The Wall

The other day an interesting graphic was posted on twitter which got me thinking about a post I wanted to write for a long time.

Back in 2014, The Pew Research conducted a Religious Landscape Study in the U.S. The study is interesting for its extensive demographic data which, when looked at a bit deeply is quite informative with regard to today's state of affairs.

In particular I'm interested in the data concerning households earning more than one hundred thousand dollars a year. This group or class constitutes the majority of the country's governing class. And by governing, I mean it in its most expansive context.  Within this group are found senior and middle bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, journalists, businessmen, accountants, virologists, business men, community elders and so on. Much attention is directed towards billionaires and media celebrities but the yeoman's work of day to day governance and organising the country is done by far less notable men. It's the values of this class that set the "tone" of the country.

In theory, Democratic government grant's sovereignty to the people and technically this is true, but in reality the issues that the people get to vote on and how their day to day affairs are run are largely based on the the decisions and values of the governing class.  In a democracy some people are more equal than others.

Firstly, some Basic Demographic data.

What I've decided to do is concentrate on the major sized groups as I'm time limited and this isn't a full blown statistical survey. This covers 92% of the greater than $100K demographic. Interestingly, the impression that I've formed trawling the data is that the remaining 8% tends to cancel each other out on various values metrics. The Buddhists and the Hindus tend to be very permissive with regard to homosexuality and abortion, the Mormons and the Orthodox their opposite.  

What I've tried to do is calculate the absolute number of each religious group in the  >100K class and then determine their proportion in it. For example the Jewish community makes ups 4% of the U.S. population yet it makes up 5% of this class. If there are any errors in my calculations they are unintentional. 

If we take the above minority groups out, then the composition of the governing class in the U.S. can be broken down as follows.

The majority of the U.S. governing class is still nominally Christian. Let that sink in. The U.S. rot is a majority "Christian" affair. Jewish conspiracy theorists can also take note, the governing class of the U.S. is 95% not-Jewish.
 

The question of religious orthodoxy was quite difficult to determine based upon the questions in the survey but I concentrated on two:

a) Do you oppose/favor gay marriage.

b) Abortion should be legal/illegal in all or most cases.

I took these two questions as proxies for religious orthodoxy.  Orthodoxy being defined as what was considered broad social consensus before the Sixties revolution. I am old enough to remember when the concept of gay marriage was thought to be a laughable joke.  Things have obviously moved on a bit.

 

With regard to gay marriage the response for the class in 2014 was as follows:

Quite frankly I was shocked when I crunched the numbers and I really didn't think it was so bad. Now Obergefell was in 2015, and it's obvious to me that when the the U.S. Supreme Court decided to recognise gay marriage they were affirming what many of their social peers had already come to accept. The decision was not an impost on the country as much as a recognition that the ruling class had changed its mind. Within the leadership class the moral base and understanding of traditional conceptions of marriage had completely eroded. Also remember that the demographic that was sampled here are the "best and brightest" of their cohort.  These are the people who have the most natural ability and have been afforded the best education. We're not talking about the proletariat. From a Christian perspective, it's truly a disastrous situation.

With regard to the question of Abortion the situation is not much better:

It's pretty much the same and suggests a common causal link.  Interestingly though, in its reversal of Roe v Wade, the members of the Supreme Court would have probably earned a lot of personal and social opprobrium as a result of their decision. Say what you want about Trump, but his nominations made the difference and his crew are pushing against the tide.

Now if we accept that the above two questions as normative for what is considered "sound" Christianity,  then we can say that by 2014 the U.S. leadership class was critically de-Christianised. If you want to understand why Christians are starting to be persecuted, the pie charts above are your answer. The majority of governing apparatus does not share your view of things.  And remember, this was 2014, things have gotten a lot worse since then.

So who exactly is supporting the "slouch towards Gomorrah".

 

The figures are virtually identical. From what we can see the majority support is still from self-professed Christians.  A few things to note. Support for both abortion and homosexual marriage is roughly proportionate to the religious demographics of the 100k class with the exception of the "Nones", who over represented and the Evangelicals, who are under-represented.

So who is "manning the gates" and not supporting the abandonment of traditional mores.

 

 

The data shows that while Catholics and the Mainline Churches are represented at a rate proportional to their the membership in the 100k class,  the Unaffiliated are represented at a fourth and the Jewish at a third of their class rate. The real hero's here are the Evangelicals who are represented at nearly twice their rate.

