What first appeared to be merely a political-military move, which is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has also shown signs of being a culture war, Russian style.
Up the until invasion of Ukraine, there were a significant number of my fellow religiously conservative American Christians who looked at Putin as a spiritual hero of another nation's culture wars and saw the relationship between Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church as a template to be followed here only with conservative Evangelicals taking the place of the Orthodox Church. In fact, we were very much going in that direction under President Trump
But while the invasion of Ukraine has put a bad taste in the mouths of many of those previously mentioned Christians, the culture wars go on both here and there. Regarding here, many of my fellow religiously conservative Christians look to either reelect Trump in 2024 or elect a Republican candidate who will pick judges that will rule against certain rights for the LGBT community and will possibly pick SCOTUS justices who will reverse the Obergefell decision. They are hoping that the current conservative majority SCOTUS will decide on a Mississippi law that will reverse Roe v. Wade.
The culture wars are in full swing there, and by there I mean the Ukraine and Russia too as the Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church has defended the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a battle to stop Western influence, an influence that he believes to be decadent (click here for the source ). He has also said that Russia is battling the Anti-Christ when talking about Russia's invasion of Ukraine (click here for the source).
His references to Russia as being Holy Russia, which would make Russia a New Testament equivalent to Israel, seems to imitate how some of my fellow religiously conservative Christians refer to a former America from the past.
What both culture wars have in common is the seeking of government help to suppress the freedoms of unbelievers when those freedoms are used to enjoy practices, especially sexual ones, that are outside the bounds of the Scriptures. And so I hope that many of my fellow religiously conservative Christians, who complain about having lost the culture war here, take a good hard look at the invasion of Ukraine because that invasion and conflict is in par a culture war to the extent that Putin is following the direction provided by Patriarch Kirill. For just as some religiously conservative Christians believe that they are now surrounded by a culture that is antagonistic to their faith, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has been promoting Putin's domestic policies and his war against Ukraine as a way of preventing Russia from being surrounded by a secular culture.
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