Category Archives: State Religion

When the Church is Taken Over by the State and Faith Becomes Religion

Introduction: The Roman Catholic-Protestant Model of Church Administration

What exactly happens when the Church becomes part of the State? This has happened many times in Western history and shaped that history. There is not only the case of the Church-State, known as Roman Catholicism, whose head started wars, commanded armies and ordered mass campaigns of inquisition, repression and torture. There have also been the cases in Protestant North-Western Europe and wherever that model has been imitated. This is the State-Church, where Churches hand themselves over to State control.

Thus, the Protestants founded National (and nationalist, ‘flag-driven’) Churches, the Church of England, the Church of Norway, the Church of Denmark, the Church of Sweden, the Church of Finland etc. In the first and well-known case, the new Church was founded by a Welsh genocidal tyrant and wife-murderer, who stole huge numbers of monastic houses and their lands and handed out their immense riches to his cronies. As for the national riches he seized for himself, he wasted them on pointless wars against France, which he lost.

The Adoption of the Model by the Russian State

This Protestant model was imitated by Tsar Peter I in Russia. Between 1682 and 1725 he forced the Russian Church into the same Lutheran mould, abolishing the Patriarchate in 1700, appointing Lutheran-educated Ukrainian bishops, and an ‘Oberprokuror’ to rule over the episcopate, effectively creating a Ministry of Religion. Some of the ‘Oberprokurors’ were not Orthodox Christians, indeed, at least one was an atheist and worked to destroy the Church. This control, resisted by Tsar Nicholas who wanted to abolish it, was copied by the atheist Bolsheviks.

The Bolsheviks controlled the Church in a similar reformist (in fact ‘deformist’), way, appointing a Secret Police Commissar to control the bishops, working to destroy the Church, murdering hundreds of thousands of clergy and people and literally dynamiting churches or confiscating them for secular uses. It was in this way that over some 300 years since Peter I, a special ‘religiosity’ appeared among nominal Russian Orthodox, which has lasted to this day. What are the three characteristics of this particular form of religiosity?

  1. Nationalisation

A State takeover of a Church means confusing Caesar’s and God’s, despite Christ’s words in the Gospel which command us to separate them and not to confuse them. Since the Church does not by nature belong to the State, therefore when such a takeover occurs, it means that the Church unnaturally begins to resemble the State. This means the adoption of State attributes – a persecuting, nationalistic, militaristic and bureaucratic mentality. In this way, the Church begins to resemble the State, rather like Roman Catholicism.

Nationalism means an emphasis on a narrow, exclusive, racial identity and language. In the Russian context, this means Russification and the loss of loyalty of other nationalities to the once multinational Russian Church. Militarism means an emphasis on a literal uniformity, obedience and rigidity, which cancels freedom of thought, and also integration with the armed forces. Bureaucratisation means an emphasis on protocols, paperwork and administration against the sacramental and spiritual view of the world.

  1. Clericalisation

A State takeover of a Church means that the clergy become agents of the State, that is, State employees, who develop the careerist mentality of civil servants and their ranks of promotion, awards and pensions. This in turn means that the people are alienated from the clergy, who become a separate caste ‘behind the iconostasis’ and the people begin to consider that the clergy are ‘the Church’. This creates a passive, disengaged and irresponsible mentality among the people – ‘it is not for us to do this, let ‘the Church’, i.e. the clergy, do it for us’.

This passive attitude of non-participation means that professional choirs sing in churches and services increasingly become abstract concerts and spectacles. Even prayer is delegated to the clergy, as people stop praying for themselves and ask the clergy to pray for them, an attitude that can be called ‘pious consumerism’. This view of the clergy as State bureaucrats, civil servants, means that the people begin to look at the clergy as unable to resolve their real problems and so they turn to elders, ‘startsy’, who in turn are often charlatans.

  1. Ritualisation

This mentality leads inevitably to ritualisation, the understanding of worship as ‘ustav’ or rubrics, a series of outward rites, in which participation is passive, but which just have to be tolerated. Thus, communion becomes the privilege of the clergy who may control access to laypeople’s communion by weaponising confession. As a result, communion may take place perfunctorily only once a year (the obligation for all civil servants until 1917) and sacraments are replaced by semi-private services, which have nothing to do with the liturgical cycles.

These made-up services, contractions of historic ones, include molebens, panikhidas and akathists. The latter of these are popular because they are comprehensible, since they have been composed recently in a language closer to Russian than the less accessible Church Slavonic, which is seen as the private language of the clergy (‘the Church’). The primacy of private rites means weak parish life, little sense of community, churches are patterned by outward formalities. In turn, non-churchgoers then revert to superstition as their belief.