 

So what's the take home message here?

 

Firstly, the situation is quite dire with most of the leadership class being unsympathetic to traditional mores. 

 

Secondly, Evangelicals are by far the most "Conservative" political group who punch well above their weight in pushing back the tide.  Followed by the Catholics, Historical Black Protestants,  Mainline, Jews and Unaffiliated in that order.

Thirdly, especially with regard to the Mainline Churches despite their supposedly theological liberalism, many members clearly aren't going with the flow.

Fourthly, despite it theological conservatism, the Catholic Church has not been able to translate those beliefs into the beliefs of the "rank and file" especially among those in the leadership class. I think this a major problem and one of the reasons why Catholicism, despite Vatican Two is still unable to engage modernity meaningfully. The causes for this are complex but reinforce my view that the Catholicism in its current form  is unable to push back the tide as it currently stands. Catholic thought in my opinion is good, the problem is the inability to transform Catholic thought into action.  This is a problem I feel has its roots in the Church's response to the Reformation. But more on this in a different post.

Fifthly, Evangelicals are frequently derided for their lack of intellectual sophistication but "faith without works is dead", and these guys are really doing the heavy lifting. From my Catholic perspective, there's obviously something good going on there which the Church would be well to emulate. (it can't as it currently stands). Whatever they're drinking we need to be drinking as well.

Sixthly, being a Jewish conservative is a lonely business.

 

As I loathe cognitive simplification it is important to recognise that the wall is being held up by all groups but I take my hat off to the Evangelicals.

 

Protestant Modern: Teal Kooyong

Australian politics isn't really followed by much of the Anglosphere, which is a shame because some of the best examples of the change in Western culture can be illustrated by its study.

But firstly a bit of background. Prior to the 1970's Australia was effectively a Christian country divided among Catholics and Protestants with this division being felt socioeconomically. The Catholics were predominantly the class of the workers while the Protestants were the class of the establishment. The main Protestant divisions being predominantly the Anglicans (equivalent to the Episcopalians) ,the Presbyterians and a significant minority of Methodists.  In comparing it to the U.S., Australia tended to be a bit more "mainline". And in voting patterns the Catholics tended to vote for the Left (Labour) while the Protestants voted for the Conservatives (Called Liberals, as in the classical liberal tradition.) The Liberal party was the political arm of the Protestant establishment.

For much of the 20th Century the Catholic component of the culture felt that it was treated as second class in the country, and I bring this point up not to raise grievances but to illustrate that the dominant governing culture was protestant despite the fact that there was no established religion in Australia.

The most conservative state in Australia was the sate of Victoria, and most of the senior establishment lived in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, it's main city. The electoral seat of Kooyong was geographically aligned with the demographic that governed and administered the country. The seat itself was considered a citadel of the conservative demographic, being the seat of Australia's most successful--and longest serving-- conservative Prime Minister, Robert Menzies. Menzies, himself, was quite religious, describing himself "as a simple Presbyterian."  The seat was always held by a conservative, even in times where there were massive electoral swings to the left.

A funny thing happened at the last federal election. 

The conservatives lost the seat.

What was also interesting was the losing incumbent was generally likeable and politically not really offensive. So why the loss? 

The candidate who won the seat, Dr Monique Ryan, ran on the "Teal" party platform. she represented the interests of the wealthy woke. Whats also interesting is the colour that they chose to represent their stand. Teal is a mix of blue and green and it illustrates the nature of the political shift which I also think is an apt description of the shift in ideological/religious values of the Kooyong voting demographic.

The Kooyong electorate was a bastion of traditional "Protestant" civic morality however with the collapse of Protestantism, both in terms of its number of adherents and shift to the left, the traditional governing classes have abandoned their traditional protestant values and assumed woke ones. The bottom line is that the conservative party has lost its traditional supporter base. The governing class, which used to be Protestant is Protestant no more. (At least in a traditional sense.)

Similar political swings and losses were seen in other areas of the country. The conservative political loss in this former bastion of conservative values does fully convey the catastrophe of this loss. For the seat of Kooyong is also the home of senior public servants, board members, executives and so on.  The senior apparatus of government and commerce is woke.

The political changes seen in Australia have been echoed in the rest of the Anglosphere and this has paralysed the political arm of conservatism.  Traditional conservative ideology has been abandoned by the class that established it and is now adrift. Protestantism, which gave the conservative parties their ideological strength has been drained especially in the ruling classes, and a conflict has arisen in its ranks between the woke benefactors and the traditional i.e. Christians who still hold onto the faith.

