother of three young children, I would like to thank you very much for your healthy conservatism. I am terrified by the thought of my 7-year-old son being asked to choose a gender, or my 2-year-old daughter being told from all mobile devices, and even at school, as is now happening in many Western countries, that her future is that of a “person with human milk who gives birth to a baby”. And the thought that these tentacles of liberal fascism, so-called liberal, will reach us and our children. I really hope that this will never be allowed in our country, despite its great openness. 

As expressed, Putin's conservatism is "moderate" or "reasonable", to use his terms. However, his concern about "the sphere of morals, ethics and values" affecting his people certainly compounds the geo-strategic issues he is confronting in his assault on Ukraine sovereignty, issues he covered in answering a question at the end of his speech in October last year. 

On both counts, one wonders if Western observers gave serious enough attention to this leader of the world's largest nation, or whether the cultural and political agendas of the bureaucrats have been so set in concrete that a respectful handling of Putin's pleas for space for the Russian project was made impossible.     

* More on Deneen's view:

According to Deneen, "we should rightly wonder whether America is not in the early days of its eternal life but rather approaching the end of the natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations." The book argues that liberalism has exhausted itself, leading to income inequality, cultural decline, the erosion of freedoms, and the growth of powerful, centralized bureaucracies. [Source]

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