On the "Christian Nationalist" World Order Change

“The entire place was in shock. … There were many people in Munich saying, are the Americans now switching sides?” (Michael McFaul, former US Ambassador to Russia, on the reception of US Vice President JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Forum)

The most significant and unexpected development in the negotiations between Washington and Moscow was the revelation by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the primary objective of the US-Russian dialogue is to establish geopolitical collaboration and "historically unique" economic cooperation between the two nations. This disclosure indicates that the US administration is of the opinion that its novel grand strategy of cooperation with a belligerent aggressor, which has been causing widespread devastation for three years, can be successful. This assertion is further substantiated by the recent behaviour of the current occupant of the White House towards the Ukrainian President, which could be interpreted as a shift in the United States' traditional political allegiances from its traditional allies in favour of Russia.While this approach may appear to contradict the United States' vocal advocacy for moral values, it is also, in a more objective sense, a potentially catastrophic miscalculation.

It is evident that Russia's reintegration into the international community without acknowledgement of its transgressions will inevitably result in adverse consequences for the global order. You don't need to be a 'nuclear scientist' to understand this: it follows from the basic tenets of the science of international relations, backed up by dozens of historical analogies. The trampling underfoot of the principle of state sovereignty sets a precedent for other aggressors and encourages Moscow to continue. The post-war international order is based on the principle and practice of state sovereignty and multilateral diplomacy. And the defence of this should override any other - mistakenly hoped-for geopolitical advantage, such as Russia's separation from China. Not to mention that any plan based on winning Moscow over in the long term is evidence of a fundamental lack of knowledge of Russian grand strategy and mentality, and a fatal misunderstanding that is a recipe for strategic disaster. “The reason America has chosen it,” - - says Nigel Gould-Davis, Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia at International Institute for Strategic Studies - “is profoundly mysterious.”

What could be the key to this mystery?

The way to the answer is shown by a speech by JD Vance, US Vice President at the Munich Security Forum:

“[W]hile the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine – and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense – the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor… What I worry about is the threat from within… The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: Values shared with the United States of America.”

This speech was followed by the shock in the audience mentioned at the beginning of this article: "Have the Americans changed sides and sided with autocrats against democracies?"

What, in fact, was the Vice-President referring to when he denounced Europe's drift away from "fundamental values" as a greater threat to the continent than any external threat? What could be the problem of values that transcends geopolitical fault lines and pits the US, which is about to enter into geopolitical cooperation with Russia, against Europe?

The Russian government press and experts are not slow to answer this question. The author of the Russian daily Argumenti i Fakti in Moscow is quite clear:

"What is it that attracts Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin and Russia? Putin and Trump are close in terms of ideology and values. Russia continues on the path of defending conservative values. This has brought us many allies in the West, including America, where Trump began his presidency by cancelling the liberal agenda. In other words, on the issue of values, America's president is very different from the Western elite, and Putin is a natural ally".

Ruslan Ostasko, a senior contributor to the Russian propaganda channel Radio Sputnik, said the same thing:

"Thanks to Grandpa Biden and Barack Obama, the Democrats got us used to seeing the United States as the enemy. In fact, we saw them as a competing ideology, because they preached degeneracy, decadence and depravity, and infinite tolerance for everything that common sense forbids. It was a very clear enemy image for us. And now Trump is coming and he will destroy everything".

The Russian propagandists point to a crucial dimension of the West-Russian confrontation, and that is the civilisational depth of the difference between these two political cultures. While the autocracy-democracy dichotomy is an inherent part of this, there is an aspect of it that makes it easier to understand why the current US political leadership has taken this side. Put simply, it is the opposition between secular-egalitarian and religious-identitarian conceptions of political order. This opposition has served as the ideological basis of Russia's hostility towards the West, according to Ostasko, who wryly laments that this is now over, because with Trump's victory in the US, the religious-identitarian conception has also triumphed.

Alexander Dugin, a leading figure in the Russian imperial ideology based on religious-identitarianism, celebratedTrump's victory in precisely this spirit:

"Traditional values have once again triumphed over non-traditional and anti-traditional values in another country (and what a country it is!). This is the new dividing line. Quite rightly, Russia had already stated its position on the issue long before. At the time it seemed to go against the liberal mainstream. This was not an opportunistic move, but an honest and considered approach. In that sense, Trump and Vance's victory is our victory. It is only temporary for now, but it could prove decisive."

It is important to see that Viktor Orbán spoke of the same when he said that Hungary was "a kind of island of otherness" "in the liberal ocean, but now the arrival of President Donald Trump has brought a completely new reality." According to the influential Russian ideologue, this ideological - or political philosophical - dividing line is thus increasingly becoming the new ordering principle in world politics, leading to a different alliance affinity than before.