 

Protestant Modern

I think Luther must have chuckled as General Clarke's U.S. Army surged up the Italian peninsula and liberated Rome in June of 1944.  It would have amazed and probably perplexed the reformers no end to see that the spiritual descendants of Luther would be liberating the Pope from their brethren.  Yet the images that emerge from that time ways encapsulate some of the key features of modernity and help us understand its trajectory.

When Max Weber published his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber was formally stating what was apparent to anyone with eyes to see. By the end of the 19th Century, when modernity was already in full swing and despite starting from behind economically, the Protestant world had surged ahead of the Catholic,  both economically and technically, producing the worlds most "modern" societies. These societies weren't just wealthier, but were qualitatively different in that they had broken with the agrarian past and had become industrial. But even the term industrial doesn't really convey the depth of their transformation.  The "wealth" of these nations was in many ways byproduct of a broad and deep cultural infrastructure which advanced science and the arts, commercialised their application and spread their benefits far and wide.

Weber attributed a lot of the success of Protestantism to the unintended economic effects of Calvinism--and scholars have debated him about the assertion--but what whatever the cause there was a clear quantitative and qualitative difference in wealth between the Catholic and Protestant worlds. It's all the more surprising given the fact that the foundations of modernity were put in place by Catholicism in  Renaissance Northern Italy.

This interesting paper gives an idea of the degree of economic divergence between the Catholic and Protestant worlds.

The X axis is rather compressed and can give a false impression. Moderate advantage over longer periods translates to very large gains.

But what this data does not convey is how of the "wealth effect" in Catholic countries is due to the transfer of knowledge from Protestant countries. Take, for example, the inventions of the steam engine, locomotive and telegraph. These inventions have probably been the most transformative elements in the transition to modernity. All were originated, proved and made commercially successful in a Protestant milieu and then copied around the world. The copiers avoiding the research, development and risks costs in bringing an idea to fruition. They are essentially "free riders" with regard to Protestant product development and while it would be impossible to objectively quantify, my intuitive guess is that Catholic economic development would be far less developed if it weren't for this.  This is not to say that the Catholic world did not provide important contributions to modernity it's just that it did it so as a junior partner. Material modernity is primarily a product of Protestantism.

Which raises an interesting question: would modernity have developed if Protestantism had been quashed by the Counter-Reformation. This, of course, is a speculative line of thought but in my opinion a theologically 'rigid" Catholicism would have made  material modernity difficult while a "slack" poorly disciplined Catholicism would of been open to its development, albeit at a slower pace. Catholicism laid down the foundations of modernity but was unable to build on this due to its internal tensions. (More on that in another post.) Indeed, what would see to support this view is the data in the first table above. While there are other factors involved, Catholic and Protestant Per Capita-GDP's start to converge about the 1960's, the time when Catholic religious practice began to collapse.

The other thing to remember here is that while intellectual modernity was making inroads the "Negative World" , a West which was hostile to Christianity, was not really a feature of modern society until relatively recently. For much of modernity, religious faith and technological progress were not an issue for the majority of the population. Indeed, what I think best symbolises peak Protestant modernity is the Apollo 8 reading of Genesis. Mainstream Western culture, except a few atheists, saw anything wrong with public expressions of faith while orbiting the moon: There was no intellectual incompatibility between belief in the Almighty and the cultural, economic and industrial powerhouse that bought the Apollo program to fruition. They were one and the same.

The fact of the matter matter is that the Reformation did not only change the religious landscape of the Western world but initiated what would eventually become a profound economic, material and cultural divergence, and  which would result in the Catholic world becoming largely irrelevant in the shaping of modernity. (France is a complex divergence which I won't go into at the moment.)

And this is best exemplified by the events of the Second World War, where the Catholic countries of Europe were subjugated or neutral to the events (due to powerlessness or fear) and South America was indifferent. It was left to the Protestant powers (who had the means and the will) to liberate the seat of Catholicism and shape the course of events. In essence its fate was was determined by other powers.

Weber felt that Protestantism was inadvertently able to direct religious impulses toward economic activity, but I felt that it's effect was much more encompassing. Protestantism turned Christianity towards the mundane things in life thereby transforming them and it modulated modernity into a form which was compatible with it. The wealth was "by-product". But that is not to say that the Protestant modernity was without fault.  Particularly in the field of economics, great wealth rubbed shoulders with extreme poverty and exploitation of the working class. In many ways it was the midwife of Socialism. But overall it forged a world which was honest, efficient and wealthy.