A Nominal Church and Real Church Life

Reading the above, some may be in despair. However, we have made it clear that all these trends are the norm for nominal Russian Orthodox. Practising Russian Orthodox resist these outward trends and are critical of them. We follow the lives of the saints, who emphasise prayer and the ascetic, inward struggle. The above three trends are not those of St Seraphim of Sarov and St John of Kronstadt, even less are they those of the New Martyrs and Confessors, of the Imperial Martyrs, St Tikhon and St Matrona. They are ours.

Firstly, Orthodox oppose Nationalism through cultivating the sense of the catholicity of the Church, meaning cultivating good relations with the other Local Churches, which work in other countries, where the Russian State has no control. Secondly, Orthodox oppose Clericalism through developing the solidarity between clergy and people, which is what Orthodoxy is, and this means the clergy no longer living as State functionaries. And finally Orthodox oppose Ritualism through inner life, the life of the spirit, as in real monasteries.

Conclusion: The Last Tsar and the Coming Restoration

The last Tsar opposed all three deformations of Church life, Nationalism, Clericalism and Ritualism. Thus, his intention, not fully implemented, was to open a Russian Orthodox church in every capital of Western Europe. This opposed Nationalism. As for Clericalism, he was always shocked by the spiritual emptiness of ‘educated’ bishops and priests and their careerist rivalries, for example that of Protopresbyter George Shavelsky. To them he opposed St Seraphim of Sarov, whom he had had canonised, and the Martyr Gregory.

Tsar Nicholas II also ardently opposed Ritualism and wanted to restore the architecture, iconography and Church music from before Peter I, as can be seen in his design of the Tsarskoe Selo Cathedral. Already in 1905 he had proposed the restoration of the Patriarchate. Careerist bishops, all wanting to be Patriarch, opposed him and the Tsar understood that they were not ready for restoration. Indeed, after his overthrow in 1917, this became very clear. Soon another Tsar will come and carry out the unfinished restoration.

Soviet Vestiges: Centralisation and Personality Cults among Neophytes

We all know how the Soviet Union unconsciously adopted the outward, cultural practices of the Russian Orthodox Church. Thus, instead of the Holy Trinty, Soviet Communism promulgated Marx, Engels and Lenin, iconographically presented as an indivisible three in one, a new Holy Trinity. It was blasphemous, since these three were not gods or even decent men, but quite vile people. Then, anyone watching film of a Mayday Parade in the old USSR notices at once the abundance of banners and red flags, which simply imitated the church banners and icons of Easter processions, which also take place around 1 May. Christmas too was substituted by pagan Soviet New Year drunkenness and overeating.

Then there was the substitution of Christ. Who was the new Christ? Lenin and then Stalin. First came the iconography of a benign-looking Lenin, whose chemically-preserved mummy is still on display in the centre of Moscow like unholy relics. Then after him came the iconography of a kind and fatherly Stalin, which was everywhere on streets and in schoolbooks of that age. Yet he was a mass murderer and an evil persecutor of the Church. Famously, the idolatry of Stalin even had to be denounced by Khrushchov as a personality cult – which is exactly what it was. Little wonder that President Putin said years ago that only someone without a brain would want to restore the collapsed Soviet Union.

However, some in the Russian Church unconsciously adopted the outward, cultural practices of the Soviet Union. Indeed, one part of the Soviet Union did not collapse in 1991 – the Moscow Patriarchate, the Soviet-period administrative superstructure of the Russian Church. Sadly, this administration has retained two elements of the old Soviet Union. The first is Soviet Centralisation. The USSR dissolved into fifteen separate republics – the Church did not. The result is anti-Moscow schisms in the Church in Orthodox parts of the old USSR which do not have their own independent Church, in the Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, with Russophobic discontent expressed in Belarus, Kazakhstan.

The second element that survived in the Moscow Patriarchate is Soviet-style personality cults. This can be seen in the statues of Russian saints. In 1976 I met the pious and talented sculptor Vyacheslav Klykov: I dared not tell him what I thought, that statues replace the statues of the Bolshevik monster Lenin. As such they are welcome, but statues are not a traditional part of Orthodoxy. For Orthodoxy free-standing statues are considered idolatrous. And this is precisely the danger of all personality cults. There exists an exaggerated cult of certain clerical figures, bishops, priests or monks. Among some it is enough for a man to be in a cassock and have a beard and he is already worthy of worship.

This attitude is concerning, for enchantment with mere people is always followed by disenchantment – disillusion always follows illusion. If this is news, read the Psalter. We have seen this clearly with the tragic story of Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfevev), whose photos have suddenly been removed and whose books are suddenly no longer on sale. ‘Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of men’. We can see it also in the situation of other clerical figures. Fr Andrey Tkachov is an example. Absurdly popular for really just an ordinary if well-read priest, his categorical and even extremist views are typical of one who comes from the complexed far west of the Ukraine, not of the average Orthodox.

