Trumputin: the Gilead-style "Commander" of a global Christian Empire, who will save us from the Deep State ...

 

 

Why would CHRISTIANS be pro-Putin ... even after he invades Ukraine?

Is it true? Are there really Christians, and members of the far right, and even new age 'conspirituality' folks, who are now pro-Putin?

 

Well ... apparently so.

In this post, I try to explain why.

In short ... it's because this diverse cohort of people do have one thing in common ... they've consumed a heck ton of troll farm disinformation over the past several years ... without realizing Putin was behind much of it.

 

As a Christian, I would like to apologise for all my co-religionists who think that health care, affordable housing and a living wage is "Communism", but that Putin invading Ukraine is totes fine coz Trump likes him.

 

We now have evangelical Christian Nationalists in USA who think the proper way to 'Christian' is to worship Trump, support Putin invading Ukraine, get USA to invade Canada - and even Australia - to "save" the people there from their "Socialist" governments and let the USA devolve into all-out civil war.

 

How do people who profess to hate Communism and think that taxing billlionaires or gun reform or CRT anti-racism theory or even childcare, is "Marxism", end up adulating an actual Communist authoritarian?

 

Putin has been waging a soft invasion via troll farm disinformation campaigns for years now.

Cyber warfare is his preferred tactic. 

 

That's how he sucked so many into believing that Trump was electable, that the US election was "stolen", that Qanon was "military intelligence", that Covid wasn't real and that vaccines & masks are bad etc etc. 

 

All the folks - far too many of whom were evangelical Christians - who've been consuming Russian-deployed disinformation for years now, are all too willing to applaud the bullying, aggression and truth-warps of an authoritarian imperialist like Putin. 

 

ASPI, ASIO and ISD have been warning repeatedly about Russian 5th generation warfare for years, but consumers love the addictive algorithmic delusions churned out by the troll farms more.

It's like they said in The Social Dilemma: disinformation sells. Truth is boring.

 

Putin knows it.

 

How can Christian Nationalists be so sure that Communist authoritarian Russia is the path to a Christian internationalist supremacy: a "supra-national neo-Christendom, bulwark against the "evils" decadent" secularism, China as a rising world dominating power, and Islam?"

- as described in Diana Butler Bass's article, "Next Year in Kyiv".

 

This is a matter of democracy versus authoritarianism.

 

I never thought I would see my fellow Christians come out in strong support of a authoritarian like Putin, willing to tear down moderate democracy with their own hands, convinced that he/Trump are the pathway to the establishment of "God's Kingdom on earth". 

 

These people promise "freedom" from the "tyranny" of the "New World Order" and the "Deep State" .... but what they will deliver will be Gilead.

 

It started with patriarchy.

 

It always, always, always ends with patriarchy.

 

I've been a bit concerned about Russian state-sponsored troll farm disinformation campaigns for a while now. You might have noticed? 

 

I see New Age alternative health types posting such content as well.

 

What do conservative Christians and New Agers have in common?

 

A steady diet of conspirational thinking stoked by Russian troll farm disinformation campaigns over the past few years.

 

Putin's tactics are clear:

 

Stage 1: DISINFORMATION. farm algorithmic disinformation attacks to disorient the population and destabilize democracy

 

Stage 2: CYBER WARFARE. Cyber attacks to take down government and commercial websites & infrastructure

 

Stage 3: INVASION. Military aggression, incursions and invasion

 

Stage 4: OCCUPATION, which in his case means imposing a culture war also. He will destroy democracy by accusing them of being 'Nazis', he will destroy actual Christianity by imposing a politicized "Russian orthodox" version (really just his co-opting of the Russian Orthodox Church.)

USA has been at Stage 1 for a few years now - plus a little of Stage 2.

 

Stage 1 is the most critical and dangerous phase. 

 

Because if you can get 70 million people to consume political and pandemic disinformation from Russian state-sponsored troll farms, then it is very easy to go right ahead with an actual invasion and still get all those people to believe that:

 

"Putin is smart" and

 

"Putin is saving Ukraine from Nazis" and

 

"Putin is only invading to save us all from the evil Deep State New World Order" and

"Putin is going after the bio-labs in Ukraine, he's going to prove that Covid was manufactured there, that's why the West want to stop him" and

 

"Putin is going to find the proof that Ukraine flipped the 2020 U.S. election - that's why they dont want him to invade Ukraine".

etc etc.

 

They've been consuming Russian-deployed troll farm disinformation for a while now.

 

(Note: Marise Payne has previously warned that China has been up to a bit of algorithmic troll farming too)

 

 

Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers says, “I stand with Christians worldwide and not the global bankers who are shoving godlessness and degeneracy in our face” she added that Ukrainian president Zelenskiy, who is Jewish, is “a globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons”.

