Why Doesn’t Holy Mother Russia Remain Orthodox?

If there is something we can learn from the Russian example, then it’s the fact that there is nothing Catholicism in America should desire for itself more than state persecution and an increased embrace of secularization at the federal level. This should help Catholicism and hurt secularism.

God works in paradoxes, or as Tertullian once said, semen est sanguis christianorum. It’s something worth remembering towards the end of Constantine’s dream.

I also wish the American hierarchy would look happier when considering the coming persecution, if it’s really coming.

They should welcome something like it rather than ratcheting up their sad attempts to look like good mainline Americans and indulging in medieval fairy tales of a harmonious Christendom.

Too long they’ve peddled to us what H. Richard Niebuhr (the real theological brains in the family) called in The Kingdom of God in America, “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

The Murray Project is dead.

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If you want to take a deeper look at the bewildering pluralism in Russian’s subcutaneously disorganized religiosity then take a look at Mikhail Epstein’s Cries in the Wilderness.

For a more extensive account of the close ties between Russian church and state see my Cross-Kremlin-Orthodoxy.

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