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Christopher Stroop, Public Orthodoxy
One of the strangest aspects of Vladimir Putin’s third term as
president of the Russian Federation has been the emergence of Russia as
the global standard bearer for so-called “traditional values.”
Many
commentators, pundits, scholars, and Russia watchers have had difficulty
coming to terms with this shift.
While certain left-wing commentators such as Stephen F. Cohen and Glenn Greenwald have joined Green Party candidate Jill Stein
in continuing to see Russia as somehow mysteriously leftist, Moscow has
made no secret of its pursuit of a “traditional values” agenda in close
collaboration with the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. At
the same time, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump consistently
supports Putin and spouts Russian propaganda.
Over the last several years, European and US religious conservatives have often rallied to the new Moscow-centered “traditionalist international.” I have argued elsewhere
that if we examine this series of events in historical context, we can
see that it represents a revival of the Slavophile discourse of Russian
moral superiority. When anti-LGBTQ activist Paul Cameron spoke to the
Russian State Duma in October 2013 “to thank the Russian people, the
State Duma, and President Putin… in the name of the entire Christian
world” for Russia’s passage of its infamous “gay propaganda” law,
Russian media largely portrayed the charlatan Cameron as a serious scholar.
A few months after Cameron’s effusive praise of Putin, American evangelical heavyweight Franklin Graham began to warm to the Russian president
as well. Viewing this remarkable rapprochement between American and
Russian conservative Christians united by a culture wars agenda as
potentially very harmful to the cause of human rights, I initially
thought that Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in March 2014 might
disrupt collaboration between Russian and Western social conservatives.
After all, American Evangelicals have numerous ties to Ukraine through
missionary activities and adoption. In fact, the World Congress of
Families—perhaps the single most important forum for collaborative
efforts between West European, American, and Russian hardline religious
conservatives—felt compelled to suspend planning for WCF VIII, which had
been scheduled to take place in Moscow in September 2014.
The WCF, however, simultaneously announced
that it “takes no position on foreign affairs, except as they affect
the natural family,” and its leading members continued to shower Putin
with phrase for his scapegoating of Russia’s LGBTQ community. A
rebranded WCF VIII went ahead with Russian financing, much of it linked
to the ostentatiously Orthodox oligarchs Konstantin Malofeev
and Vladimir Yakunin. Now billed as a forum called “Large Families: The
Future of Humanity,” the event featured American WCF leaders as
planned. While the anti-Westernism widespread in Russian society and
the ROC created tensions in this coalition, an internationally isolated
Russia took the opportunity to claim moral authority and leadership in
the area of “traditional values,” with parliamentarian Elena Mizulina
proclaiming falsely that a forum of this nature could probably not be
hosted in the West.
A year later, WCF IX was hosted in Salt Lake City, and Russian Orthodox Christians played a prominent role there. For example,
Alexey Komov, WCF’s Regional Representative for Russia and the
Commonwealth of Independent States and a member of the Russian Orthodox
Church’s Patriarchal Commission on the Family and the Protection of
Motherhood and Childhood “touted Russia’s leading role in the global
‘pro-family’ movement today, emphasizing . . . ‘Eastern Europe can
really help our brothers in the West’ to resist the “new
totalitarianism” associated with ‘political correctness’ and the sexual
revolution.” Perhaps the apex of this high-level Russian
Orthodox-American Evangelical Protestant collaboration was reached when
Graham met with Patriarch Kirill in October 2015, and Patriarch Kirill proclaimed Christians opposed to same-sex marriage, such as Graham, to be “confessors of the faith.”
More recent developments, however, make it possible to believe that
such warm relations between the ROC and conservative American
Protestants—an example of “bad ecumenism”
focused not on the pursuit of the common good but on the domination of
the marginalized—may have fallen apart, at least for now.
The first sign of fraying relations came when the preparing for a
World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians that Graham planned to
host in Moscow, in collaboration with the ROC, was quietly put on hold
by the Russian side last spring. In March 2016, however, Graham announced
that the summit would be moved from Moscow to Washington, D.C. and take
place March 10-13, 2017. Acting as if the initiative to break with
Russia was his own, Graham cited Russia’s recent passage of an
“anti-terrorism” package known as the Yarovaya Laws (for the key role of
United Russia Duma deputy Irina Yarovaya in their passage) as his
reason for moving the summit. These laws place severe restrictions on
Protestants and other minority religious groups in Russia, essentially
banning proselytizing. In effect from July 20 of this year, the Yarovaya
Laws are already being enforced. Protestants are being detained and
fined for conducting ordinary religious activities. For example,
Americans David Kozan and Reverend Alexander Whitney, Associate Pastors
of Missions at First Presbyterian Church in Baton Rouge, LA, were arrested and fined 3000 rubles
each in Kaluga for participating in religious activities on tourist
visas. Russian Protestants have faced sanctions as well. And as long as
Russia has returned to the genuine persecution of Protestants, it seems
unlikely that Graham and his ilk will be able to make common cause with
Moscow for what both parties erroneously perceive to be persecution
against Christians who object to equal rights and full accommodation of
members of the LGBTQ community in the public square. (Such
“secularism,” Graham has declared “is almost no different from Communism.”)
I reached out to William Yoder, a Belarus-based writer on church
affairs who has decades of on the ground experience working with
Protestant communities in Eastern Europe and Russia, to get his opinion
on the current state of affairs. In his view, “the Yarovaya Laws are
putting a damper on the budding relationship between the Christian right
in the US and the Orthodox in Russia . . . I can imagine an on-going
tussle on the issue within both Russian Orthodox and government
circles.”
Yoder is surely right that tensions remain in ROC and Russian
government circles over the impact of the Yarovaya Laws on
Orthodox-Protestant relations. As the current American election is
revealing, some hardline American conservatives will continue to look to
Putinist Russia as a model. Nevertheless, by persecuting Protestants,
the Russian state is making it considerably more difficult for American
Christian conservatives to count themselves among Putin’s right-wing
fellow travelers. Anti-Americanism, always a tension that has run
through the social conservative coalitions of Russians and “patriotic”
Evangelical Americans, has arguably become
the Russian Federation’s current legitimating ideology. Nevertheless,
there is little doubt that some Russians and Americans will manage to
overcome these tensions in order to continue collaborating through the
WCF, which is certainly an organization to watch. While events have
driven a wedge between Russia’s and America’s hardline conservative
politicians and religious leaders for the time being, the ground is
liable to shift rapidly in such unstable times. Russia will undoubtedly
continue to assert itself as the global standard bearer for “traditional
values” conservatism, and those who care about human rights should pay
attention to how this plays out down the road.
Christopher Stroop is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of South Florida.