The situation is clear: Putin made a good bet when, years ago, he launched an influence operation aimed at winning the support of Western conservative movements for Russian strategic goals by repositioning Russia as a bastion of 'conservative Christian values'. This was also alluded to by the author of the Russian newspaper quoted above. This has brought us many allies in the West."

The fact that these counterfeits of real "conservative values" are worthy of a rubbish dump (or rather a hazardous waste bin) should of course be obvious from the fact that they go hand in hand with the liquidation of dissent and of course with a brutal military aggression against a neighbouring country. It is a pity that Western defenders of 'conservative-Christian' values are more concerned with rummaging through other people's bedroom secrets than with their 'conservative' ideologue chopping up the occupants of the house with a chainsaw. There is nothing surprising about the latter, of course: the Russian 'conservative-Christian' movement is an ideology and tool of traditional Russian imperial expansionism, which has always gone hand in hand with brutal violence.

Russia, the "restraining force"

The Hungarian prime minister, who has had a much greater influence on the ideological line of current US policy than many thought for some time, has provided a number of keys in recent years to ensure that the developments now taking place are not unexpected. It is not his fault that these have been barely noticed by analysts, prisoners of their own secular paradigm of thought. Let us recall that Viktor Orban, a few days after returning from his meeting with Vladimir Putin in February 2022, shortly before the outbreak of war, said:

"Christian Europe is in deep trouble because of its own internal weaknesses and the force of external adversity. It seems, or so I myself see, that Latin Christianity in Europe can no longer stand on its own feet. Without Orthodoxy, without the alliance with Eastern Christians, we can hardly survive the next decades."

So the Hungarian prime minister was arguing for an alliance with "Orthodoxy" at a time when he had already "seen" Putin's "determination ", or in his own words, "that there was trouble", and when the attack on Ukraine, which had been warned by US intelligence agencies for months, was just two weeks away. Given the dominant role of the Russian Orthodox Church within Orthodoxy and its symbiotic relationship with the Russian state, the need for an alliance with Orthodoxy in this situation was an obvious reference to the need for an ideological (religious-identitarian) alliance with Russia.

"The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, once a KGB agent of influence, justified the war in the very same culture-war ideology that the Hungarian prime minister invoked to portray Orthodoxy as the saviour of Europe."

The Hungarian prime minister has of course a political responsibility to answer for: either out of unpreparedness or moral relativism, he has regrettably overlooked the specific features of Russian Orthodox political ideology that led to the attack on Ukraine (The role played in this process by Russian influence operations on Hungarian and Western political and ecclesiastical leaders has been discussed here, here, here and here, so I will not go into this topic separately.)

The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, who was once an agent of influence for the Soviet KGB, justified the war in the spirit of the very same culture-warrior ideology on which the Hungarian Prime Minister invoked to portray Orthodoxy as the saviour of Europe. As the head of the Orthodox Church put it after the outbreak of the war: "The future of the world depends, in the full sense of the word, on the future of our country, our people, our Church, because our country today defends the values that prevent apostasy, that is, the movement towards the end of time under the rule of the Antichrist." Astonishingly, even this fact has not prevented the Hungarian prime minister from continuing to see the Orthodox as the saviours of "Christian" Europe. Indeed, a year after the outbreak of the war, and against the backdrop of a series of similar statements by Kirill, he still declared that "if Europe is to survive, it must return to the faith that created the sacred order on which its civilisation was built", adding the basis on which he imagined this "faith" renewal: "Most hope today lies in the Orthodox. They do not argue, they believe.” (Even then, he failed to mention that these particular 'Orthodox' not only believe, but also shoot, while a prominent Orthodox theologian - deprived of his Russian Orthodox priesthood - Kirilo Hovorun, has called the religiosity embodied by the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church a downright “fascist drift".)

Of course, these statements are difficult to interpret in a vacuum, and are typically ignored. However, it is important to know that the context for these statements by the Hungarian Prime Minister is provided by an international ideological alliance and organisation that spans European, American and Russian borders. Analysts usually smile at the prime minister's religious pronouncements, even though this is the thread along which important elements of his grand strategy can be deconstructed.

The Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin, mentioned above, shared the following quote on his X-account a few days after the outbreak of the war:

“Perhaps Providence has ordained that Moscow, the Third Rome, will today in the sight of the world take on the role of κατέχον (2 Thess 2:6-7), of eschatological obstacle to the Antichrist.”

