Function and Dysfunction in the New Millennium: The Rise of the East and the Decline of the West

A Spiritual Matter: Part One of a Series

Photo: newsbaltic.files.wordpress.com Photo: newsbaltic.files.wordpress.com     

Oh, east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat,
But there is neither East nor West, border nor breed nor birth,
When two strong men come face to face,
though they come from the ends of the earth!
Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West, 1889

The solutions offered by the world’s solution-vendors are socioeconomic or sociopolitical. We think in terms of changes of power and movements of capital, all pursued from various theoretical schools of thought and personal prejudices. The problem is, as necessary as they are, the diplomatic solutions only deal with symptoms, with what we are able to do-now-about-this. This approach is crisis-oriented and time-constrained, and tends to miss the point.

The point that we, in our detail-inundated, crisis-plagued diplomatic environment, tend to miss is that it is our spiritual condition that determines our outlook. In turn, our outlook determines our morality; our morality determines how we behave toward each other, and how we behave toward each other determines the condition of our society. It’s universal, from the laws we permit to be passed to the behaviors we tolerate; from what we regard as “normal” or even “desirable.”

In short, our spiritual condition is the determinative factor behind a given society and the driving force behind pragmatic matters of state. It thus bears the ultimate responsibility for that society’s condition.

Up until the 2016 election, the United States—the leader of the West—was in a steady, increasingly sharper, moral decline. Her leaders had, with a brief period of relief under President Reagan, championed this decline since the mid-60’s. Under President Obama (2008-2016), the moral and religious climate took a nosedive. As of this writing, we have spent over two years in a successful beginning at recovery—all of it under unrestrained and ruthless opposition from the establishment that put Mr. Obama in place.

The social degeneration has not been localized in the United States. It is the product of an aggressive and militant global socialist initiative whose disdain for God has produced a low view of the human person and a scope and degree of moral corruption never before experienced on earth. It had all but swallowed Europe whole before the 2016 elections offered hope and support to citizens beleaguered by an impersonal and culturally stifling European Union.

God and Realpolitik

East and West may not have quite met, but they have certainly passed each other on parallel tracks going in opposite directions, It appears we have become each other, the East and the West having each, simultaneously, both won and lost the Cold War.

I’m not the only one to observe this. Fr. Johannes Jacobse in the August 2016 American Orthodox Institute online journal posted an interesting article entitled, Russia and the West Have Swapped Spiritual and Cultural Roles.

In 1991, when Russia finally threw off the Soviet occupation after seventy dark years, hardly anyone, in either place, could anticipate what we have become, today.

For instance…

America vs. Russia

The Good Guys were the West, led by a United States whose values of freedom and democracy were clear. America was generous with foreign aid and rich with the fruits of individual initiative. Its churches sent missions throughout the world.

The Bad Guys were the USSR, led by a grim and grasping Russia. The USSR was the Evil Empire, a ravenous police state infamous for its gulags and the KGB, where atheism was enforced at gunpoint and individual initiative drew the attention of the neighbors, who were probably police informers. The Soviet Union was a hungry bear, gobbling up the nations of Eastern Europe and capturing their economies and identities while destabilizing cultures around the world. We have the witness of many who made it through those days and wrote about them.[1]

Things have changed.

Russia threw off the “evil empire” and re-embraced her Christian history. She now builds churches in places into which the former “good guys” used to have to smuggle Bibles. The Church goes where the new Russia’s diplomats go, and advancing the cause of Christ appears for all the world to be part of the new Russia’s foreign policy.

By contrast, under our last administration, Servicemembers in a “new, fundamentally transformed” America actually faced disciplinary action for failing to adequately conceal their Christian faith.[2] American foreign aid was used as a bludgeon to influence countries to accept abortion on demand and to normalize dysfunctional sexual addictions.[3]

Abortion hangs on in Russia, a holdover from the old, dark days, albeit on a restricted basis. It is, however, officially discouraged by the government and disincentivized by encouraging, and even subsidizing, larger families. There is not only prayer in school, there are religion classes. The Orthodox Christian faith is championed, and church attendance is unapologetically encouraged and growing. Contrary to Western accusations, personal homosexual activity is neither illegal nor “persecuted” in Russia.

What is illegal is propagandizing it, particularly to minors. There are, for instance, no “sex education lecturers” from “gay rights” groups permitted into Russian schools to proselytize prospective young converts.

By contrast, the world’s erstwhile Good Guys subsidize “gay pride days” in the public school systems and give Planned Parenthood representatives free access to the minds and morals of American children.[4] In most American schools, wearing a “satan” or “Che” T-shirt used to be perfectly acceptable, where a Jesus, or even an American Flag T-shirt would get a student sent home. A barrage of lawsuits (somewhat) rectified that, but wearing a “Trump,” or even a veteran-honoring shirt will get you sent home from any publicly-funded school that thinks it can get away with it.[5]

The West has permitted itself to be led into evil, into a very vicious sort of paganism. Its ontology is that human beings, rather than being created in the Image of God, are created in the image of some primeval mud puddle and should be valued accordingly.

Its teleology regards humanity as a virus that must be controlled lest it destroy the planet.[6] Its rites are a grim, almost rote sensualism—the desperate reveling of a condemned man; its sacrament is human sacrifice, which began with an eerie fervidness toward abortion and has morphed, as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger had hoped, into a headlong descent into full-blown Hitlerian eugenics.[7]

Until recently, an increasingly suicidal West was hurling itself into the frenzied anarchy of the Bolshevism that preceded the cold darkness of the Soviet era. At the same time, a resurgent Eastern Europe has been rebuilding her Christian culture and, herself increasingly open-handed and confident, has in effect traded places with her erstwhile adversary.

The result of this is that the West has been fading while the East has been expanding. I submit that whatever pragmatic diplomacy might be practiced in connection with this, its successes and failures have been due to Russia’s increasing, and America’s declining, relationship with Christ.

This is nowhere more evident than in the disparities between Russia’s current and America’s recent leaders: On one hand, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB thug miraculously converted, Saul-like, into an enthusiastic son of the Church; a stable man and an unapologetic Christian leader. On the other, former President Barack Obama: a man who declined to define what a “gender” is, and who couldn’t define “terrorism” even after a significant number of his citizens, (whom he was sworn to protect) had been murdered by it.

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has publicly used the word, ”miracle” in reference to Mr. Putin’s conversion and subsequent administration.[8] As for Mr. Obama, daily-increasing numbers in America’s Christian churches and communions have been driven away from his party by its hostility to them.

This geopolitical shift is easily viewed in terms of simple political mechanics. Once again, though, while real enough, it’s just the surface. At the heart of it is the spiritual condition.

God and Geopolitics

Photo: e-ir.info Photo: e-ir.info     

NATO, all the time loudly calling Russia an “aggressor,” has ringed her with military installations and has invited her neighbor-nations to join them. NATO’s sales pitch relies less on a positive appeal to enhanced defensive capability than on a cynical manipulation of residual resentment toward the now-defunct Soviet Union.

Speaking of which, NATO protects the interests of the European Union: a rapacious organization that assumes control of the economies and monetary policies of its vassal nations and places them on a foreign currency under a foreign central bank and drives them into dependence on “loans.” Greece, for instance, a nation with a tidy if uncompelling economy under the drachma, has fallen into financial disaster under the euro.[9]

The story goes on. Ireland’s world-astounding “Celtic Tiger” economy simply vanished shortly after Ireland went under the euro. Portugal’s respectable little self-contained economy and even those of European powerhouses Italy and Spain have alike been driven into debtor positions by Brussels and her bankers in Germany.[10] Moreover, the EU has placed its vassal states under a foreign parliament and has worked to destroy their cultures by flooding them with hostile and dangerous refugee-invaders. In Sweden, for example, government policies have made it unsafe for many Swedish citizens to leave their houses. Police departments have suffered wholesale resignations.

The EU has replaced the Secret Police and the Gulags with economic dependency and imposed social instability. It is more subtle than the old Soviet approach, but after the same idea.

Brussels feeds on the economies it captures. Like all empires, The EU survives on fresh infusions of new blood. Russia, with her vast land area and mineral wealth, would be quite a prize. Hence, NATO’s encirclement. But that’s, again, a symptom.

