When Vladimir Putin rose to the presidency of Russia
in 2000, he inherited the remains of a once-fearsome communist-atheist imperial
state.
In the intervening 19 years, he has transformed Russia
back into an imperial power with global ambitions. One of his key tools in that
transformation has been the Russian Orthodox Church.
Putin often invokes the Russian Orthodox Church in his
public speeches, giving the church a much more prominent place in Russian
political life than under his predecessors. But these invocations hardly seem sincere
in the religious sense. Rather, he has used the church to justify Russian
expansion and to try to discredit the West’s influence in Eastern …read more
Source: The Daily Signal
