What Putin and Florida Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott have in common | Opinion

Does it seem odd to you that Republicans are twiddling their thumbs over aid to Ukraine as Russian forces advance? Odd that both Florida’s senators, Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, voted against the aid package that the Senate was finally able to pass but that House Speaker Mike Johnson declared would be “dead on arrival” in his chamber? Should we be wondering whether Republicans perhaps want Russia to win the war?

I hadn’t really worried about this until I read an essay on the ideology animating Russia’s war effort and realized how closely it resembles the Christian nationalism Mike Johnson espouses. While Russia of course wants to keep Ukraine out of NATO, its larger purpose is to protect Ukrainians from the moral decay it sees as inextricably bound up with Western liberalism. In a sense, Moscow is fighting to keep Kyiv from becoming more like Amsterdam. So it makes sense that Republicans would have a soft spot for the Russians: they are brethren in culture wars.

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One important strand of Russian political philosophy called Eurasianism pits a tradition-loving, “family values”-centered, and anti-democratic populace stretching in principle from the plains of Hungary across Mongolia to the Pacific against corrupting European and American forces of moral decay. The Russian Orthodox church has joined itself to this strand in promoting the assault on Ukraine.

So it should not surprise us that Franklin Graham, son of Billy, would praise Putin during a visit in 2015, one year after his invasion and theft of Crimea, and wish Putin could run for president of the United States. After all, Putin was protecting his populace from “homosexual propaganda.” And isn’t this just what Republicans in Tallahassee are doing for us in Florida by promoting book bans, bans on drag story hours, and bathroom bans on transgender users? So the Republican pols here in the U.S. seem to be channeling Patriarch Kirill of Moscow in his fulminations against the abominations of homosexuality and gender change.

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The recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are people makes clear how deeply Christian nationalists have penetrated and corrupted our political system. Casting aside any notion that religion and state should be kept separate, that court ruled that its decisions, supposedly made at the behest of the people of Alabama, would be “theologically based.” As the Court said, frozen embryonic “life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”

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To impose religious policies like this upon a public that broadly disapproves of them requires that democracy itself be dispensed with. Trump’s admiration led Republicans in general to view Putin authoritarian regime more favorably, and polls indicate that his invasion of Ukraine has not notably dimmed this enthusiasm. A group of social scientists analyzing the issue writes that “To the extent that Christian nationalist ideology ‘threatens democracy’….it attracts Americans to demonstrably authoritarian strongmen who promise to return their nations to a mythical ethno-culturally ‘pure’ past.” No wonder, then, that Trump talks about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” And no wonder Ron DeSantis talks about gunning people down who illegally cross our border. They are appealing to the clientele for an American strongman who can whip a purified America into shape and make its subways as clean and orderly as Tucker Carlson found them to be in Moscow. Along the way, they can make America “safe” for Christians again, who somehow feel themselves beleaguered because, while there is a church on every corner and almost the entire AM dial devoted to their programming, they do not yet have prayer in public schools and cannot keep newspapers from covering gay pride parades.

So if you wonder why Ukraine is waiting for aid, understand that it doesn’t have many friends among that increasingly large group of Republicans who are either Christian nationalists or beholden to them. For them, Putin’s got the longer and better game.

Mark Schneider is a resident of Boynton Beach.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Odd alliance between US Christian right and Russia's Putin