The disease is that the once-Christian West has succumbed to the lure of the new paganism and its values. Holy Russia upsets the narrative and redefines the discussion, so that a morally-collapsed West can no longer credibly argue that it’s the Good Guy in the contest. The new Russia shines an annoying, frequently painful light into the darkness the newly-paganized West has adopted. Evil shrinks before the Light, which is the real reason an atheistic USSR wanted to destroy the Christian West. I daresay it’s also the reason the new, nihilistic West is doing all it can to discredit the revived and reviving Christian Russia.

Hope, if we’ll have it

We in the West are beset by eighteen-hour days, meetings, briefings, meetings about briefings, briefings for further meetings; in other words, the press of circumstances. We are growing to see “circumstance” as some disembodied force with an autonomous power to compel, something with which we must “keep up,” or to which we must “adapt.” “Circumstances” are our equivalent of the old Soviet “inevitable outworking of history.” This is a trap. We are no more beholden to impersonal “circumstances” today than Russia was beholden to an impersonal “inevitable history” under the Soviets. As Russia reawakened in Christ, the chains of “inevitable history” fell away and she began to move forward.

The West would today do well to follow Russia’s example, as she apparently, in 1991, followed ours. If we will permit ourselves to continue to be renewed in Christ and subsequently spiritually and morally reformed, the oppression of “circumstances” will fall away from us and we, too, will continue to move forward. It is we, made in God’s image and given stewardship over the earth, who determine our destiny: Whether it will be full, and God-ward, or empty and God-avoiding, is ours to own. Ours to own, also, is the chaos that is increasing as our spiritual resources grow too weak to sustain our physical world.

There is an increasing Orthodox presence in the West. The Russian Church has opened reading rooms in Paris and missions in Britain. In the United States, there is an Orthodox parish within driving distance of most places. Healthy and growing Western Rites in the Russian and Antiochian Churches have restored the ancient and venerable rites of the Orthodox West, making the fullness of the faith available to Westerners in liturgically and culturally familiar settings—even with a Western Rite ROCOR monastery in Germany, the financial belly of the EU beast.

I submit that it is the spiritual influence of prayer, the Sacraments and the fullness of the faith that are, with or without their knowledge, supporting and giving strength to those who are beginning to question the course their countries are taking. More on that, below.

Modernists are fond of saying that “coincidence does not equal causation.” I am skeptical of this phrase and of the glibness with which it is often used to deny causation altogether.

Cause and Effect

Modernist philosopher David Hume once proposed that the motion of one billiard ball, after having been struck by another, did not necessarily prove causation; that it only indicated coincidental motion.[11] This led to the postmodern denial of the objective nature of reality, a corrosive doctrine which is taught in Western schools from the earliest years. One of Hume’s influences, philosopher George Berkeley, Anglican Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland’s County Cork, even went so far as to advance a Hinduesque denial of the existence of matter, itself! Reputedly, Samuel Johnson responded to Hume’s proposition by kicking a large stone over, declaring: “I refute him thus.”[12]

The West was formerly on the side of Dr. Johnson, the East on the side of Bishop Berkeley. They have traded places. I submit this is key to understanding the present rise of Eastern Europe and the decline of the West. Yet, since the establishment of a culturally-engaged Orthodox presence, the following has happened which was not happening before: America has been awakening from a fifty-year slumber and is currently engaged in a furious battle to regain her culture and morality; Great Britain is leaving the European Union and there is a strong movement afoot (despite fierce official opposition) to rebuild her national character; the people, if not the government, of France have begun reconsidering their own relationship with the EU, and Italy has elected an anti-EU Prime Minister.

Orthodox missions have pierced the darkness in both Cuba and China, where Orthodox churches now publicly stand in places where churches were once strictly forbidden. Since then both countries have become more open to—and friendlier toward—the rest of the world. Even in Germany, Mrs. Merkel’s socially-suicidal policies have been soundly rejected in one regional election after another, and her party’s continued hold on the German parliament, and thus its government, appears shaky.

