In a series of recent articles on the ‘world split apart’, I discussed the various economic, political, and military aspects of the new division between the Sino-Russian semi-alliance and its growing number of partners around the world, on the one hand, and the West writ large (to include Japan, Australia) led by the US and EU, on the other. [1] I did not discuss cultural factors, which I believe are really the foundational element of much of politics, whether domestic or international. As numerous thinkers have noted, cultures and civilizations are formed at their root and are nurtured by religion. Therefore, religion is bound to be a factor in the new global schism or ‘new cold war.’ In this article I will discuss religion and the threats and opportunities posed by the religious factor to the Sino-Russian or ‘rest’ and the Western sides in the world split apart. I will not address the role of Russian Orthodoxy, the Russian Orthodox Church, or other religious and semi-religious institutions — e.g., the Vsemirnyi Russkii Narodnyi Sobor (Global Russian Peoples’ Council) or the related ‘Russian world’. — as instruments of Russian cultural influence and soft power abroad. Instead, I focus on religion in general and other confessions and the role these might play in enhancing or hindering the ability of the West and the rest to garner allies in the political struggle surrounding the new world schism.
From 19th century Russian thinkers like Berdyaev and Danilevskii to 20th century American political scientists, such as Samuel Huntington, the idea has been strong and well-argued. Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), perhaps the greatest overall thinker in early 20th century Russia and the subsequent Russian émigré` community, saw religion as the basis of world and Russian history and life. He argued that history had were “religious preconditions” and “religious content” and was “the path to another world.”[3] Regarding Russia, “only a culture on a religious basis was possible.”[2] It is “a mysterious country still unclear about its fate, a country in which a passionate dream of religious transformation of life was hidden. … In the Russian people’s soul, perhaps, there has been preserved the ability to reveal the will to the miracle of the religious transformation of life.[4]
Nikolai Danilevskii (1822-1885), the foremost thinker among the second generation of Slavophiles and perhaps the chief proponent of pan-Slavic Slavophilism, argued that history had yielded by his lifetime ten “historical-cultural” types of nations or civilizations. Two American civilizations had died out, and one – Slavic civilization – was in the process of formation. These civilizational types were unique, differentiated artistic genres’ or styles and could develop in one or more of four spheres of human endeavor: the religious, cultural, political, and economic. Whether a civilizational could compete with and outlast others depended on whether they developed in one, a few, or all of these spheres. A central sphere around which most of Danilevskii’s types formed and developed was religion: Slavdom -Orthodoxy, European – Catholicism, Indian – Hinduism, and so on. [5] A century and a half later, American political scientist Samuel Huntington constructed a similar delineation of civilizations around which international conflict would develop in the post-Cold War world. He stipulated seven civilizations, each of which was anchored in and developed on the basis of a particular religious orientation. [6]
The emerging world split I described previously between the West and the ‘rest’ is and will be shaped by religion (and, consequently, Huntington’s clash of civilizations). Most notable is the split between the increasingly secular, indeed anti-religious West, and more traditional cultures still supporting religious faith in one form or another among the ‘rest’, including Russia and China. The traditional cultures are a considerable part of the common ground many Third World states are finding with Russia, supplementing the historical, political, military, economic, and financial factors forming an increasingly common ‘rest’ alienated and running counter to the West behind the Sino-Russian semi-alliance’s lead.
Moscow has been forced to abandon relations with the West as a result of NATO expansion, color revolutionism, and the consequent Ukrainian crisis and war, but those relations were affected by Russian traditionalist culture’s rejection of excesses in Western secular culture such as radical feminism, transgenderism, and transhumanism. Russia’s ‘traditional religions’ — at the forefront Russian Orthodox Christianity but also Islam, conservative Judaism, and even Biddhism — have formed a phalanx of countering systems of thought and values. Russian Orthodoxy and various ideas surrounding it are an element in an emerging new unofficial, if not official Russian ideology [7]. The new role of Russian Orthodoxy in Russian life, culture, thought, politics and, indeed, anti-Westernism can be seen in its growing role within the military and on the front lines in Ukraine. Thus, Russian troops more and more often are going into battle after prayers being led by an Orthodox priest [8].
As Russia turns to Africa, Latin America, and of course China and the rest of Asia to compensate for lost trade, financial, and other ties with the West, religion as the basic element of traditional culture is one axis around which relations can be developed. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been waging a diplomatic offensive in Africa. And the dark continent has been very receptive. The West’s past history of colonialism on the continent offers trade and other economic opportunities for Russia today, but Africa’s significant Islamic element and growing Christianization offer additional ones. Russia has been fairly adept at using its Muslim population and elites for diplomatic efforts for decades. Now Africa is undergoing a wave of Christian evangelism and conversion. The growing Christianization of Africa will create a new point of leverage by which Moscow can use antagonism to Western hyper-secular, anti-religious Wokism to win over friends and allies on the continent. Similarly, many Latin America states have had an alienating experience with Western colonialism and imperialism and have a recent history of good relations with Moscow going back to the communist era. Now, already very Catholic Latin America is undergoing an explosion of Pentecostalism, which, together with the continent’s ‘macho’ cultures are a bad match for American Wokism’s radical feminism, transgenderism, and LGBQTism. The conservatism of the Christian drive and masculine culture in Latin America fits well with Russia’s traditionalist Orthodox and male-dominated military-oriented security vigilance culture.