His aggressiveness, lack of diplomacy and tact and just plain rudeness is shared by others and also gives rise to a cult following among the simple and unthinking. Fr Andrey is far from being the only such example of one engaged in broadcasts, podcasts and the writing of books and who makes a lot of money in this way. For instance, I know one Russian woman who never comes to church, but she does spend a lot of time on her computer reading the ‘prophecies’ of ‘holy elders’. This too is an example of personality cults. She told me that she prefers ‘elders’ with very long hair and very long hair. The attachment to externals is typical of the superficial and the neophyte, not of the rooted and the grounded.

As I have remarked many times, it took 75 years for the USSR to Sovietise and then fall and therefore it will take 75 years for de-Sovietisation to take place. 33 years after the dissolution of the USSR, the administration of the Moscow Patriarchate still retains the above two elements of the Soviet mentality. It is therefore no surprise that Ukrainians insult Russians by calling them ‘Moskali’ – Muscovites. It has long seemed to me that the top-heavy and highly centralised Moscow nationalist administration of the Russian Orthodox Church, with all its tiresome bureaucracy and taxes, is not something that is to be retained from the USSR. Nor are clericalist personality cults which are so close to idolatry.

 

 

The Spiritual Consequences of the Millennial End-Game for the West

Foreword: The Rise and Fall of the Western Empire (1054-2024)

Nearly a thousand years ago Western Europe began to expand systematically. Thus, following Frankish aggression in Spain and Portugal, there came the attacks by the Pope’s Norman shock-troops in Italy and in 1066 their full-scale invasion of England with its genocide of the English and the establishment of a Norman elite, from which the English have never recovered. The rest of the British Isles then collapsed into the greed and powermongering of the Roman Catholic Normans. Within a generation the so-called First Crusade had been launched to extend Western power to Asia by violence, massacring Jews and Orthodox Christians on the way. The fall of the Western Empire really begins 970 years later through Western imperial overreach against Orthodox Christianity in the Ukraine. Before this there had already been the ignored warnings of its impending defeat and collapse in the decades before, notably in Vietnam and Iraq.

The Death and Resurrection of Kiev

The war in the Ukraine is petering out. Nearly 600,000 Ukrainian troops are dead against 35,000 Russian troops. According to mobile phone providers there, 1.2 million users of Ukrainian mobile phones have simply disappeared. That is the total number of Ukrainian dead, missing, in Russian captivity and seriously injured. It has been officially admitted that the average age of remaining Ukrainian soldiers is now 43. The Ukraine was given second-rate and obsolete Western weapons from old stocks, which would otherwise have been scrapped. The Ukraine was only ever a giant military charity shop for the West to dispose of surplus military junk. President Biden, among others, said that he would support Kiev ‘for as long as it would take’. We now know that ‘it’ meant the Ukrainian defeat.

After the coming liberation of pro-Russian Avdeyevka by Russian forces, there will surely only be a few more months of this decade-long bloody tragedy. It began in Kiev in 2014 under pressure from the US and with the support of the American-run EU. This has been confirmed by the political establishment in Italy, which has just predicted the end of the Ukrainian conflict in the spring of 2024. On the front there is no stalemate, Kiev is plainly losing. There will be no peace talks in the Ukraine, only unconditional surrender to the Russian Federation. It is clear that the New Ukraine, in its new borders, whatever they will be, will become the third part of the already existing East Slav Confederation, or ‘Union State of the Russian Federation and Belarus’. And then in turn the New Ukraine will become part of BRICS +.

From Hero to Zero

President Zelensky, whom a year ago the American media called ‘the Man of the Year’ was in fact ‘the Actor of the Year’, as an English-speaking actor was required. That is why he got the job, once he had been taught how to speak Ukrainian, even if with a Russian accent. US PR companies trained him up and created him, just as they created so many US Presidents before him. They have plenty of experience. The poor puppet is now delusional in his bunker, like the other one in 1945, dreaming of Wunderwaffen, ‘game-changers’, and that his forces will advance 500 metres a day, instead of retreating 500 metres a day. He has quite simply lost contact with reality.

Zelensky has just banned the Presidential elections, which were due on 31 March 2024, extended martial law, declaring a de facto dictatorship. Gennady Chastyakov, an assistant of Zelensky’s bitter rival for power, General Valery Zaluzhny, has been assassinated at a party, at which a box with a bottle of vodka turned out to be a box of grenades, one of which exploded. Is Zaluzhny next? The purge has begun and when purges begin, the end is not far. After Zelensky, there will be surrender. No-one will regret the incredibly corrupt Kiev, which sold off American arms to terrorists and to which Ukrainian families have to pay bribes in order to get their sons out of Russian captivity.

