I am going to have more to talk about with anti-trans hate groups organizing across the US and in Seattle specifically, as well as how to respond to them more successfully in the future because trans people are actively under attack from the highest levels of the federal government as Trump and his political allies try to enforce essentialist gender ideology into every state and city they think they can…and the only thing that is going to stop that is loud, constant, in-their-face resistance and refusal to accept all that bullshit.
But building towards some of those posts, and trying to help my myself and my reader connect patriarchal misogyny; transphobic, gender-essentialist ideology; a racist/fascist/colonial understanding of nationalism; crony capitalism; AND theocratic fundamentalism, I think it is really eye opening to look at this BBC article about the Russian Orthodox Church in the United States.
If you don’t want to read the article, the basic summary points that will be relevant to this blog are:
1. The Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia (ROCOR) is the most conservative Orthodox Church in the US, it recruits men almost exclusively by preaching misogynistic ideas about masculinity and trans-misogynistic ideas about gender. However, for all of its social conservatism, it doesn’t follow US. Conservatisms inherent nationalistic zeal for things like the sanctity of the constitution or idolization of the founding fathers, nor for blind faith in capitalism.
2. Its followers idolize Putin and Russia as an ideal nation exactly because of its homophobic, transphobic and misogynistic laws. They see Russia, even soviet Russia, as a still thriving Christian Empire that has lasted for over a thousand years that has always prioritized protecting traditional social values over pursuing endless economic growth, because all individual freedoms must be balanced first by social responsibility.
3. ROCOR is finding great success recruiting cisgendered men into the fold by presenting itself as the “Manliest church,” that promotes an intensely patriarchal family and social structure and includes religious community building activities like “working out with the pastor,” and participating freely in online rhetorical cultural war battles to espouse deeply misogynistic gender-essentialist ideologies.
One of the reasons I find this trend so interesting is because, on the one hand, it is almost like a counter conservatism to the kind of “traditional” republican conservatism I am used to encountering in more than 2 decades of anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist organizing. It doesn’t inherently look at western civilization and neoliberal capitalism as any kind of divine mandate. In fact it is pretty critical of both of these things. However, it is critical from the most terrifying perspective possible, and that is that Western civilization has been corrupted by the greedy pursuit of economic opportunity into the idolatry of individual freedom. Thus while traditional US conservatism will minimally have to pay lip service to upholding constitutionally enshrined freedoms (even if that lip service feels nominal at best), ROCOR conservatism is completely without obligation to do so and is prepared to hit the ground running in the promotion of theocratic fascism. The more Trump flirts with Putin and the idealization of Russian authoritarianism, the more he prepares and even invites his most ardent followers to consider abandoning faiths that might still be tied (even vestigially) to semi-democratic organizational and structural principles in pursuit of a faith willing to place absolute authority into just about any strongman politician that enforces totalitarian, patriarchal family values over any other political ideology. ROCOR is about as “anti-woke” as any religion can possibly be and will be very appealing to a base that has become convinced that “wokeness” is the ultimate political enemy. With no need to even pay honorific acknowledgement to traditional, European enlightenment conceptions of liberty or freedom, a ROCOR-styled theocratic fundamentalism will be able to advocate for an abandonment of any constitutional protections like freedom of speech, freedom from government seizure, protection from cruel and unusual punishments, etc.
I don’t personally think that ROCOR currently has much of a chance of completely sweeping western christian fundamentalism away from the US Republican Party and Trumpism. The churches at the heart of Trump’s brand of Christian nationalism have just spent far too much time and energy into their network building to be completely swept away in any kind of hurry, but Putin is a very savvy political player, who, like Trump, has managed to place himself at the head of a religious fundamentalist movement without personally demonstrating or honoring any of the actual socially conservative values that these movements purport to prioritize, and it must be impossible for Trump and his political allies to see how zealously Russian Orthodox adherents can be to pure bootlicking authoritarianism. Even if it remains a small percentage of the theological demographics supporting Trump, I can see their voice within the movement being given increasing power and privilege the more it is willing to abandon the reliquary accoutrements of “American values,” like democracy, and move Trumpist followers to venerate authority and abandon liberty.
This will still take some work for the right to accomplish, as anti-communism is deeply woven into the fabric of US conservatism and many of the folks that are economically supporting Trump are doing so from a place of purely capitalistic exploitative interest that they will balk very hard at a shift to a state-controlled economy unless they are given extreme cronyistic control over the state institutions that will be running those industries…but we have already started to see this in how Elon Musk is getting pushed out of Trumps inner circle of political advisors (at least superficially) now that his political money is no longer working to provide Trump with political victories that couldn’t already be won. And it is not like Putin has been bad for Russian oligarchs as a whole. Crony Capitalism is certainly not antithetical to Russian Orthodox Christian (ROC) theocracy, as long as the depraved flaunting and exercise vice of that wealth is kept out of the national public spot light. ROC is not inherently anti-capitalist after all, it is just anti promoting capitalism as a value over maintaining tight social control over patriarchal family structures.
Certainly the democratic party’s complete abandonment of anything but the most vestigial socialist economic policies and heavy reliance on promoting itself as a party of liberal social values has paved the way for the US conservative right to give up the need to be so fiercely oppositional to state-control of the economy, but those anti-socialist seeds run very deep in US conservatism, a political movement still dominated by a very old guard of capitalist barons. With the republican voter base gaining ground in young men who are feeling as excluded from avenues of economic prosperity as they are from what they perceive to be their political and social authority as men, it really would not surprise me to see more and more national socialist (read: NAZI) policies creep into the Republican Party platform, as long as those policies can be very exclusionary to anyone but those deemed as righteous and deserving…hence an inherent need for intense xenophobia and anti-immigrant zeal, a very narrow state-defined definition of gender, sexuality and family, and nationalistic purity tests that can be used to surveil and police dissenting thought.
This is why I find an article about a relatively fringe religious movement in the US so fascinating and concerning. Not because I think the inherent religious aspects of the faith have a lot of potential for growth in the US, but because it is such an obvious match for what Trump (and Putin) are trying to accomplish on a global scale, that I think its voice and influence will be something that all those opposed to fascism will have to keep very close eyes on.