Coincidence? Only if you believe that one billiard ball striking another has no necessarily causative effect. In the real world, the outworking of the facts refutes that. Human agency, conscientiously exercised, is an honorable thing, but it is limited. Divine Agency is not, and the more our own efforts are open to and consistent with it, the more successful they will be. I submit the facts on today’s ground are examples of this, not coincidences.

Mr. Putin has repeatedly said there is no logical reason for conflict between the United States and Russia, citing virtually identical geopolitical interests. Perhaps, though, his real appeal is to a spiritually-reawakening America, and the immense good God could do through two great powers should they become allies in Christ.

Imperfection and conflict, selfishness and foolhardiness are givens on a fallen planet populated by imperfect people. Bur the last time the bulk of the world was united in Christ, peace and co-operation became at least the striven-for goal if not the achieved norm. The world was a flawed place, but it at least aspired to a higher standard of honor and dignity than we have aspired to since.

God appears to be calling us to this sort of aspiration again.

As we deploy our diplomatic pragmatism against the symptoms, I submit we in the West should stop calling the new Russia names for long enough to take a closer look at their efforts against the disease, itself, and perhaps consider joining them in a revitalized relationship with the One Who makes all things possible.

  

Fr. James is Rector of St. Joseph of Arimathea Orthodox Church, a House of Prayer ministry in La Porte, Indiana, USA, in the Western Rite of ROCOR. He is the author of The Transformed Life: Living and Growing in Christ, released as an e-book by the American Orthodox Institute and available on Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook.

Fr. James Rosselli

7/27/2019

[1] Most famously, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Harper & Row, New York, 1973

[2] Marine Court-Martialed for Refusing to Remove Bible Verse: Todd Starnes, Todd’s American Dispatch, Fox News, May 25, 2015.

Air Force Officer Told to Remove Bible from Desk: Todd Starnes, Town Hall, May 03 2013.

Military Chaplains Banned From Using Jesus’ Name, Reciting Bible; Lawsuit
Filed in Calif.
, Katherine Weber, Christian Post, Nov. 14 2013

Gays In, Bibles Out, In The New American Military: Bob Campbell, American Thinker,

July 23, 2013

…Just four examples of dozens.

[3] Under Obama, Billions in Foreign Aid Has Gone to Groups That Support Abortion, Lisa Correnti and Andrew Kubick, Life News.com, August 30 2013.

Obama Admin to “Leverage” Foreign Aid for LGBT Rights, Paul Canning, Care2, December 6 2011

[4] The Gay Agenda, Coming to a School Near You, Tom Robinson, Beyond Today, Oct 31, 2014.

Public School LGBT Programs Don’t Just Trample Parental Rights, They Also Put Kids at Risk, Walt Heyer: The Witherspoon Institute, Public Discourse, June 8th 2015.

Parents Shocked to Learn Planned Parenthood Teaching Their Kids Sex Ed in School, Sarah Zagorski, Life News.com, Nov. 7 2014

[5] Student Was Sent Home From School for His Trump Border Wall Shirt — Now He's Fighting Back in Court, Jenni Fink, IJR Red,| May 27, 2018

California Students Sent Home for Wearing U.S. Flags on Cinco de Mayo, Joshua Rhett Miller, Fox News, May 06, 2010.

Student Wearing ‘Virginity Rocks’ T-Shirt Sent Home From School, Aric Mitchell, Inquisityr, September 14, 2014

[6] David Attenborough - Humans are plague on Earth: Louise Gray, The Telegraph, June 29, 2018.

[7] Margaret Sanger: in her own words: http://www.dianedew.com/sanger.htm

Trevor Loudon, Adolf Hitler, Progressive Pioneer

[8] Reuters Online: http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2012/02/09/russian-orthodox-patriarch-kirill-calls-putin-era-a-miracle-of-god/

[9] Kimberly Amadeo, The Balance: What is the Greek debt crisis?

[10] A fascinating and perceptive comparison between the problems in the Eurozone and political unrest in the sport of motorcycle racing, by James Parker in Motor Cyclist: Financial Trouble in Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain | When Pigs Fly | Drawing the

Line

[11] See Routledge: http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/alevelphilosophy/data/A2/Hume/HumeCausation.pdf

[12] The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page: http://www.samueljohnson.com/refutati.html

Comments
JJ7/29/2019 11:44 pm
@Fr. James

Where is it reported that Trump met Christ? Where is the evidence of his conversion? Most conversions are transformative - where is the evidence?