So, do Christians *really* think that Putin is the good guy, saving us all from the evil Deep State?

Am I making stuff up?

I did actually see a post explaining that Putin is the 'good guy' because he's going after "bio labs" in Ukraine. Posted by someone caught up in "Conspirituality" in the natural health community.

 

There are clear links to Christian nationalism in the USA and elsewhere too. 

 

The anti-Semitism animating Putin's claim to 'de-nazify' Ukraine

"Putin, the leader of Russian Christian nationalism, has come to view himself as the global leader of Christian nationalism, and is increasingly regarded as such by Christian nationalists around the world, including in the United States. Putin has emerged as a leader of this movement in part because of the global reach of recent Russian fascist thinkers such as Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov who laid its groundwork."

 

 

It's hard to tell if this was from a bot, or a bot-bamboozled real person. But this is the sort of content the Christian Right are being exposed to:

 

"VLADIMIR PUTIN IS A GREAT LEADER!

I love Putin and I love the Republican party.

What Putin understands is action, not english grammar.

Putin is the last degree of Great leadership.

The man you don't know his wife and children.

Putin didn't destroy Libya.

Putin didn't destroy Afghanistan.

Putin didn't destroy Iraq.

Putin is not destroying Africa.

Putin is not the one destroying and taking the lands of the Palestinian people.

Putin is not enslaving and killing Black people.

The west can't survive without supplies from Russia.

Putin is the only reason the west don't want to enslave Africa again in the 21st century.

Putin is not the one threatening Iran and putting sanctions on nations globally.

What is happening is because of the weak leadership and bad negotiations from the Biden/Harris administration.

It's about interest, Putin is protecting his interest just like any other nation. If it is another nation everything is alright, but if it's putin he is evil. PUTIN IS A GREAT LEADER!" 

~ Sulley Kone

 

 

So, is the religious right in USA *really* plotting a 'Christian Empire' with Putin??

 

Well, read this:

 

 

How Russia Became the Leader of the Global Christian Right

While the U.S. passed gay-rights laws, Moscow moved hard the other way.

 

"After all, it’s not as if it’s difficult to unearth the fundamentalists fawning over Putin’s putative turn toward God. For instance, according to Bryan Fischer, who until 2015 was a spokesman for the American Family Association, Putin is the “lion of Christianity.” Evangelical Franklin Graham has likewise lauded Putin as someone “protecting traditional Christianity,” while Buchanan only continues praising Putin. Even recent frictions—see: Russia’s recent legislation against non-Orthodox proselytizing—have hardly dampened US fundamentalists’ newfound fervor for Moscow. And if Trump decides to deprioritize rolling back same-sex or abortion rights, the U.S. far right will look to Moscow even further support, ensconcing the Kremlin’s position that much more." 

 

[Franklin Graham is the son of Billy Graham, so USA "Christian Royalty" in the eyes of some]

 

And this:

Putin is after more than land — he wants the religious soul of Ukraine

"Make no mistake, Putin is seeking full capitulation from Ukraine — both physical and spiritual.

 And if Russia occupies the country, religious freedom will be one of the many casualties." 

 

 And this:

Next Year in Kyiv?

When it comes to Russian Orthodoxy, Kyiv is essentially Jerusalem.

"The world is witnessing a new version of an old tale — the quest to recreate an imperial Christian state, a neo-medieval “Holy Roman Empire” — uniting political, economic, and spiritual power into an entity to control the earthly and heavenly destiny of European peoples.

The dream gripping some quarters of the West is for a coalition to unify religious conservatives into a kind of supra-national neo-Christendom.

The theory is to create a partnership between American evangelicals, traditionalist Catholics in western countries, and Orthodox peoples under the auspices of the Russian Orthodox Church in a common front against three enemies — decadent secularism, a rising China, and Islam — for a glorious rebirth of moral purity and Christian culture.

In the United States, Trumpist-religion is most often framed as “Christian nationalism.” It is, indeed, that.

But it is also more — it is the American partner of this larger quest for Christian internationalism."

 

 

Here is a man from Texas actively involved in Putin's disinformation war:

War of Words: Meet the Texan Trolling for Putin

 

"At a NATO summit in Wales in September 2014, U.S. general Philip Breedlove described Russia’s actions as “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare.”

The Russian propaganda campaign employs what political scientists from the nonpartisan RAND Corporation have termed the “firehose of falsehood” model: basically, an overwhelming number of half-truths and outright lies are spewed across a dizzying array of media channels. The goal is to sow confusion and exploit existing rifts inside Western democracies."

