Note: This was originally drafted in February, 2024 and not posted. In looking for something else, I can back across it.
It'll be timely for another post I'm working on.
St. King Abgar V, an Arab, and the first Christian King. He died approximatley in 50 A.D. He adopted Christianity at a time it was a minorit religion and not exactly popular. Putin and Trump are not like him.
Do not be led astray:
“Bad company corrupts good morals.”
St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 15.
Back in the AnteCovid days which now seem like a lost world, I'd sometimes run into neo monarchist on Reddit, usually due to participating on the Distributist Sub Reddit. I quit participating there prior to the epidemic, as the discussions were really not worth participating in. Distributism is a modern economic system in its own right, but the sub tended to be populated by people who romanticized the Middle Ages, or who were Socialist trying to view everything as Socialism. An awful lot of the discussion looked like it was being conducted by 15-year-olds hiding in their parent's basements.
Among the real goofball discussions were those by monarchist. I didn't realize up until then that there are people today who long for a return of monarchy, but there are. Their typical logic was that monarchs are needed as they set the moral tone for the nation.
Hah.
Apparently these people know nothing of real monarchs, as plenty failed to live a moral life. There are very notable exceptions, some of which appear here, but they are indeed the exception that proves the rule. There's the entire problem of attacking your neighbor as you want his lands, of course, but beyond that monarchs tended to be pretty icky. It's hard to find an example of kings who didn't have mistresses, or worse. One early English king seems to have had a habit of basically sacking convents and raping nuns, which is really weird. A joke about a later one is that when he went to Monaco on vacation, the children ran out and yelled "papa" as he was just that. A Norman Christian king in Sicily kept Muslim women as concubines, to the extent that he was known as The Christian Sultan. One French king was so randy as a teenage prince that concubines were acquired to satisfy his pre marital urges.
And of course there's King Henry VIII
Even really admired ones often were problematic this way. King Charles the Great was accorded the title "blessed" for valid reasons, but Charles had at least fourteen mistresses during his lifetime and was rebuked by a noted churchman for still having an eye for the ladies well into old age. He died, I'd note, at age 72. King Cnut set his first wife aside to marry another when he became king, which was perhaps justified at the time by the fact that his first wife, a very able administrator, was a pagan and he was a Christian. Harold Godwinson, whom some in the Orthodox faith regard as a saint, put aside his first wife, Edith the Fair, in favor of Edith of Mercia, for political reasons, although legend has it that Edith the Fair was present at Hastings and identified his body. Czar Nicholas II who has been canonized in the Russian Orthodox Church for being a martyr shared, in his early years, the same mistress that his brother had.
On the latter, I'm not meaning to cast stones at these people's virtues. Czar Nicholas, for example, seems to have grown more devout after his marriage. Charles the Great spent his last months fasting and contemplating King Harold Godwinson's first marriage was complicated by the means of its contracting, and his second may have been merely political. I only note all of this as the silly devotion on Reddit to monarchy, with some of the silliness being extended to some academics, is just that, romantic silliness.
And then we have the bizarre ongoing devotion, in some Christian circles, to viewing Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump as saviors of Christian society.
What on earth?
This seems to have all started with the devotion that developed to Viktor Orbán in the same circles. Orbán is the champion of illiberal democracy and is blunt in his concept that Hungary is a Hungarian nationality, Christian, nation. Hungary has not collapsed into an authoritarian state as is sometimes claimed, but it's become one run by a far right nation under a party that espouses Christian Nationalism and Illiberal Democracy. Orbán is a serious Christian, although interestingly he's a Hungarian Calvinist. His wife is Catholic, as are most Hungarians, and their children were raised Catholic.
Orbán is an authoritarian by nature, although democracy is still functioning in Hungary, and he's an admirer of Putin. I think that's where the American Evangelical fascination with Putin came from.
Putin is effectively a murderer, which is widely known. His murders come through the state, of course. Before he rose up in post Communist Russia, he was an employee of the KGB. His marriage to his only wife, Lyudmila Putin, ended in divorce in 2014. His been carrying on an affair with retired Russian gymnast Alina Kabaeva since prior to the divorce date, by all indications, and seems to have borne two children through the union.
