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

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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

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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.