Is Russia truly a Christian country? Does Vladimir Putin actually believe that it is Russia that is on God’s side and that the West is Gomorrah? And has Putin entered a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism?
Pat Buchanan offers a startling look at today’s Vladimir Putin. Putin’s defiance stems from what much of the world sees as America’s arrogant drive for global hegemony. Putin is tapping into the worldwide revulsion of and resistance to the sewage of a hedonistic secular and social revolution coming out of the West. With the displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity.
Pat Buchanan writes:
What is going on here?
With Marxism-Leninism a dead faith, Putin is saying the new ideological struggle is between a debauched West led by the United States and a traditionalist world Russia would be proud to lead.
In the new war of beliefs, Putin is saying, it is Russia that is on God’s side. The West is Gomorrah.
Western leaders who compare Putin’s annexation of Crimea to Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria, who dismiss him as a “KGB thug,” who call him “the alleged thief, liar and murderer who rules Russia,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins did, believe Putin’s claim to stand on higher moral ground is beyond blasphemous.
But Vladimir Putin knows exactly what he is doing, and his new claim has a venerable lineage. The ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers who exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, was, at the time of his death in 1964, writing a book on “The Third Rome.”
The first Rome was the Holy City and seat of Christianity that fell to Odoacer and his barbarians in 476 A.D. The second Rome was Constantinople, Byzantium, (today’s Istanbul), which fell to the Turks in 1453. The successor city to Byzantium, the Third Rome, the last Rome to the old believers, was — Moscow.
Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.
