Each Friday edition of The Wall Street Journal features an opinion page column titled “Houses of Worship” that discusses aspects of religion. The authors have been priests, pastors, rabbis, leaders of many faiths, academic theologians, and other commentators. The most recent was an essay be one George Weigel, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center based in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Weigel’s essay “Putin’s War and Kirill’s Blasphemy” in which he severally criticizes Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who seeks to justify Putin’s War on Ukraine in religious terms. It seems Kirill has published his own manifesto as an official patriarchate document. He postulates that Putin is waging a “salvific action” and duty to God and a Russian service to a corrupt world. Kirill further promises that Russian soldiers who die will have their sins forgiven and immediately enter heaven. (Doesn’t say anything about them being greeted by 72 virgins.)
Ayn Rand had a prescient idea that describes Putin and Patriarch Kiril’s relationship, summarized as “Attila and the Witch Doctor” published in her 1961 collection of essays For the New Intellectual.
Rand bases her idea using the example of Attila, the Fifth Century king of the Huns, for a political leader— monarch, dictator, or other ruffian— in history who uses physical force to accomplish goals. The “Witch Doctor” is an intellectual or religious leader who would use the written or spoken word to persuade people to follow and support Attila under threat of loss of their social or cultural identity or dire future circumstances such as eternal damnation in hell. Disobey Attila, and he burns you at the stake; his witch doctor consigns you to hell.
The most obvious example in today’s world, leaving Putin and Kirill’s outrageous conduct aside, have been the Islamic jihadists. Twenty-five years ago this September our country tasted Islamist jihad. The Iranian ayatollahs and IRG leaders appear to have taken this paradigm to a new level— wholesale murder of their own people who disagree with them.
It is an unfortunate fact of history, that some Christian leaders, especially in the Medieval period but even later, have followed the same paradigm. The Crusades of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries — using the slogan Deus Vult (God wills it) as a sanction by several Popes — for example.
The superstitions that gave rise to the witch doctors have mostly been debunked in today’s Western world, so here wannabe dictators and other strongmen have to find allies elsewhere. This raises the question: Is Russia part of the West? Is Ukraine? Ever since Peter the Great in the Seventeenth Century, Russians have sporadically reached out but have not truly embraced Western culture. Political scientist Samuel Huntington in his Clash of Civilizations (1996) postulates that the Orthodox world, of which Russia is the principal state, is not of the West. Ukraine is part of the West as well as of the Orthodox, and sits astride one of Huntington’s “fault lines” that produce conflict.
Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill remain in the tradition of Attila and the Witch Doctor in gaining and retaining power. The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard leader (who ever he is) and his ayatollah similarly are in that vogue. In each case they pervert governance and faiths to the detriment of their people.
