The Russian Orthodox Church, American Christian Nationalism

 Last night I had MSNBC on during crashes of YouTube. There was much made of a Christian Nationalist meeting on Trump property, with Trump sycophants leading the charge.

I remain enough of a Baptist, enough of an American, to stand for separation of church and state. A government cannot be Christian; government is about the worldly power Christianity stands against.  Christians can run a government, but that does not make a soulless human entity Christian.

The relations between the Orthodox Church and the civil governments in which the Church is found is more complicated. For the longest time, much of Orthodoxy lived under a Muslim government. Then for most of this century it existed under Communist governments.

There is also the fact that the Orthodox Church is set up regionally - Greek, Russian, Albanian, Serbian, Syrian, and so on.

However, it is heresy in the Orthodox Church to equate salvation with any particular national or ethnic group. They think Christ did not come to save only Russians or Greeks - or even only Americans - but to save the world.

Public Orthodoxy published an essay by Sergei Chapnin, An Act of Lighthearted Betrayal How Moscow's Official Church Hunts Down Her Anti-War Priests, exposing the dangers of a political church for the Russian Orthodox Church, which should give Americans something to think about:

I have heard many times from the Moscow clergy that the patriarch’s men spy on the churches to make sure the prayer is said all the time and with no alterations or additions. Patriarch Kirill and what is known as the “official church” probably consider it to be the way to express their ideological loyalty to the Kremlin.

In that very prayer, Fr. Koval, an ethnic Ukrainian, switched one word:

Rise up, O God, for the help of thy people and grant us peace by thy power.

The patriarch becamee engaged because the word Fr. Koval had replaced was actually victory. According to Kirill, Russia’s (or Holy Rus’) victory is the only way to achieve peace.

When the news of Fr. Koval’s suspension appeared in the media, the deputy chair of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Department for Public Communications, Vakhtang Kipshidze reaffirmed the sacrosanct status of the wording used in the prayer:

I must tell you authoritatively that if any priest comes to change prayers to match his mindset, aspiration or political preference, the very unity of our church will be challenged.

This statement is crucial for understanding the state of affairs in the Moscow Patriarchate. Kipshidze is saying in his usual brutal manner that in the Russian Orthodox Church, there may be but one “political preference”: that of Patriarch Kirill. All other options constitute either heresy or at least a grave violation of church discipline and will immediately entail censure, such as suspension.

Kipshidze’s statement, however, includes even a more radical theological point. According to him, the unity of the church directly depends on the hierarchy’s political bias, which means all the clergy (to say the least) are bound to adhere to a single pro-Kremlin ideology.

As is usual with a political church, the political usurps the religious. For Christians, it will mean a political leader's agenda trumps the teachings of Christ. 

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