Two questions to the Patriarch

At the opening session of the Worldwide Russian National Council last Tuesday (http://ria.ru/religion/20141111/1032786988.html) Patriarch Kirill of Moscow defined how he would like to synthesize Russian identity out of his country’s Russian history and carry it forward, with the formula ‘faith, justice, solidarity, dignity, great power’ "вера, справедливость, солидарность, достоинство, державность".

I have two questions:

One: Is it right for a religious leader to be using the term ‘great power’? I have to be careful not to throw stones: Archbishops of Canterbury used similar language during the British Empire (1), and Churchill’s relation to God was , I suspect, rather similar to Vladimir Putin’s looks to me to be, as a useful part of the country’s psychological armoury. And it seems to me theologically acceptable to suggest that the way one nation runs its affairs, the ‘mores’ by which the body of its people, starting with its ruling and political class, can be superior or inferior to that of another. Most of us would place Germany or England – or indeed Russia - ‘higher’ than Colombia or Tajikistan. Indeed am not against saying that a particular nation or faith may have a ‘high calling’ to set an example to the world: but by moral persuasion, not by force and certainly not by dirty behaviour away from the cameras. National pride has, though, taken some countries down some dreadfully negative paths, externally and internally: Germany and Japan being the most obvious examples, and the record of the USA is more than ambiguous here. And yes, ‘power’ does not fit very well with the Gospel, as least as we interpret it here in the west.

Two: What place does the concept of ‘freedom’ take in the identity that Patriarch Kirill is looking for? This concept is central to Western politico-religious thought – indeed it is on this search for ‘freedom’, so the myth goes, that the United States was founded, largely by deeply believing people. While as a Christian I can do without a lot of what is actually very superficial and ‘unfree’ freedom, true freedom (“whose service is perfect freedom”) remains for me a deep God-implanted longing, and an essential part of the Christian message. When it comes to Russia I sense a deep ambiguity and paradox: no one is going to tell me that organized Christianity in Russia is ‘free’; from what I have seen of it it is miserably unfree: and yet on the same hand many Russians I know (especially lay people) reach a spiritual depth and inner freedom which I have rarely found elsewhere. It may be that ‘freedom’ passes first through ‘unfreedom’ (certainly in mystical theology it does) and we are wrong in the west to leave our young people too early with too many options and no sense of meaning. But I would still prefer to reduce Kirill’s pentatych to a triptych ‘justice, solidarity, dignity’, leave ‘faith’ to the individual and put ‘great power’ on the shelf.

(1)    See the YouTube Clip of like Archbishop Temple in 1944 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e84CMrW1vA – jump to minutes 17, or the language of the newsreel presenter in the last minute of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOsSjVvGvRY).