Casey Michel is a writer living in New York, and can be followed on Twitter at @cjcmichel. This article is adapted from a forthcoming report, entitled “The Rise of the ‘Traditionalist International’: How Moscow cultivates American white nationalists, domestic secessionists, and the Religious Right,” from People For the American Way.



In early April 2014, as the post-Cold War order roiled in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula—the first forced annexation in Europe since the Second World War—Pat Buchanan asked a question. Taking to the column-inches at Townhall, Buchanan wondered aloud: “Whose side is God on now?”

As Moscow swamped Ukraine’s peninsula, holding a ballot-by-bayonet referendum while local Crimean Tatars began disappearing, Buchanan clarified his query. The former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and intellectual flag-bearer of paleoconservatism—that authoritarian strain of thought linking both white nationalists and US President Donald Trump—wrote that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today[.]” Despite Putin’s rank kleptocracy, and the threat Moscow suddenly posed to stability throughout Europe, Buchanan blushed with praise for Putin’s policies, writing, “In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity.”


Three years on, it’s easy to skip past Buchanan’s piece in discussing Russian-American relations, drenched as they are in mutual sanctions and the reality that Moscow attempted to tip the scales in Trump’s favor during the election. But Buchanan’s article crystallized a paradigm shift in religious relations between Moscow and Washington, and in Moscow’s role within the global Christian right. Before 2014 Russia was largely seen as an importer for Christian fundamentalists, most especially from the U.S. But as the Kremlin dissolved diplomatic norms in 2014, Moscow began forging a new role for itself at the helm of the global Christian right.

And Moscow’s grip at the tiller of a globally resurgent right has only tightened since. Not only have Russian banks funded groups like France’s National Front, but Moscow has hosted international conferences on everything from neo-Nazi networking to domestic secessionists attempting to rupture the U.S. Meanwhile, American fundamentalists bent on unwinding minority protections in the U.S. have increasingly leaned on Russia for support—and for a model they’d bring to bear back home, from targeting LGBT communities to undoing abortion rights throughout the country.

“In the same sense that Russia’s [anti-LGBT] laws came about in 2013, we’ve seen similar sorts of laws proposed in Tennessee, for example,” Cole Parke, an LGBT researcher with Political Research Associates, told me. “It’s difficult to say in a chicken-and-egg sort of way who’s inspiring whom, but there’s definitely a correlation between the two movements.”

***

It’s no coincidence that Buchanan’s column, which outlined the players within the “cultural, social, moral war” between Russia and the “hedonistic” West, mentioned a semi-obscure group called the World Congress of Families. As Buchanan wrote, the WCF listed Russia’s emergence as a “Pro-Family Leader” as one of the “10 best trends” of 2013. Indeed, in order to outline how Russia challenged—and supplanted—the U.S. role as a clarion for Christian fundamentalists, you have to parse the WCF’s role, and the group’s attendant impact on Russian policy over the past few years.

Based out of Rockford, Ill., the WCF is an outgrowth of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society. Claiming that it wants to “help secure the foundations of society” by, among other things, defending “the natural family founded on marriage between a man and a woman,” the WCF is run by Brian Brown, who also acts as the co-founder and president of the far right, and vehemently anti-gay, National Organization for Marriage. Just this week, Brown landed in Moscow to, as BuzzFeed reported, help continue constructing trans-Atlantic links between Russia and the American Religious Right.

In the two decades since its formal founding in 1997 the WCF has become one of the primary poles around which far-right U.S. evangelicals have exported their fundamentalism, as well as one of the world’s foremost anti-LGBT organizations. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the WCF “is one of the key driving forces behind the U.S. Religious Right’s global export of homophobia”—not that the WCF would necessarily take offense to the charge. In 2016, for instance, the WCF hosted a conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, in which, as Coda reported, speakers encouraged attendees to “stay firm against homofascists” and “rainbow radicals.” Conference topics ranged from how sexual education “undermine[s] the family and parental authority” to looking at how court systems push “Anti-family indoctrination.” (The WCF did not return multiple attempts for comment.)

But the WCF isn’t a wholly American export; this isn’t simply some effort to push Christian extremism alongside baseball and apple pie for foreign consumption. Rather, the WCF is a product of joint Russian-American homophobic ingenuity. As Christopher Stroop, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of South Florida, recently detailed, the WCF was the brainchild of Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov, a pair of sociology professors at Lomonosov Moscow State University, and Allan Carlson, WCF’s current president emeritus. The two Russians, according to Mother Jones, were casting about for a means to stave off their country’s looming “demographic winter”—the idea that progressive legislation, from birth control to LGBT rights, will precipitate civilizational collapse—and stumbled over Carlson’s prior work. Gathering in the apartment of a “Russian Orthodox mystic,” the trio outlined an organization that would help oversee a global Christian right—and restore Russia to a position abdicated during the atheistic Soviet period.

Indeed, while the West saw substantial progressive gains since the WCF’s inception, Russia underwent a stark lurch in the opposite direction. Not only has Moscow, most especially under Putin’s third term, grabbed the rudder of the global anti-gay movement, but it has further unraveled even the most basic abortion rights protocols. To wit, in 2011 the Kremlin enacted an anti-abortion bill that, as The Nation wrote, “many pro-choice activists regard as the first volley in an effort to ban the procedure altogether.”

But this legislation didn’t arise in a vacuum, especially when Moscow was the world’s first to legalize the procedure. Rather, those Russian legislators pushing a domestic abortion clampdown looked to their American colleagues—specifically, the WCF—for inspiration. After all, the package of abortion restrictions, speared by Duma member Yelena Mizulina, was launched a day after a series of WCF honchos, including Carlson and Managing Director Larry Jacobs, settled into Moscow for a “Demographic Summit,” the WCF’s most substantial assembly in Russia to date. As the head of a Russian women’s advocacy group later said, “It was 100-percent clear that everything [in the anti-abortion legislation] was copied from the experience of American fundamentalists and conservative circles of several European countries where abortion is forbidden or restricted severely.” Or as the WCF would later claim in its promotional material: The WCF “helped pass the first Russian laws restricting abortion in modern history.”

***

Shortly after the summit’s close, Putin announced plans to return to the presidency, supplanting then-President Dmitry Medvedev. Buffeted by a flat economy, Putin shored up his support by tacking to a nativist, nationalist—and resentful—base. In the first 18 months after his return to the presidency in 2012, Putin corralled protesters, smothered many of the remaining independent media outlets, and dissolved the distance between the Kremlin and the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. All of his moves pointed toward a hard-right shift in outlook—to a return to Tsar Nicholas I’s triumvirate of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.”

America’s Christian fundamentalists followed Putin’s moves with glee—all the more after then-President Barack Obama earned a second term, and same-sex rights charged forward. In 2013, Moscow pushed an “anti-propaganda law” specifically targeting the country’s beleaguered LGBT population. Despite widespread condemnation throughout the West, members of America’s Religious Right tripped over themselves in supporting the Kremlin. Likewise, as a Daily Beast report found, the “anti-propaganda law,” like the anti-abortion measures before it, didn’t arise in some kind of retrograde ether, but “had emerged from a years-long, carefully crafted campaign to influence governments to adopt a Christian-Right legal framework”—stemming from the efforts of both American and Russian WCF officials who had “successfully disseminated a U.S.-born culture war that’s wreaking havoc on women and queer folks all around the world.” Even Moscow’s ban on Americans adopting Russian children that year managed to gain support within the U.S.’s far right, with Christian fundamentalists praising Putin’s move as preventing children from living with same-sex parents.