Unfortunately, there are not many (security) policy analysts whose eyes do not glaze over such a statement, laced with a biblical Greek phrase. Which is a problem because the phrase provides a key interpretive reference point for our subject, which if not understood or taken seriously, misses the dynamics of the whole phenomenon. The identification of Russia as the "restraining force" that prevents the coming of the "antichrist" in fact goes back a long way in defining Russian imperial ideology and with it the nature of the Russian-Western opposition (although the use of the term katechon in this context is relatively new).

"And it is precisely this secular common enemy that no longer pits Russia against the traditionalist and identitarian political tendencies of Western Christianity - whether Protestant or Catholic - but links it to them."

The point of it is to sacralise this opposition, to promote it on a religious level, by presenting Russia as a bulwark against the West as an anti-Christian force threatening traditional Christian values. The West, from the point of view of Russian Orthodoxy, used to be seen as an enemy of Christianity because it differed from Orthodoxy ( in the form of Roman Catholicism and Protestant Christianity). Today, however, it is not primarily this but its secular character that makes it the 'anti-Christ'. And it is precisely this secular common enemy that now makes Russia no longer oppose but associate itself with the traditionalist and identitarian political tendencies of Western Christianity, whether Protestant or Catholic. The above-quoted post by Dugin, a leading figure in this Russian ideology, is a striking sign of this: the author of the lines he quotes is not a Russian Orthodox, but Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former Vatican nuncio ('ambassador') to the United States. As a Roman Catholic, he thus described Russia's war as a supernatural, sacral mission to defend traditional Christian values in the world as a ''catechon'' (restraining force) against the secular, decadent West.

Archbishop Viganò did not stop at the above theological position, but called for close geopolitical cooperation with Russia on the part of the West: “The United States of America and the European States must not marginalize Russia but build an alliance with it, not only to restart trade for the prosperity of all, but in lieu of the reconstruction of a Christian Civilization.” We remember that Viktor Orbán said exactly the same thing both immediately before and after the outbreak of the war, don't we? It is no coincidence: Viganò is an influential figure in the international anti-globalist Christian fundamentalist political movement that underpins the strategy of the Hungarian Prime Minister - and now of the US political leadership.

The latter explains why Donald Trump boasted about the letter of support he received from the Archbishop ahead of the 2024 US elections. It is a letter which describes the struggle between Trump and his political opponents, against whom he wants to impose the 'kingdom of Christ' (i.e. the political and legal imposition of religious principles), as a struggle against evil and satanic forces. Here is an extract from the letter:

“Behind these people – by now we should know this – are people devoted to evil, united by the satanic hatred against Our Lord Jesus Christ and those who believe in Him, mainly against the Catholic faithful. We want Christ to reign, and we proclaim it with pride: Christ is King! They want the Antichrist to reign, whose tyranny is made of chaos, war, disease, famine, and death.”

Image: Trump on Viganò's letter. “So honoured by Archbishop Viganò’s incredible letter to me. I hope everyone, religious or not, reads it!”

It is typical that Tucker Carlson, an influential figure in the "Trumpist" American elite - whose shows are a prime vehiclefor the Hungarian government's international prestige-building and whose father is the official lobbyist for the Hungarian government in the US - shared Viganò's open letter with the comment that it is “a remarkably insightful description of what’s at stake in this election.” The same circle includes, for example, the Polish ultra-conservative Catholic organisation Ordo Iuris, which is closely linked to the Hungarian ruling party and its backers, and which is reportedly giving a presentation on 11 March at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington (the organisation behind the Trumpist Christian nationalist government programme), in collaboration with the Hungarian pro-government MCC, on the need to rebuild the European Union, which would effectively lead to the demise of the EU in its current form. The event is part of a long-standing collaboration between this Polish and Hungarian organisation and the Trumpist establishment to organise and implement the Christian nationalist 'world order' change analysed here. It was on the basis of the Ordo Iuris 'report' that the Hungarian government granted asylum to Marcin Romanowski, a former Polish deputy justice minister, who is wanted by the Polish judiciary for corruption and abuse of office, among other things. The Ordo Iuris's links with the Russian "Christian conservative" influence peddling operation also discussed in this article can be found, for example, here.

The invitation to the 2019 event "Russia in the Global Culture Wars", held by the Jesuit-affiliated Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, provides a critical summary of the phenomenon as follows:

“For the last 30 years, the American Christian Right has been exporting the model of the American culture wars to other parts of the world, but only fairly recently has it found a new powerful ally in this cause: Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian Orthodox Church’s contacts with Christian Right groups in Europe and in the United States have helped to strengthen ties between the Kremlin and European far-right parties. This has allowed Russia to define its anti-liberal profile in a Christian conservative key that differs from the traditional Orthodox Christian anti-westernism. For Russia the globalized Christian Right is a useful ally.”

