Putin Is Courting America's "Christian Right"

Vladimir Putin is using the playbook of the tsars and the Republican Party to quell dissent at home and to court the far right in America, namely the white evangelicals and Christofascists who would prefer a Christian theocracy - with themselves in control, of course, and riding rough shod over the rest of us - over democracy.  Power and control are their twin gods and love of neighbor and acts of kindness are nowhere on their radar. For centuries, the tsars were intertwined with the Russian Orthodox Church which enjoyed power and wealthy in exchange for unwaivering support for the autocracy. Putin has restored the position and prestige of the Russian Orthodox Church which has remained reactionary as ever and the Moscow patriarch of the Church has even endorsed Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the rape and murder of women and children. Like far right "Christians" in America, the Russian Church cares more about power and inflicting its 12th century beliefs on everyone than it does about furthering Christ's gospel message. Hence the murder of Ukrainian children simply does not matter so long as the Church has power and privileges.  Internationally, Putin is playing the Republican Party's playbook with white evangelicals and Christofascists: condeming modernity, attacking gays and racial minorities and promising power in the culture wars.  Indeed, it is as if Putin is trying to out do Greg Abbott of Texas and Florida's vile Ron DeSantis and win the GOP 2024 nomination.  Frighteningly, as a column in the Washington Post notes, far too many on America's political and cultural right are embracing Putin's courtship.  Here are column highlights:

Here’s a scoop for you: Vladimir Putin is sounding like someone who wants to enter the 2024 Republican presidential primaries.

How else do you explain that in the middle of his bellicose speech Tuesday promising success in his assault on Ukraine, the Russian dictator fired a series of heat-seeking verbal missiles into our culture wars.

“Look at what they’ve done to their own people,” he said of us Westerners. “They’re destroying family, national identity, they are abusing their children. Even pedophilia is announced as a normal thing in the West.” Never mind that Russia is a world leader in sex trafficking.

Putin didn’t stop there. In one rather convoluted passage, he came out against same-sex marriage, backed off a bit, and then doubled down:

“And they’re recognizing same-sex marriages,” he said. “That’s fine that they’re adults. They’ve got the right to live their life. And we always, we’re very tolerant about this in Russia. Nobody is trying to enter private lives of people, and we’re not going to do this.”

Well, not quite, but he pressed on: “However, we need to tell them, but look at the scriptures of any religion in the world. Everything is said in there. And one of the things is that family is a union of a man and a woman.”

Among his enemies, Putin charged, “even the sacred texts are subjected to doubt.” Also, watch out, Britain: The “Anglican Church is planning to consider the idea of a gender-neutral God,” Putin mourned. “What can you say here? Millions of people in the West understand that they are being led to spiritual destruction.”

It has become a habit to cast the struggle over Ukraine in Cold War terms. Maybe that’s natural, given Putin’s old job as a KGB agent and his determination to expand Russia’s imperial reach to something closer to the hegemony once enjoyed by the old Soviet Union.

But it’s closer to the truth to see Putin as trying to build a right-wing nationalist international movement (no pun intended). And it’s obvious that his embrace of social and religious traditionalism is aimed at winning over right-wing opinion in the democracies and splitting the traditional right.

You don’t have to watch Fox News commentators waxing warm about the Russian president to see that this strategy is working. Opposition to helping Ukraine is growing among rank-and-file Republicans.

A Pew Research survey in January found that 40 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said that the United States was providing too much help to Ukraine, up from 32 percent in the fall and 9 percent last March. A Jan. 27-Feb. 1 Washington Post/ABC News poll found 50 percent of Republicans saying that the United States was doing too much to support Ukraine, up from 18 percent in April.

[M]any Republican leaders are resisting the lure of selling out Ukraine (Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) has been especially outspoken), many are not so brave. Especially striking were the comments of former president Donald Trump’s leading 2024 rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

“I don’t think it’s in our interest to be getting into a proxy war with China, getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea,” DeSantis said on Fox News. He added: “It’s important to point out the fear of Russia going into NATO countries and all of that and steamrolling that is not even coming close to happening. I think they’ve shown themselves to be a third-rate military power.”

As a narrow political matter, DeSantis has been crafty in straddling the fence dividing Republican opinion. He has been Trumpy enough for the former president’s base, but different enough to appeal to those in the GOP who want to be done with Trump. On Ukraine, DeSantis fell off the fence. It was not an auspicious illustration of how he will deal with the balancing act he faces.

The much larger problem is for U.S. foreign policy. For the medium term, enough Republicans share Biden’s view of the Russian threat and Ukraine’s heroism to maintain assistance to the war effort.

But Putin is very shrewd about opinion on the right end of politics — in the United States and in Western Europe, too. He is counting on a backlash against social liberalism and the idea of a “gender-neutral” God to rustle up support for ungodly aggression.