And then, in early 2014, Russia began its invasion of southern Ukraine, claiming Crimea and sparking sanctions, animus and the downing of Flight MH17—the destruction of which almost certainly came at the hands of Russia-backed separatists. In the midst of the greatest breach between the Kremlin and the White House in decades, the WCF confirmed plans to host its annual September 2014 conference in Moscow. Suddenly, though, a pair of the WCF’s biggest boosters in Russia—Mizulina and former Russian Railways chief Vladimir Yakunin—were placed on the U.S. sanctions list. Citing “uncertainties surrounding sanctions,” the WCF pulled its official imprimatur from the conference.

But that didn’t stop WCF higher-ups from attending the conclave, rechristened “Large Families: The Future of Humanity,” or from cementing further links with those close to the Kremlin. Not only have WCF fundamentalists continued building ties with ultra-Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, but, as Stroop told me, the conference “was pretty much what it was supposed to be.” (To get a taste of Malofeev’s views, he believes Orthodox Christians can’t be fascist because “Russians suffered from Nazis more than any other nation in the world.”) As journalist Hannah Levintova wrote in 2014, the conference went off with a “nearly identical title” and took place “in the same location, on the same dates, and with a similar schedule[.]” For good measure, Alexey Komov, the WCF’s official Russian representative, told a Russian media outlet the WCF was still helping organize the conference.

This time, though, something was different. Two years into Putin’s third term, and a few months after the Kremlin upended the post-Cold War order, Russia was coalescing support from far-right forces across the West, ranging from the white nationalists who would buoy Trump’s campaign to political groups bent on fracturing NATO and the European Union. While Washington pushed toward legalization of same-sex marriage, Russia, to Christian fundamentalists on both sides of the Atlantic, suddenly regressed into the world’s primary bulwark for nominally “traditional” values.

The 2014 conference, Stroop told me, was “a crystallization of this moment of nationalization and exporting [of nominally ‘traditional’ values] on the Russian side—of Russia taking the lead. … There was a moment when Mizulina was saying that it would be impossible for this kind of conference to take place in Europe or America right now.” Mizulina, of course, was mistaken; the 2015 conference took place in Salt Lake City, just a few months after the Obergefell decision legalized same-sex marriage across America. But in that milieu, in that broader political moment, Russia, to those following the threads of Christian fundamentalism, made a play at wresting control of the global Christian right from the U.S. And Moscow may well have succeeded—and has now even surpassed its American counterparts in terms of regressive social legislation, recently pulling back criminal penalties for domestic violence. As Stroop added, recalling the aftermath of the 2014 conference, “Russia is taking on the mantle of leadership of global social conservatism. … [That conference] gave Russia the chance to say, ‘We’re the leaders here.’ And people have responded to that, and followed along.”

***

After all, it’s not as if it’s difficult to unearth the fundamentalists fawning over Putin’s putative turn toward God. For instance, according to Bryan Fischer, who until 2015 was a spokesman for the American Family Association, Putin is the “lion of Christianity.” Evangelical Franklin Graham has likewise lauded Putin as someone “protecting traditional Christianity,” while Buchanan only continues praising Putin. Even recent frictions—see: Russia’s recent legislation against non-Orthodox proselytizing—have hardly dampened US fundamentalists’ newfound fervor for Moscow. And if Trump decides to deprioritize rolling back same-sex or abortion rights, the U.S. far right will look to Moscow even further support, ensconcing the Kremlin’s position that much more.

We might not know, per Buchanan’s early questions, whose side God is on. But those in Russia are happy to return the support from America’s radical Christian extremists—and clutch the mantle of Christian fundamentalist leadership as long as they can, even after Trump’s election. “They’re using the history of anti-communism as a means of making a point,” Stroop told me. “They’re saying: ‘We survived communism, and so we know how to resist it.’ And they’re playing right into this whole script, which is a Cold War script, that communism and secularism are the same thing.”

It remains to be seen how the trans-Atlantic relationships among socially conservative Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians

shift under Trump, whose pockets, like Putin, are clearly far deeper than his godliness. For the time being, though, there’s a clear head of the global Christian right. As the WCF’s Jacobs said following the 2014 enclave in Moscow, “I think Russia is the hope for the world right now.”