Shall the Tyrants Win? Reflections on Alexei Navalny
This week gone by I’ve written two pieces reflecting on the life, death, and faith of Alexei Navalny, the murdered Russian Opposition leader.
The first is called “Shall the Tyrants Win?” published over at Seen and UnSeen.
Death is the tyrant’s ultimate weapon to terrorize, to force people to suffer in silence, to make them accept enslavement and despotism as normal and unchangeable. But the promise of resurrection means that God intends to undo whatever the tyrant does. The worst of evil is no match for resurrection. The goodness of God’s power and the power of God’s goodness always defeats death. God’s promise of resurrection is not pious longing, but a political doctrine, the hope for creation to be renewed, powers to be reconciled, and all things to be put to rights.
Faith in God’s life-giving power is our defiance against evil powers, “against the leaders, against the authorities, against the powers that rule the world in this dark age, against the wicked spiritual elements in the heavenly places”, as St Paul writes. And defiance is contagious.
The second is called “Alexei Navalny was inspired by the Sermon on the Mount” and was published in The Times.
Navalny could not find a place for himself, for his faith, in the Russian Orthodox Church, a once great Church that has turned itself into a fawning chaplain of the Russian state and degraded itself into the spiritual sycophant Putin’s regime. Putin’s façade of Russian Christianity is a twisted parody and pernicious privation of true Christian religion. Such a church that willingly subordinates itself to the regime in the interest of attaining a stake in state power makes for an insidious idolatry. Even worse, the Russian church blesses and baptizes the violence of their self-aggrandizing dictator who transfigures the church into a monument to his own depravity. Nalvany’s faith convictions would not allow him to join with Russian Patriarch Kirill and condone the evils that God condemns, to turn a blind eye to the corruption, brutality, and the horror of a state that claims to be all-powerful.
I was also interviewed by Greg Sheridan in The Australian for his piece on Woke leftists and extremist US evangelicals threaten the West (behind a paywall unless you can find a link to the full article on your iPhone).