As Dean Percy of Christ Church College Oxford states Trump's religion is overwhelmingly that of the wealth gospel: "Start with his inauguration ceremony. Pastor Paula White was one of the clergy nominated to pray for Trump on the day. A televangelist and exponent of the “health, wealth and prosperity” movement, she preaches the “prosperity gospel”, an unorthodox approach to Christianity that says God wants people to be rich, and that he makes them wealthy as a sign of his blessing. So the richer you are, the more obvious it is that God loves you, and the stronger your faith is.....In the end, a market-driven religion gives rise to a market-driven approach to truth..". This gospel, IMO, has nothing to do with Orthodoxy.


Anon.7/29/2019 8:13 pm
Imperialists are idiots. The "greater" the empire becomes, the safer it is for the elites to conduct business offshore and avoid hiring Americans.
Fr. Jame Rosselli7/29/2019 6:16 am
Beannachti, Matfey,

Your argument is basically: (The West was not the Good Guy because they were sinful and imperfect)><(the East was not the Bad Guy because, face it, everybody is sinful and imperfect).

It's self-cancelling. All it says is that we make allowances for the people we like, and we don't for those whom we don't.

At any rate, Mr. Trump was a rich kid in New York. Mr. Putin ran the KGB. Both behaved accordingly, and there's really no excusing that behavior. Blessedly, we don't have to. Both men met Christ and became new men, and whatever happened before then simply doesn't matter. So, an argument that runs, "look what terrible things they did in the past," is irrelevant.

The Donald Trump who exists now, has mounted the only successful opposition to the baby-killing machine since Roe vs. Wade built it. The Trump family is exemplary, modeling traditional family values to the nation, and Mr. Trump numbers among his friends the heads of almost every pro-family ministry in the country. He is advised by Franklin Graham, of whom even Patriarch +Kirill spoke well.

Granted, the Evangelicals are trying to live a whole Faith with half a religion. Nevertheless, they are obedient to the Lord's Great Commission, which is a command, not a suggestion, and as a result they are where America goes to meet Jesus. And whose fault is that? In 1995, aftr we'd been here for 254 years, a venomous argument was raging among us as to whether or not it was "proper" to do the Liturgy in English! A decade and a half later, a similarly bitter war would be waged around the Western Rites. Mwanwhile, while w wee busy, the Evangelicals were still evangelizing. God uses the willing.

Of course, now we have awakened to the mission for souls, and the Evangelicals themselves are daily discovering Orthodoxy. Imagine if we'd been doing this for the past two-and-three-quarters-hundred years!

If we would like Mr. Trump to join so many of his friends and become Orthodox, I submit that a good place to staert would be to reject the fashionable "Get Trump" stuff propounded by our own atheistic Left.

At any rate, that's not what the article was about. It was about a spiritual phenomenon that has taken place, out of which, I infer, you join me in wanting us to dig.

I won;t argue with you about WWII. I was a military chaplain for 20 years, and I'd never say anything against the legendary heroism of the Soviet soldiers. They weren't just fighting the Germans, they had to do it hindered by feather-merchant "political officers" to whom their commanders had to answer for everything they did. Russians are some of the toughest people on earth, and they made it out the other end of their 70-year-long dark tunnel despite, not because of, their "Democratic Socialist" (Lenin's word for "Communist") rulers.

