(03-03-2023, 08:56 PM)Mav link Wrote:Of course I do, Thryleon. But I suspect you’re reading Christian Nationalism as a simple conjunction of an adjective and a noun. It’s actually a political descriptor. Here’s the Wikipedia entry (and of course insofar as it relates to Russia we have to remember that partisans can modify text):
France is a very Christian country (with a much smaller Muslim population drawn predominantly from Algeria. But the French also practice staunch separation of Church and State and react swiftly to any display of religious iconography in public spaces. That extended to banning the burquini from beaches which created a bit of a furore.

Quote: “I think the president of Russian Federation is making it a religious war,” Archbishop Daniel of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the U.S. told an interviewer for Religion News Service last week. That view is shared by John Schindler, a retired U.S. intelligence officer and historian with expertise in Eastern Europe, who argues that it was the establishment of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine separate from the Moscow patriarchate in 2019 that caused Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade.

The argument goes basically like this. Putin has wrapped his ambition to restore the Russian empire in a revived Russian Orthodox Church, long stifled by Communist hostility to religion. He considers Ukraine to be Russian heartland, spiritually as well as territorially.

After the 2014 Maidan revolution, in which the pro-Moscow president of Ukraine was ousted by protesters, deprived him of secular authority over the country, the establishment of an independent Orthodox Christian Church in the country, approved by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I in Istanbul, was the last straw. Ergo, the invasion.

This seems to me to overstate the case. The Biden administration’s badly managed withdrawal from Afghanistan, the rise of a pro-Russian right in Europe and North America, and the dislocations of COVID-19 all gave Putin other reasons to imagine that the time was right to force Ukraine back into the Russian orbit.

But there can be no doubt that, under Putin, the Russian Orthodox Church has resumed its czarist role as an arm of state policy. This political religion — call it Russian Orthodox nationalism — has served not only to advance Putin’s goal of suppressing liberal democratic dissent at home but also to win the admiration of the pro-Christian right in Europe and America.

Writing nearly a century ago in the wake of the bloodletting of World War I, the eminent Columbia historian Carlton Hayes attacked what he called “a new religious syncretism, by virtue of which very many persons continue nominally to adhere to the faith of their ancestors and even to practice its cult, whilst they adapt it to the exigencies of nationalist worship and discipline.”

The flaunting of Christian imagery and language by those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 is a prime example of such syncretism. 

More than half a century ago, in the throes of the Vietnam War, the eminent Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah praised what he called “the American civil religion” as “not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality.”

(03-04-2023, 07:06 AM)Mav link Wrote:Could it be that some priests and nuns have supported the Russians? After all, some of them might be ethnic Russians who remained loyal to the Russian Orthodox Church. Wouldn’t it be reasonable for a government of a country in wartime to crack down on treasonous clergy? Now, I don’t know if any of the above is true but I’m not going to accept without proof that they were arrested for no justifiable reason (and in fact after googling it looks like my suspicions are correct). But it looks from what you say that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church isn’t seen as an arm of the Ukrainian State such that we’d say Ukraine is run by Christian Nationalists (and that was the issue).

Do you agree with Sergei Lavrov that Russia is trying to stop the war that was started by the Ukrainians?

(03-04-2023, 06:34 AM)ElwoodBlues1 link Wrote:Zelensky is a Jewish comedian by trade who in a previous life was in a TV show that used to make fun of Jews and religion so he would probably fit right in on "The Project" and target Christians and Jews alike.
Was initially seen as a buffoon when he got the president role but a good dictator in Putin and a dirty War has done wonders for his credibility, as for harnessing the Ukranian Orthodox Church....dont see that happening, more harassing seems his methods.
Zelenskyy’s secret police have raided monasteries across Ukraine, and even a convent full of nuns, and arrested dozens of priests for no justifiable reasons whatsoever and in clear violation of the Ukrainian Constitution.
The UOC have actually assisted the Ukrainian army with money and aid but Zelenksy has been revoking citizenships of Priests in return. Biden has just sat back and allowed Zelensky to do what he likes.....nice quote from the past by the famous Will Rogers where he says
" Everything is changing, People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke".

(03-04-2023, 08:09 AM)DJC link Wrote:The UOC is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) and is closely aligned with Putin's Russian Orthodox Church.  The OCU, Orthodox Church of Ukraine, was granted ecclesial independence by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in 2019, giving it control of the branches of the Orthodox church in Ukraine including the UOC.  I think that you'll find that it's the OCU that has been assisting the Ukrainian Army and the UOC that's resisting the OCU and supporting the Russians.

While Zelensky was best known for his satirical comedy, he is a lawyer from a family of high achievers and intellectuals. I don't think anyone saw him as a buffoon.

(03-04-2023, 08:09 AM)DJC link Wrote:The UOC is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) and is closely aligned with Putin's Russian Orthodox Church.  The OCU, Orthodox Church of Ukraine, was granted ecclesial independence by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in 2019, giving it control of the branches of the Orthodox church in Ukraine including the UOC.  I think that you'll find that it's the OCU that has been assisting the Ukrainian Army and the UOC that's resisting the OCU and supporting the Russians.

While Zelensky was best known for his satirical comedy, he is a lawyer from a family of high achievers and intellectuals. I don't think anyone saw him as a buffoon.