 

Do westerners realize that absolute bombardment of disinformation they have been targeted with over the past 4-5 years?

"In the inaugural episode, Bentley explained that he hoped to bring communism 2.0 to Donbass.

But unlike the Soviet Union, he claimed, this new state would be friendly to religion. “We’ve got Lenin and we’ve got God on our side and cannot be defeated,” he said.

... he routinely promotes false stories. For instance, he once created a ten-minute video “investigation” about Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down in July 2014 near the town of Hrabove, in separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. Bentley claimed that the plane was downed by Ukrainian fighter jets “in an act of premeditated mass murder.”

However, a Dutch-led joint investigation team concluded that it was shot down from a territory controlled by pro-Russian fighters by a missile launcher trucked in from Russia.

Bentley’s theory is among at least eight conspiracies disseminated by pro-Russian outlets in an attempt to distract from the untidy truth."

 

The New Right’s Grim, Increasingly Popular Fantasies of an International Nationalism

In the quest to unify American conservatism’s fragmented ranks, a right-wing vanguard is looking to Hungary and Poland for inspiration.

The Revival We Weren’t Expecting

 

WE'RE SO PERSECUTED

Memes like this suppose that it's the Gospel people object to, rather than the travesty of what the church has become.

It's a good example of meme trolling activity, in that the whole point of the meme is to provoke political radicalization and make Christians feel that unless they go along with that radicalization, they're compromising and weak. The meme implies that any opposition to Christian supremacy and nationalism is "persecution".

Such memes are not authentic commentary on Christianity. Consider the pot-stirring origins of such "meme-trolling" and the agenda behind it.

A few thousand memes like this can incrementally change people's world view.

So, can we "evangelize" in a way that won't lay Christianity open to charges of "white supremacy"???

Is there a way a "preach Good News to the poor" that doesn't exploit and oppress the poor and the marginalized even more???

If we still don't know how ... it's time we learned.

It's possible to cling to the Bible and learn to stop being intolerant.

The problem is people interpreting the Bible to justify prejudices that are more cultural than Scriptural.

The idea that if you are truly Scriptural, it follows therefore that you'll inevitably be deemed "intolerant", is a post hoc fallacy.

It is absolutely possible to be a follower of Jesus with a high view of Scripture AND un-learn a lot of quite hateful and unjust prejudices we've normalized along the way.

The idea that you can only be a good "sold out, on fire, anointed” Christian if you are dogmatic, harsh, judgemental, intolerant, prejudiced and bigoted, is faulty reasoning.

There's also an issue there, that supposes that if we *ever* deconstruct *anything* that has been incorporated into our cultural expression of Christianity, that would be bad - that would mean we are becoming "woke" or "compromising with the world".

This line of thinking is problematic, because it hinders growth and maturity.

For example, it stops us learning

- that male headship doctrine is sexist

- that purity culture contributes to widespread sexual exploitation and abuse in the church

- that prosperity doctrine feeds into exploitative unfettered capitalism that hurts the environment and oppresses the poor

- that gun culture and militarism is not fitting for the people of peace

- that white savourism and feel-good missions trips may be narcissistic, unhelpful and counter-productive for developing nations

- that people of colour can be harmed and disadvantaged by institutional and structural racism, even when individuals who benefit from that social infrastructure may not hold racist views personally.

This type of growth is vital for the spiritual health of individual Christians, the church as a corporate body, and for the credibility of the Gospel.

Lately, we see the church increasingly judging the 'world' - wider secular society - to distract and deflect away from the really hard work of addressing our errors, learning from our mistakes and letting go of some of our pet doctrines and customs - especially the ones that afford us a sense of cultural superiority or political supremacy.

Instead of learning to love a broken world the way Jesus did - as a servant, with sacrificial love. As it says in Acts 10:38 - Jesus of Nazareth was anointed of God and went about doing good and healing all who were afflicted by the devil/evil.

The more we cast ourselves in the role of the 'persecuted, righteous victims', presuming we have God on OUR side, the more we become blinded to our real mission ... to go where GOD goes, to the poor, the hurting, the marginalized, the oppressed, the exploited - and help them, tell them about Jesus, pray with them and SHOW them Jesus through our acts of service: really living with them, listening to them, standing in solidarity with them.

 

SJWs

When social justice started to become denigrated among American preachers and pundits, and being a "SJW" (social justice warrior) became a slur, and sermons starting being preached about how empathy is a “sin”, I noticed that a sickness crept into American evangelicalism.

If we care about the Gospel, and truly want to be sold out for Jesus - instead of being mad at secular society for daring to call us intolerant, or bigots - we have a lot of work to do.