Putin is at least nominally Russian Orthodox, but its hard to see it being much more than that. The Russian Orthodox Church as revived as a major Russian institution since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Putin has been careful to seem to be close to Metropolitan Kirill, its head. The Metropolitan has his own checkered history, as he is rumored to have had a relationship with the KGB in the Soviet Union era. Metropolitan Kirill is extremely conservative, which is not inappropriate for the head of an Apostolic Church, and Putin has been on at least some social issues as well. This may simply be Putin's own views, or in part it may be an effort to keep the good graces of the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia has been, for example, very restrictive in regard to homosexuality.
All of this leads some American Christians to believe that Putin is acting as the bulwark against the corruption of the decline of Western values, but if so, he's doing it in a very corrupt way which inclined killing people. And Putin seems to have adopted the monarch's view that he can do no wrong, to include invading the territory of Russia's neighbors, assassinations, and sleeping with a woman who much junior than his former wife.
And for American Evangelicals, it might be noted that the Russian government is actually pretty repressive towards non-Orthodox religions, particularly those that depart significantly from the main line of their branches. This has included Evangelical Protestants and the Jehovah Witnesses. This makes this one of those interesting areas in which some American Evangelicals have adopted as hero a culture which really doesn't have any sympathy for their views.
And then there's Donald Trump.
A large group of American Evangelicals have taken on the view that Donald Trump is their man, with some going much further than that. Ironically, evidence of him every actually practicing his faith, Presbyterianism, is pretty hard to find.
Trump is a serial polygamist, for one thing. In spite of American Protestantism and the American Civil Religion having come to fully accept divorce and remarriage, Christianity doesn't, and people who pretend otherwise are adopting something that's fully contrary to Christian tenants. As the Stormy Daniel affair reveals, Trump isn't beyond some really base sexual conduct. We won't even get into the allegations of other conduct. By Christian beliefs, bare minimum, Trump lives in a state of outward moral sin, which might be reduced by the doctrine of "invincible ignorance".
Trump is also a liar, cast aspersions against other people, and calls them degrading names. Lying, at least in classic Christian theology, can rise to the level of a mortal sin.
For years and years, the dominant Christian faith in the American South as been the Baptist.
Why is that?
The American Civil War had a lot to do with it.
Prior to the Civil War, in much of the South, the dominant church was the Episcopal Church. Its roots reached back to the Colonist and back to England. Most Colonist, as colonization really got rolling, were members of the Anglican Church, although other Protestant denominations were included, most notably the Presbyterian Church, the Church of Scotland, which was the dominant faith for Scots immigrants.
Going into the Civil War, the Episcopal Churchmen of the South largely backed the Confederacy. One Confederate General was an Episcopal Bishop.
The South had always had a fair number of itinerant preachers who were not Episcopal Priest. While the Episcopal Church seemed to be backing the Southern cause during the war, the itinerant preachers were warning of doom and God's judgment. The result of the war seemed to prove them right.
The point is, the Southern cause was corrupt and disgusting from a moral prospective from the onset. Backing corruption, in the end, corrupts.
Bad company corrupts good morals.
This will have a bad end for Evangelicals, and for those of other faiths following the same path. But particularly for Evangelicals. For one thing, they are the only religions denomination that's so heavily invested in Trump. Not other religion, Christian or otherwise, is.
Secondly, the "mainline" Protestant denominations are not only not invested in Trump, they've already sustained their demographic blows by compromising with the leftward drift of culture. That's split them in many instances, and where it has not, people have voted with their feet. The Episcopal Church, for example, once the Church of the economic elite, is in severe trouble.
The Catholic Church, by comparison, has actually remained stable in numbers in the US, but it should be growing. The scandals of the earliest 21st Century served the accidental purpose, however, if making its younger adherants, including clerics, more orthodox and conservative, and more "other". Younger clerics speak as if they're at a last stand, which they really are not, or as if they're the first missionairies into pagan culture. Nobody is looks upon any current political leader as a Catholic standard bearor, most particularly Catholics.
No, it is some of the Evangelical and Culturally Christian Americans who have adopted Trump with zeal, seemingly thinking of him as a sort of Protectant Knights Templar out to do battle.
When he fails, and he will, as this time he will be unrestrained, they will share the failure, and the consequences of it.
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