Except for this paragraph, all of this was written by February 2023. It seemed complete enough, but then October 7th came. Israeli’s devastating and cruel war on Gaza has re-polarized Israeli-Muslim relations, Western-Muslim relations, and united the Shiites and Sunnis for the time being. The Israeli state particularly is dividing itself from all but the once Protestant and Catholic West. To be sure, Western evangelicals are all in with the war on Gaza, marking a division on a religious basis plaguing the West, especially the US. But the larger schism is of central concern. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed a portion of it, when he warned against allowing the Israeli-Hamas war to become one between ‘the Crescent and the Cross.’ In reality, this schism is extended by the Orthodox-Western Christian schism, and the internal Orthodox schism pitting the Russian, unofficial Moscow patriarch-affiliated Ukrainian, Serbian, and other Orthodox Churches against the now official Ukrainian Orthodox and Uniate Churches and Orthodox branches in Istanbul, Antioch, and others. Thus, Orthodoxy is being further split by the Gaza war, with the powerful ROC siding cautiously with the Muslim world and the more Western Orthodox communities remaining neutral or siding passively with Israel.
The overall effect of the Gaza war, therefore, is a furthering of the schisms in the world rooted in and based on the major religion’s differences. This trend is exacerbating the polarization between the West and the rest deepened by the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. With Muslims drawing even closer to Orthodox Russia and the Sino-Russian-led pole opposed to the Western pole in international affairs, the system has received a greater impetus towards bipolarity rather than multipolarity.
The other half of the Sino-Russian core of the emerging ‘rest’ against the West, China, is an outlier in this story. The growth of Christianity in China has been aggressively resisted by the CCP regime for decades, and Beijing has been brutal in repressing Muslim religion and culture among Xingjiang’s Muslim Uighurs. Thus, there is a significantly profound contradiction between Chinese communist atheism, on the one hand, and Russian and Third World religiosity, on the other hand. This is one potential point of tension between the core of the non-West rest, but for now the non-Orthodox nature of Christian movements in China allows both Moscow and Beijing to easily ignore the Christian part of this issue at least for now, but Chinese oppression of its Muslims have had and more still could have repercussions in Russia’s North Caucasus as well as the Volga regions of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan (Baskiriya). Moreover, the Woke West can will use Moscow’s alliance with ‘Islamophobic’ China to sow tensions between Moscow and Beijing by doing the same between Moscow and its Muslim regions, some of which are being promoted as targets by many in the West for a ‘decolonization’ campaign against Moscow in the hope of breaking regions away from Russia. Less Woke elements in the West might try to do the same using China’s campaigns against Christianity as a point of leverage, but one that will be unlikely to produce any results.
Overall, however, the trend is clear: a world split apart not just by economic and political issues from past and present but by deeper religious and cultural fissures that can rip humankind apart without a birth of actual tolerance of differences over belief and existence, as opposed to the hyper-materialist fake tolerance of American Wokism. The alternative is more phenomena such as jihadism, Islamism, and ultimately the new racism that stands behind the West’s belief in its right to expand military blocs and destabilize ‘non-democratic’ societies at will now in an effort to inflict a Wokism that half of Americans themselves refuse to abide. The Wokist Biden regime’s response has been to markedly intensify the de-democratization (de-republicanization) of American politics and to deepen the polarization ripping the world apart. In doing so, the Democrat Party-state regime is rejecting the religious and political legacy of Christianity and republican government upon which Western civilization was built, making it less likely that non-Western states among the rest will be attracted to the West any time soon. Perhaps, a ‘restern-based’ or non-Western Christian and — however unlikely at present– republican movement will have to save Westerners still loyal to the European ideal and American founding?
As a closing aside, it seems the various prophets and prophecies have not spawned the universal love each of their religions profess to foster. If a supreme being inspired these prophecies, then he appears to be less than perfect, for his providence has been sending the world up in flames throughout history. The ‘out’ for that being’s responsibility is the doubtless distortions of the original prophecies’ tenets introduced by humankind and their weaponization for the seemingly universal pursuit of power.
FOOTNOTES
[2] Nikolai Berdyaev, Smysl’ istorii: Opyt’ filosofii chelovecheskoi sud”by, Vtoroe izdanie (Paris: YMCA Press, 1969), pp. 92 and 236.
[3] Berdyaev, Smysl’ istorii: Opyt’ filosofii chelovecheskoi sud”by, p. 250.
[4] Berdyaev, Smysl’ istorii: Opyt’ filosofii chelovecheskoi sud”by, p. 268.
[5] Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth CenturyRussian Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975,), pp. 514-16.
[6] Samuel Huntington, “A Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993).
[7] See Gordon M. Hahn, “The New Russian Ideology,” Russian and Eurasian Politics, 12 August 2021 https://gordonhahn.com/2021/08/12/the-new-russian-ideology/ and Gordon M. Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History, and Politics (London: Europe Books, 2022).
[8] See the video at https://x.com/WorldWarNow_/status/1736849742066483378?s=20 and https://twitter.com/i/status/1736849742066483378
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NEW BOOK
