Trump and Putin, the Same Religion?

Denis Müller, theologian, ethicist and honorary professor at the universities of Geneva and Lausanne, examines the religious backgrounds of the two statesmen.

As Michel Eltchaninoff showed in his 2022 book, “Dans la tête de Vladimir Poutine” (“In Vladimir Putin’s Head”), the Kremlin leader has repeatedly exploited Christian values over the years and has claimed to be inspired by prestigious authors such as Immanuel Kant, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Berdyaev, all of whom have a focused relationship with Christianity. Following in the footsteps of Orthodox Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow, Putin defends a theory of Christian values that underpins his vision of a conservative Russian society inherited from Sovietism and the KGB, the Russian Committee for State Security.

Putin, the son of a religious mother and an atheist father, shares the cardinal values of Soviet society: patriotism and military culture above all else. A conservative vision drives him to ignore all past criticisms; on the other hand, he criticizes the current decline of the West and the values usually associated with it.

Paradoxically, we are dealing with an altruistic and pacifist Putin, for whom Christian values are part of Holy Russia. It is easy to understand how this pacifism leads him to deny the initial violence in the war against Ukraine.

The comparison with Donald Trump is illuminating in this respect. Of Presbyterian and Reformed origin, Trump certainly doesn’t have the same “philosophical” and “theological” culture as Putin; his rather superficial background is distinct from Putin’s involvement in and alongside the Moscow Orthodox Patriarchate.

With his economic and political conception of the world, Trump unwittingly confirms Max Weber’s analysis of the relationship between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. However, unlike Weber, Trump has a savage and brutal opinion of this link. Supposedly Christian values lead to a conservative vision, and the spirit of capitalism boils down to the ideology of the deal, i.e., the shameless dimension of profit. Elon Musk embodies this complete deviation from historical and modern Calvinism.

Basically, Trump and Putin seem to be on the same wavelength; their shared struggle against wokeism is rooted in a traditional conception of the Christian faith and its values. Putin subscribes to a Christian-inspired nationalistic statism; Trump is a firm believer in the sacred union of power and religion. Despite their different political backgrounds, they share the same relationship with Christianity. Putin’s ideological approach, similar to that of Trump, is as dismissive of democracy as it is of reason, and it’s all in the name of religion.

Putin’s instrumentalization of Christian values led to a scandalous justification of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. With Trump supported by the most fundamentalist movements of evangelicalism, there is no longer a critical distance between political action and faith; every life event (especially his assassination attempt) becomes a messianic mark, in both the theological and political sense of the word, of his election.

Let’s be clear. With these two “examples,” we witness both the collapse of universal rationality and the devaluing of the Christian faith in its liberating and practical importance.