Against the background of these lines, it is even clearer that it is not by chance that Viganò identifies Russia at war with the West with the force that restrains the "antichrist", since for him too the antichrist is the secular state - that is, a state not based on religious foundations - which is the concept that underlies Western democracies.

A "new apostolic revolution" in the United States

The transcendentalist struggle against the secular West is thus also a key element of the interdenominational religious movement that brought Trump to power. The New Apostolic Revolution (NAR), one of the most influential of these organisations, is a striking example of this trend:

“If you were curious why Tucker Carlson, who was raised Episcopalian, recently spoke of being mauled in his sleep by a demon, it may be because he is absorbing the language and beliefs of this movement. If you were questioning why Elon Musk would bother speaking at an NAR church called Life Center in Harrisburg, it is because Musk surely knows that a movement that wants less government and more God works well with his libertarian vision. If you wanted to know why there were news stories about House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Southern Baptist, displaying a white flag with a green pine tree and the words AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN outside his office, or the same flag being flown outside the vacation home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a Catholic, the reason is that the Revolutionary War–era banner has become the battle flag for a movement with ideological allies across the Christian right. The NAR is supplying the ground troops to dismantle the secular state,”

says The Atlantic on the subject. Paula White, President Trump's "chaplain" and a recently appointed senior staffer in the White House Office of Faith, who was mentioned in a previous post, and who says that "To say no to President Trump would be to say no to God,” is also a member of this movement.

As the aforementioned Atlantic article points out, the ideas of the movement, which has tens of millions of members, or about forty percent of American Christians, “have seeped into Trumpworld, influencing the agenda known as Project 2025, as well as proposals set forth by the America First Policy Institute. A new book called , co-authored by the far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and endorsed by J. D. Vance, describes political opponents as “unhumans” who want to “undo civilization itself” and who currently “run operations in media, government, education, economy, family, religion, and arts and entertainment”—the seven mountains. The book argues that these “unhumans” must be “crushed.”

Also quoted is Matthew Taylor, a researcher of the movement - Taylor has written an important book on the subject - who says that “the movement merging seamlessly into ‘the MAGA blob,’ with the prophets and apostles casting whatever Trump does as part of God’s plan, and rebuking any dissent. ‘It’s the synchronization with Trump that is most alarming… The agenda now is Trump. And that’s how populist authoritarianism works. It starts out as a coalition, as a shotgun marriage, and eventually the populism and authoritarianism takes over.” He also points out that

“the movement has never been about policies or changes to the law; it’s always been about the larger goal of dismantling the institutions of secular government to clear the way for the [God’s] Kingdom. It is about God’s total victory.”

Image: From freedom fighter to crusader.

It is partly the symbiosis of this trend with the Trumpist "MAGA bloc" that explains the scandalous move by which Donald Trump, as one of his first measures after taking office, terminated the criminal proceedings against all the perpetrators of the deadly siege of the Capitol on 6 January 2020, released those already sentenced to prison, and, astonishingly, ordered the accountability of the FBI and other agents involved in the proceedings. Indeed, the said religious movement took part in the siege in large numbers, with the aforementioned "APPEAL TO HEAVEN" banner, after one of their leaders had previously dreamed of storming the Capitol on horseback to "stand up for the Kingdom [i.e. the Kingdom of God]."

Against this background, it is perhaps easier to understand why the Hungarian Prime Minister called for the restoration of a "holy order" in Europe, in a speech in which he held up the "Orthodox" as an example to the West: "if Europe is to survive, it must return to the faith that created the holy order on which its civilisation was built. In my analysis, this social structure, which has been built up over the last thirty years, is completely at odds with human nature. It will collapse."

At first reading, what has been described so far may sound like a bold statement, despite the fact that it is unfolding before our eyes. In a broader context, it is worth noting that the growing importance of religion in international politics and security policy was a surprising development at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. According to the prevailing theory of secularisation, religion should have gradually lost importance as modernity progressed. Today, this theory, which still dominates the thinking of many, has finally been disqualified and there is a succession of publications and studies on this phenomenon. A new global trend is emerging on the horizon.