We need to put our own house in order and stop playing victim. 

We need to be willing to go through the painful process of growth instead of clinging to our pet doctrines and customs - if we're going to be fit to go where Jesus is going, and truly preach the Gospel in truth and power.

And that is a lot harder to read (and live out) than a confirmation-bias meme.

Refraining from white supremacy, Christian Nationalism and "culture wars" is no hindrance to the Gospel. Rather, politicized power Christianity and Christian supremacy are the anti-thesis of the Gospel - these errors drag the Gospel into disrepute and put people off. They are a distraction from the real work of reaching out to people and ministering in the power and love of Christ in a hurting world. These deceptions are giving Christians a false identity and a fake mission that is a counterfeit for the Great Commission: taking up our cross, laying down our lives, and following Jesus.

The real Gospel, and the real Great Commission, cannot be hindered by true Christians understanding that white supremacy is sin and that imperialism & colonialism are/were abuses.

This could only be the case if Christians were deceived into thinking that supremacy, individualism, exceptionalism and prejudice are the Christian way, and that Christians are entitled to political and cultural supremacy, and that this is what “spiritual victory” would look like.

I have no problem with apologizing for white supremacy. 

Doing so is the Gospel, it is literally 'proclaiming Good News to the poor.'

 

WE ARE NOT THE VICTIMS HERE

It seems to me it's Christians who are becoming more radicalised by algorithmic disinformation and thus more intolerant of anyone who doesn't subscribe to their preferred "values" and cultural norms; and Christians who are becoming more and more judgemental of a hurting and stressed communities around them; and Christians who are increasingly ‘cancelling’ other people’s culture by labelling it as “liberal” or “woke” or “Marxist” or any other synonym for just plain “bad”.

After working as a missionary for a couple of decades in China, and as a church leader since, I have to say, we're not the victims here.

Politically and socially, we have no hindrance, no opposition and no excuse not to preach good news to the poor and pour out our lives for "the least of these, my little brothers & sisters."

THE REVIVAL WE'VE BEEN PRAYING FOR

The biggest issue I see is Christians conflating having to lay down our privilege and presumed supremacy with "persecution" - and being unwilling to abandon our comforts and privilege to serve the poor ... or even just share more fairly.

Christians having to lay down their accustomed prejudices and learn not to be bigoted will only advance the Gospel, not obstruct it.

Isn’t it time that we stopped being so offensive, and abandoned the nonsense of Americanized white evangelicalism? 

It's easy work to repent of white supremacy and other errors and prejudices, and get on with living for Jesus and fulfilling the great Commission. 

All we have to do is admit we were wrong, we got off course, and return the Lord. 

It's actually the revival we've been praying for. 

We just don't like it because in our pride, we don't want to admit we got it wrong. 

We created a self-serving Gospel instead of a self-sacrificing Gospel, we got deluded by right-wing media and troll farm disinformation, we tolerated Qanon synchretism, we normalised superstition and conspirational thinking as a counterfeit for authentic faith, and we created God in our own image.

Troll farm algorithmic disinformation - especially since Trump, Qanon and the pandemic - has exacerbated and leveraged weaknesses of pride and supremacy that were already fault lines in the evangelical church.

We are off track - as much as Islam was dragged off-track by right-wing fundamentalism and extremism.

RETURN TO THE LORD

I have no fear whatsoever that the secular world or those of other faiths will judge me or persecute me.

My whole life of serving Jesus as a missionary and minister of the Gospel since I left school, the worst opposition, judgement and persecution has come from Christians, and I have to say it ... especially American Christians who seemed to be most influenced by ideology and spiritual pride.

But we have Jesus, and it's time to return to the Lord, lose our religion and seek Jesus afresh.

This has been so, so painful, it's been agonizing ... but I believe that if we can truly learn from history that the seeds of revival are REPENTANCE ... I think we will indeed see the revival we have hoped for, and like all revivals, it will be completely different to everything we expected; and it will challenge our religion.

People are leaving the institutional church in droves not because they are abandoning Jesus … but because they are SEEKING JESUS.

They are leaving the church, drunk in its own power and influence .... because He is not there.

They are going to find Jesus, the Jesus they have loved with their whole heart since Sunday School, in the same places He's always been.

On the streets. A lonely hillside. In the crowds. An upper room. A marketplace. With the sick, the poor, the helpless and the rejected. With the sinners, the outcasts, the losers, the addicted.

My heart is grieved, because I love Jesus with all my being, and I am devastated at what evangelicalism has become.

But as for me, I will follow Him anywhere.

Bring it on, I say.

Even so, come Lord Jesus.