It's just the first in a series. Hope you like the rest.

in Christ-- Fr. James+
James7/28/2019 8:17 pm
Matfey Shaheen, I believe the author used the "good guys", "bad guys" in quotes intentionally to discredit such thinking. I believe he used the terms because they are such common ways of thinking, and that the quotes are there to imply that they are incorrect.
JJ7/27/2019 10:46 pm
From a European perspective America was never the “good guy” The USA was never the “rescuer” of the free world but was forced to engage in WW II. USA policy destroyed Vietnam. The Americans were reputed for their ruthless materialism and excess beginning in the 60s - when their excessive wealth, loose morals (the counter-cultural movement began in America)began to be paraded throughout the world in the media and especially in film and television. America brought corrupting values to the whole world through its ruthless determination to coca colaize the entire world. America has never held the reputation of “good guy” outside America .
Gary Cox7/27/2019 9:28 pm
A very good article. It covers basic truths. Not overly detailed but detailed enough to show the reality of the world we live in. I voted for Trump because it was him or Hillary. I'm not happy with some of the things he has done ( bombing Syria and probably after this article was written has said on TV that he has no problem with homosexuality). Trump was not my favorite, but Hillary? You didn't mention it but in a lot of people's minds she hates Christianity and is a rabid baby killer. A very good analysis. Thank You! Gary Cox
Photios7/27/2019 4:03 pm
Hume's argument concerning the billiard balls is philosophically impeccable.
Empirically, however, no same man can believe that the world actually works that way.
Matfey Shaheen7/27/2019 11:52 am
Part 1: This is a very interesting article, which I believe in principle is quite on point, but I do have some minor disagreements. Certianly the godless authorities brutally repressed Holy Rus', as well as even Russian nationalism under Bolshevik internationalism, however I think it may be an oversimplification to catagorically say the West were the "Good guys" and the East were the "Bad guys".

I think this type of thinking is what promoted the reluctance of many contemporary traditionalists and/or conservative Americans from seeing Russia as a friend or ally, not because modern Russia has any serious unreconcilable ideological differences with the West, but simply because the idea of Russia as the "bad guy" is deeply ingrained.

It also disguises the immoral actions of the West in history. For example, it was the East - Slavic people that bore the majority of the suffering, the fighting, and the victory during WW2, but many Americans genuinely think they alone saved the world from Nazism, when it's simply historical fact that Soviet forced were the ones winning the key battles and turning the tide, as well as paying the largest price by orders of magnitude. Then we take into account how the "good guys" in the West funded the islamist Mujahedeen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, the result of which was the birth of islamic terrorism that plauges the middle east.

The "good guys" in the West condemned certian governments as dictatorships when they constantly supported brutal regimes in Saudi Arabia and Latin America, Regan in particular justifying this as containment of communism. The West which loves to lecture people about wars but they were the biggest instigators of wars, and the only force in history to deploy in warfare nuclear weapons.

At best, the good guy bad guy dicotomy is simplistic, at worst, it can lead to pride and blindness.

The implication that the moral situation is turning around under good guy Trump rather than bad guy Obama is understandable as wishful thinking, and I wish it were so, but I often marvel at how other traditionalists genuinely see Trump as some morally superior white knight.

His greatest virtue is that he's NOT Hillary Clinton - and that is a great virtue! but not a very high standard to hold a person to. In some ways Trump was worse than his predecessors, for example, Obama constantly talked about bombing Syria, probably the only Middle Eastern country aside from Lebanon actively defending Christians. But Trump actually DID bomb Syria. I don't even understand how people consider him a defender of family values: the man has been divorced multiple times, has been involved into multiple sexual scandals (not unlike Clinton). To my knowledge, in 2016 there is a very infamous photo of Trump holding up the rainbow flag! The homosexual apologists of course argue he doesn't actually support them, but did it as a publicity stunt, even so, what does that make him? A man who simply does what is politically or financially convient for him?

I don't by any means hate Trump was the left does, I try not to hate anyone at all, I just don't see why some traditionalists are enamoured with him. And I'm not saying even this article takes that position, its just a vibe I get.

I suppose a traditionalist Orthodox Christian could argue, in fact, the west did not go wrong just now, but went catastrophically wrong in 1054 and never recovered. The idea of a mostly protestant or catholic country as the main defender or Christianity is a bit too ecumenical for me at least. The Hapsburg Empire, for example, was extremely "Christian" in the way America was during the cold war, but it visited constant tortures against our Orthodox Rusyns, Ukrainians, Serbs, Romanians, etc.

Culturally the classic greco-Roman Christian Europe, or the classic western civilization of which modern Russia is a part of died in "the west" since the "enlightenment". And let's not forget how many traditional Orthodox are monarchists...
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