This has become the official line from the Kremlin. It is less surprising, given what sits in the Kremlin if you realize that the KGB was always about control and not about ideology. Kremlin is no longer Communist, — in fact it hasn’t been that since about 1960 (the Chinese were first to notice), — and the Kremlin finds the tale of Christian Russia useful.
The truth is, there is a small, very small core of Orthodox believers in Russia; and a vanishingly small amount of Catholics and Protestants. The typical Russian Orthodox is 50% likely to also not believe in God. Don’t laugh, I got statistics. Of those who identify themselves as Orthodox, under 10% visit church on any regular basis. Orthodoxy has become an ethnic attribute, and since the Russians feel irritated by just about any other nation, Orthodoxy becomes very important to them, not as faith but as attribute.
The Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchy) is a branch of government in Russia. The government promotes them and they promote the government. That, too is not necessarily new: MP toasted Stalin as their liberator and benefactor while he was starving and bleeding the country to death. Ther last honest Russian patriarch was Holy Martyr Tikhon, who died in 1925, and even he appears to have been intimidated into a measure of collaboration with the Reds. The Orthodox core would be nourished by the debris left of Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and various fractions of the dissipated Catacomb Church.
This, in short is not a model of re-Christianization of the West, as much as I would like it to be.
Before anything good comes out of Russia it needs to be de-sovietized, both the nation and the Church. At this point in time, Putin works on re-sovietization and the Church is running interference for him.
I agree, but what about the US?
By the Grace of God the soviets failed before, and if what you post is true then by His grace they'll fail again.
This is true not only of Russia, but of religious identity almost everywhere. In Northern Ireland, being "Catholic" or "Protestant" had less to do with theology than whether you were loyal to the British crown or not. In the Balkans, the joke was was that a Bosnian was a "Muslim" who never went to Mosque, while a Croat and a Serb were respectively "Catholics" and "Orthodox" who never went to Church. Yet they were willing to murder one another over their supposed "religion."
If religion is to survive in any form, it will do so as part and parcel of an ethnicity and a culture. Taken outside of that context, theology just doesn't mean much to most people.