The Isolation and Fall of the West

The US, which has been running the whole affair in the Ukraine, has exploited and flattered the two national Ukrainian weaknesses. The first is the provincial sense of entitlement: ‘We are Ukrainian, you owe us everything’. The second is the fact that many Ukrainians would do anything for money, so opening them to corruption. Like the pagan Roman Empire of old, the US divides and rules with bread and circuses by building on these two weaknesses, not just in the Ukraine, but everywhere. However, unlike in the Ukraine, not all accept US bread and Hollywood and Facebook circuses. There are those who have faith in God, moral principles of integrity and long cultural traditions – we are made of sterner stuff and throw off US tyranny.

Thus, Kievan Ukraine, just like Tel Aviv Israel and Taipei Taiwan, is completely dependent on US dollars just to pay the salaries of its civil servants. Everywhere, the US has implemented its policy of backing minority separatist groups. In the Ukraine this meant Galician nationalists with their strong Nazi sympathies, in Afghanistan it meant Al-Qaeda, in Syria it meant ISIS, in Taiwan it means anti-Chinese Chinese, in Israel it means the unpopular and allegedly corrupt Netanyahu fanatic, one of whose associates wants to nuke 2.3 million Palestinians. Now Netanyahu has begun his holocaust in Gaza in a very long guerilla war which he cannot win. His tanks are being destroyed in the north of Israel and his rule overthrown on the West Bank.

In the White House

The politicians in the White House, also in their bunker, surrounded by imaginary enemies, China, Palestine and Russia, are just as delusional as Zelensky. The virtual world is their real world.  There will be a purge here too, given the incompetence of its failed diplomats like the Jewish Blinken and of Biden himself. Sixty years since Kennedy was assassinated and given the violent ends of so many US emperors, it is likely that the demented Biden will be removed too. As US commentators have pointed out, this is elder abuse. Some ask what Biden is on. Certainly, some sort of medication, though not the cocaine which Zelensky has, supplied, some say, by Biden’s son. Both the genocidal Zelensky and Netanyahu are now embarrassing political liabilities for Washington and they will soon become even more embarrassing.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world, seven billion people in all, rejects the West, which is isolated. All that the Muslim world, Arab, Iranian, Turkish, Pakistani, has to do to win is nothing, given Israeli and Western competence. Turkey may leave NATO. It is fragmenting anyway. The self-appointed ‘masters of the universe’ in Washington will soon lose not just the Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, but also South Korea, Japan and then the peoples of Eastern Europe (Hungary and Slovakia have already gone) and Western Europe, including even the UK. There will be a New Europe, which will reintegrate its natural geography – Eurasia. Next year the USA may well re-elect the leader of American nationalism, Trump, who will have to sort out his own debt-ridden people’s destitution and end the drain of the US-run NATO and EU.

The Fall of State Christian Religion and the Return to Real Orthodoxy

After a millennium the two Western deviations of religion, Catholicism and Protestantism, are facing extinction. The only hope is the Faith which has been oppressed by the West for a thousand years, Orthodox Christianity. However, all over the Orthodox Christian and Non-Orthodox Christian world, triumphalist, State-sponsored forms of Orthodox Christianity have first to be rejected. Nobody wants State-sponsored religion. In general, people do not want the formalistic and ritualistic, but the spiritual food of the ascetic, the prophetic and the charitable. In the new European world, the need is for the spiritual. However, this is not Islam, Hinduism and Buddhist-Confucian-Communist-Nationalism, which relate to other Eurasian civilisations, the Muslim, Indian and Chinese. So what then can we say of real Orthodox Christianity, of the Faith of St Paisios and St Porphyrios of the contemporary Greek Orthodox world and of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the contemporary Russian Orthodox world?

The administration of Greek Orthodoxy, compromised by political subservience to the secularist USA, not least by its creation of a fake Church in the Ukraine on US orders and with US dollars, and the administration of Russian Orthodoxy, compromised by its self-imposed centralising and Sovietising Russian nationalism and formalism, convince few. A political and military win in the Ukraine is not a spiritual victory, for the peace must be won and the practice of faith is voluntary. We look forward to the decentralisation, multipolarisation and sovereignisation of the Orthodox Church, meaning many new sovereign Local Churches, with their model of parishes centred around the eucharist, linked to monasteries and ascetic life and the memories of the New Martyrs and Confessors. The old corrupt State model is over. Schismatic and unhinged podcasters, gold-coated cathedrals and bishops in big black cars who have nothing to do with the people, distant and menacing bureaucrats, often homosexuals and narcissists, convince nobody.