Invading your neighbors is not an act of Christianity.
Flying your nuclear armed bombers into other nation’s airspace is not the act of a Christian.
Arming a rogue states like Iran with Nuclear weapons, is not the act of a Christian.
Arming the one of the most strident enemies of Israel with nuclear weapons, is not the act of a Christian.
Now while the U. S. has just signed an agreement to let Iran persue it’s desires with regard to nuclear weapons, we haven’t provided know-how and the promise to arm them with state of the art delivery systems. Russia has.
The idea that Russia is today’s moral leader is about as flawed a perception as there could be.
It's more in the way of propaganda than flawed perception. It is known that Moscow has people posting on various websites around the country, including conservative ones like ours. And FR is one of the largest conservative forums around. So we should expect that they would infiltrate this site too, posing as Obama haters, etc... Obama, of course, has helped Russia in their stated goals perhaps more than any president in our history with his missile defense, nukes, and other deals.
The Rus learned very early that Christians who let their faith emasculate their state-craft will soon be ruled by non-Christians. Boris and Gleb are venerated as saints for not fighting Svyatopolk the Accursed over worldly power, but it was Yaroslav who secured the patrimony of St. Vladimir’s conversion for the Rus.
And I think there is a very long list of Christian heads of state who would be very surprised by the notion that Christians do not invade their neighbors, from the sainted Emperors Constantine and Justinian down to Presidents Polk and McKinley (both Methodists). (Though both Constantine and President Polk were only baptized on their deathbeds — perhaps both recognizing that state-craft may well often involve sin.)
Russia’s dealings with the Muslim world are simpler than ours because they only have Sunni enemies. I think Putin is mistaken in his belief that he can use the Iranian regime as a pawn in balance-of-power politics vis-a-vis the U.S. and NATO — he does not regard seriously enough the difference between the Hastener or Ta’ajili sect of Twelver Shia Islam controlling their regime and the orthodox Twelver Shia Islam of, for instance, Ayatollah al-Sistani in Iraq — but this is a matter of flawed judgement, not moral failing.
Russia has religious education in its state schools, a flat income tax, is resisting the homosexualist zeitgeist, since the fall of Communism has begun putting serious restrictions on abortion which in Soviet times was simply used as birth-control. Orthodox monasteries in Russia (and the Russian monastery on Mount Athos) are full as they were under the Tsars.
Remember also the article is a comparison with the West, not the United States. The U.S. still has, by Western standards, a fairly pious people (mostly in what I as an Orthodox Christian regard as the thin and unsatisfying piety of Protestantism), but like Western Europe is led by an “elite” which is openly hostile to Christianity. The West taken as a whole is much further gone — supposedly piously Roman Catholic Ireland has homosexual “marriage” due to an overwhelming vote in a plebiscite, rather than by the imposition of an unelected court, forthright preaching of Christian morality on sexual matters or stating unassailable facts about the warlike nature of Islam are treated as “hate crimes” in Western countries without a proper analogue of the First Amendment, the euthanasia laws in the Low Countries are even more appalling than that in Oregon, and the trend is for the rest of Western Europe to follow suit, while in the U.S. only the Left Coast and the usual bits of New England seem likely to follow Oregon (though the 5 minions of the Evil One on SCOTUS will surely conjure a robust “right to die” out of the 14th Amendment by sheer force of will sooner or later if we don’t find a way of reigning in the Court).
Well said. Putin’s militarism is not what the Gospels teach us about Jesus Christ. The fact that Putin wants to use Christianity to be the new ethos of his empire no more makes him a Christian than the occasional use of capitalism to benefit himself and his cronies makes him a believer in property rights and the rule of law.