In his New Year’s address, Russian president Vladimir Putin once again spoke of “the importance of traditional family values.” It is one of his most common themes. Two months earlier, Putin had angered Western liberals by saying that teaching children “that a boy can become a girl and vice versa…is on the verge of a crime against humanity” and blasting gender confusion ideology that “seeks to eliminate basic human categories like mother, father, and family.”
On December 5, Putin signed legislation that bans propaganda promoting sexual deviance. The new law makes it illegal to “praise LGBTQ relationships, publicly express non-heterosexual orientations or suggest that they are ‘normal.’” The new law builds on an earlier one that banned homosexual propaganda targeting minors.
The intensifying culture war between Russia and the West is rooted in religious difference. While the West continues its stampede away from traditional faith, Russia is moving in the opposite direction. Since the fall of Communism in 1989, Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and to a lesser extent other creeds have been making a comeback.
I have long loved the interpretations and depictions of Russian Orthodox Christianity in the works of the great 19th century authors Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. But what about today’s Orthodox spirituality? Who, I wondered, should I be reading to get a sense of what the Russian religious revival feels like from the inside?
I was advised to check out the 2011 bestseller Everyday Saints and Other Stories by Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov), a spiritual advisor to Vladimir Putin.
Now available in an excellent English translation, Everyday Saints chronicles the lives of the memorable figures of the Pskov Caves Monastery in western Russia. The only Russian monastery that was never shut down during the rabidly atheistic Communist era, thanks to its then being just across the border in Estonia, the Pskov Caves monastic complex is built over a network of caves that originally harbored 15th-century hermits, and then became the “God-built” portion of the monastery as the human-built edifice rose above it. Over the years and centuries the caves were used as sepulchers for a growing number of monks, lay-workers, parishioners, and warriors. Oddly, the 14,000 corpses interred in the caves have always been strikingly odor-free—a peculiarity explained by the atheistic Soviet authorities as due to a mysterious microclimate, but viewed by the faithful as miraculous.
Everyday Saints depicts a colorful cast of characters, not all of them invariably saintly in demeanor—as Tikhon says, “there is no cure for personality”— yet united in striving together in the cause of God in the tradition of Orthodox monasticism. The book communicates with remarkable effectiveness the reasons why intelligent modern people can choose the path of traditional religion and follow it to its logical conclusion.
Islamic Iran, the Original Religious Republic
In its return to religion Russia is following a path blazed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, most authorities and experts believed that religion everywhere was a spent force, and that the future would be increasingly secular and atheistic. But the genius of Iranian religious scholars in general, and of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in particular, turned that notion upside down. Forging a bond with the downtrodden patriotic ordinary people of Iran, the religious scholars overthrew America’s puppet Shah and enshrined a new model of governance that blends representative democracy with scholar-administered theocracy.
Roy Mottahedeh’s classic The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran paints a vivid picture of Iranian religious scholars around the time of the 1979 revolution. Just as Everyday Saints takes us inside the Pskov monastery, The Mantle of the Prophet introduces us to the last place on Earth that offers a first-rate genuinely classical education: the seminaries of Qom, Iran.
One emerges from these two books with heightened respect for the religious and civilizational traditions of Russia and Iran—two nations and heritages that have been around a lot longer than we have. The men we meet in these pages have a depth of soul, and (especially in the Iranian case) a breadth of learning, that puts the Western scholarly and political classes to shame. Taken together, the two books raise the inevitable question: Why should these people—the Orthodox thinkers influencing Putin in Russia, and the Islamic scholars of Iran—be our enemies?
As our imperial overlords wage their unholy wars against Orthodox Russia and Islamic Iran in a rabidly messianic quest to make the world safe for juvenile gender reassignment surgery and kiddie drag queen shows, ordinary Americans ought to read Everyday Saints and The Mantle of the Prophet to get a sense of the richness of the civilizations that our government wants to destroy.
By Kevin Barrett