Not quite of course but what this item does is recognize something i had suspected but had not seen confirmed. Putin has led a complete revival of Russian Christianity and this has now led to a rebirth of population and cultural moral.
This will just as clearly strengthen Russian democracy after Putin, while utterly cleansing Russia of the last vestiges of Communism. It is a great turn around and sets the stage for Russian confrontation of Islam.
He has also understood that the prophetic road map laid out for centuries for the triumph of Christianity is also a good business plan.
Lawrence Solomon: In Russia’s religious rebirth, Putin is a new Pope
Lawrence Solomon | October 13, 2016 6:16 PM ET
http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/lawrence-solomon-in-russias-religious-rebirth-putin-is-a-new-pope
What explains Putin’s success? Two years ago, amid plummeting oil
prices, a plummeting ruble, a contracting economy, the flight of
investors and sanctions over Crimea, pundits were predicting Russia’s,
and Putin’s, demise. Yet Putin’s popularity at home has soared
— hovering well above 80 per cent according to the Associated Press’s
and other reputable polls — despite the hardships caused by rising food
prices and falling employment.
Western naysayers who dismiss his popularity as rooted in false
values — his control over the press, his bare-chested publicity stunts
or chauvinism stirred by his military muscle — misunderstand the great
respect and moral authority he commands within Russia and neighbouring
countries. Putin stands for everything craved by a country debased and
diminished by 75 years of communism: A principled leader who protects
his country from Western aggression, Western contempt and Western
values. While we in the West see ourselves as paragons of enlightenment,
the envy of the people who don’t enjoy Western-style liberal democracy,
only one in 20 Russians wants to become more like us. The overwhelming
majority hews to Putin’s vision of Russian exceptionalism and
puritanism.
Unlike almost every other country in the world, Russians have rising
birth rates and growing families; unlike almost every other country in
the West, Russians are undergoing a religious Renaissance. Putin, who is
baptized, is arguably a greater defender of traditional Christian
values than the Pope, who has been tolerant of divorce, abortion, gay
marriage and the transformation of what was once an unabashedly Holy
Christian Europe into a part-atheistic, part-Muslim continent.
Christianity has loomed large in most of Putin’s foreign policy decisions
Putin, in contrast, has repudiated the once-official atheism of
Communist Russia and embraced the traditions of the Russian Orthodox
Church. In diametric opposition to the trend elsewhere in the West, he
penalizes divorce, prohibits advertising abortion services, outlaws
pornography and campaigns against “homosexual propaganda.” Unlike the
West, which has seen the abandonment of hundreds of thousands of
churches or their conversion into restaurants, bars and entertainment
venues, Putin has reversed Lenin’s legacy by restoring almost 25,000
churches that had been abandoned or destroyed under communism. Putin
contrasts a decadent West to a profoundly spiritual and moral Russia. In
his State of the Union address three years ago, he expressed disdain
for the West’s “so-called tolerance — genderless and infertile.”
Russia’s Christian roots also inform its foreign policy, with the
Russian Orthodox Church — allied with Syrian churches — in 2011 asking
Putin to protect the Middle East’s Christian minorities. “So it will
be,” Putin responded, in what would become a modern-day crusade of
sorts. Syrian dictator Bashir Assad not only is a long-standing ally of
Russia; he has long been the protector of Syria’s Christian community —
10 per cent of the country’s population — from the country’s Muslim
extremists. The alignment of Syria’s Christians with Russia’s Orthodox
Church, combined with Russia’s military and geopolitical interests in
Syria, made Putin’s decision to back Assad a no-brainer.
Much of Putin’s moral authority at home, in fact, comes from his
judgment abroad. Putin had supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
(after 9/11, he saw the U.S. as an ally against Muslim terrorism) but he
turned against the U.S. when it invaded Iraq, a war he saw as
unjustifiable and sure to inflame Sunni Islamic fundamentalism. Among
the Iraq war’s many tragic results has been the decimation of virtually
the whole of Iraq’s once-vibrant, 1.5-million-strong Christian
communities. Putin on similar grounds opposed the West’s overthrow of
Libya’s Gaddafi and Egypt’s Mubarak — a protector of Egypt’s Christian
Copts — and supports Egypt’s new president, Sisi, another protector of
Egypt’s Christians.
Christianity and the Russian Orthodox Church, in fact, have loomed
large in most of Putin’s foreign policy decisions. The West’s attempts
to pull Ukraine away from Russia created deep resentment because of the
cultural ties between the nations, not least those between their sister
Orthodox Churches.
The Crimean Peninsula’s return to Russia was also deeply symbolic, as
Putin explained in an address to Russia’s federal assembly: “It was
in Crimea, in the ancient city of Chersonesus or Korsun, as ancient
Russian chroniclers called it, that Grand Prince Vladimir was baptized
before bringing Christianity to Rus…. Christianity was a powerful
spiritual unifying force that helped involve various tribes and tribal
unions of the vast Eastern Slavic world in the creation of a Russian
nation and Russian state. It was thanks to this spiritual unity that our
forefathers for the first time and forevermore saw themselves
as a united nation … Crimea, the ancient Korsun or Chersonesus,
and Sevastopol have invaluable civilizational and even sacral importance
for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers
of Islam and Judaism.”
Putin’s Russia is not the soulless Soviet Union, but a major Western
country that takes its religion seriously, and itself seriously, and is
united in its appreciation for a leader who embodies both.