Sacred Violence

The obvious historical lesson is that the sacralisation of politics and the politicisation of the sacral leads to intolerance based on ideology. In our case, an ideological - and geopolitical - alliance with Russia based on the idea of 'holy order' or 'the kingdom of God' is clearly the death of the political culture of secular Western democracies, with which it is completely irreconcilable. One could say that there can be peace between these two ideologies in the same way as there can be peace between Russia and Ukraine: if one side surrenders, it will come to terms with the other. In the light of the above, there can be no doubt as to which side is in a position to win on this score as well. The parallel is not coincidental, since, as we have seen earlier, the root of the opposition to the West in the eyes of Russian Orthodox is religious and civilisational. As Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, put it, before the war:

“We cannot say that we live in a completely peaceful environment. Today there are battles without roar of guns, and the enemy who threatens us does not visibly cross our borders. However, we are all involved into what the Orthodox tradition calls ‘the invisible battle’. Everyone today is involved in this battle. We are offered a chaos, but we should not be bought by these recommendations and should not participate in the creation of chaos … We are offered sin, a destruction of the moral foundations.”

The above sentences, by the way, are quoted by Rob Dreher, an important figure in the intellectual holdings of the Hungarian government - living in Hungary as an American citizen -, a "bridge-builder" between domestic and international - American and Russian - Christian political circles, and, not incidentally for our subject, a person of Orthodox faith himself. Also before the war, Dreher wrote an essay entitled'America's culture war against Russia: Western individualism is deeply incompatible with Orthodox Christian tradition'. The paper refers to an essay by Mark Movsesian, who, in discussing the differences between the West and the Orthodox East on the issue of human rights, stresses that the Russian Orthodox Church is inherently distrustful of Western-style individualism, not only in its excesses but also of “the very idea of the autonomous individual as a rights-holder.”

Dreher adds that “when Orthodox countries reject liberal Western ideas (e.g., gay rights, religious liberty), they are not necessarily doing so out of bigotry, but because they have a fundamentally different view on what the human person is, what the church is, and what society is. They see the West’s war on their traditions in the name of secular liberalism as an act of aggression — and they’re right.” The problem with this claim, of course, is first and foremost that the war is not being waged by the West, but by Russia. Or rather, it is Russia that is waging war, and as we have seen above, it is doing so in the name of the very ideology mentioned here. The West is calling for Russia to respect freedoms (gay rights, religious freedom), but it has neither the will nor the means to enforce this on Moscow by force. On the other hand, even if we call the restriction of the rights of people of other religions or sexual or political orientations, the imprisonment or even liquidation of such people, merely a 'different understanding' of the human person, church and society, it is still bigotry. Unless, like this, we intend simply to call it ''different understanding'' of the human person and religion when the Islamic State cuts the arms or slits the throats of those who violate the laws of Islam that they profess.

Image: The Supreme Jailer

But whatever you call it, irreconcilable ideological intolerance is unfortunately a necessary, integral part of any political ideology and its underlying establishment that sees itself as the depositary and enforcer of some transcendent, objective moral order. For this ideology sees dissent as a transcendent, objective extreme, just as it sees itself: only on the negative side, on the side of Evil. This inquisitorial fervour is on display, for example, when Russell Vought, the otherwise modest-looking, lean, grey-bearded, bespectacled Russell Vought, who is one of the key figures in the Trump administration and one of the main people responsible for Project 2025, the ongoing Christian ideology-based transformation of the administration, has stated how he will make tens of thousands of staff changes: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected… When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” It is telling that, as a leading figure in the Christian nationalist "revolution", Vought is also one of the main promoters of an initiative that would provide a legal basis for the army to be used for domestic law and order activities, and more specifically against dissent movements of a political nature.

Image: Russell Vought, co-author of Project 2025.

And with the "Christian world order change", it is not the Russian model that is moving closer to the Western one, but the Western one to the Russian one.

For those familiar with the Russian model, of course, none of this is surprising: in Russia, where the defence of Orthodoxy - also known as "traditional Christian values" - is part of the country's national security strategy, it is common practice to harass, exclude, imprison or unexpectedly "fall out" of the tenth floor of a building for people with a different worldview, creed or political viewpoint. And with the "Christian world order change", as we have seen from the Russian speakers quoted in the first half of this article (Ostashko, Dugin), it is not the Russian model that is moving closer to the Western model, but the Western model to the Russian model.

I do not claim that all the political leaders mentioned here are aware of the danger of this convergence. But the process has a number of iron laws, borne out by historical analogy, which it is a fatal mistake to ignore. As Taylor puts it above, “that’s how populist authoritarianism works. It starts out as a coalition, as a shotgun marriage, and eventually the populism and authoritarianism takes over." Populist politics, based on irrationality increasingly unleashed - and fuelled by various social crises - can escalate to extremes. Russia, which is waging a bloody 'holy war' against both internal and external enemies, should serve as a warning, not a model to follow.