This is why the collapse of  "spound" Protestantism is THE tragedy of the 20th Century, primarily because modernity has become "uncoupled" from what would be considered "traditional" Christianity.  We are now entering a post-Protestant modernity which is repudiating the the modulating influences of the past and the "Globohomo" world that we now inhabit is primarily as a result of the collapse of "sound" Protestantism, particularly of its managerial class, which now practices a form of Protestantism--if it practices it at all--which would have horrified the Reformers.

Merry Christmas

 Merry Christmas to my long suffering readers.

Hopefully I'll be less slack and put up a few more posts next year.

Best wishes to all.

Modernity

One of the recurring tropes seen in conservative blogs is the opposition of modernity to religion. The implication of this line of thought is that somehow a return to pre-industrial society would shore up the decline of Christianity. I don't particularly subscribe to this point of view but I can understand how it came about.  That the the collapse of religion in the West is correlated with the industrialisation of Western society  is true but as all the good text books say, correlation is not causation and the relationship of modernity to religious decline is much more complicated.

But first we need to define terms.

Modernity as a concept has both temporal and qualitative aspects. Temporal, in that it acknowledges that that whatever modernity is, it marks a discontinuity with the past in time. Qualitatively, it acknowledges a civilisational change irrespective of time. I think that one of the reasons why modernity is so difficult to define is because its is one word linked to two different two concepts. 

The first thing to consider the is the temporal component of the concept which I think is its least important aspect. The Latin root of the term, modo, defines the present or contemporary. So the concept refers to the here and now. But the important point of the word modernity is that it is meant to distinguish a now that is different from the past, yet time itself is neutral with regard to modernity's qualitative aspect. The modern world is not modern because it is five hundred years away from the the 1500's, it's modern because there has been a qualitative change since then and its the change in things, not the passage of time that gives the term its major meaning. The reason why the 1500's are not modern is because the civilisation experience  of then is different to what it is today.

So what then are the major qualitative changes in modernity?  From the point of view of Western History, the two main factors would be the development of technology and the change in values, with technological aspect having greater value. Simply put, the modern world would be impossible without the technological innovations particularly of the last two hundred years. Technology has given Western modernity a large component of its qualatative aspect.

But technology does not apply itself and requires human agents for its implementation. Therefore the the expression of technology is conditional on the values used in its implementation. If a society decided, because of its values, to reject technology current technological modernity would be impossible. The point I'm trying to make here is that technology is "captive" to the values of society and these values modulate the expression of technology,  and hence modernity. The interesting thing about this line of thought is that modernity can have many forms and the modernity we currently have is not necessarily the only modernity that could have been.

However, qualative changes can also occur in a society in the absence of technology, and history is full of societies which were technologically backward but which culturally changed over time. Here it's the change of values and not the passage of time which is the marker of change. The late Roman Emprie was "modern" in that it differed from the founding values of the Republic.  Looking at the decadent values of the late empire and ours now, are we really that modern? Strip away the technology and we resemble a lot of "old" decadent societies.

Whats been interesting about the West is that it has undergone two transformations over the past few centuries. First, the material one, driven by technology, and secondly the cultural one, driven by other factors.

When religious conservatives talk about modernity they have to be quite specific. It needs to be understood is that incorporation of technology into our civilisation has bought, quite literally incalculable, benefits. The production of medicines, diagnostic equipment, food and safe transportation for instance, sits atop a vast mountain of technological capital. Turning the clock back would come at the price of an ocean of human misery. A more simpler existence, i.e. agrarianism, would be a more painful one as well. 

Of course, none of these religious conservatives would dream of getting of getting rid of the beneficial effects of technology what they want to do is simply change morality, but even here we have a problem.

Now, while I have separated technology and culture, treating them separately, the reality is there is an interplay between the two of them. Formally, technology shouldn't really impact upon our values system but materially it does, and the medium of the interaction, from a civilisational level, is the midwit. Culture isn't just a product of the guys at the top of the intellectual food chains, it is a product of all levels of society and I don't think what isn't recognised enough is just how powerful this midwit engagement with science and technology is in the shaping of culture.

"A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to him" is a quote attributed to Pastuer but it captures the essence of things. Not thinking deeply about things is problematic but its how most of the human race lives and the midwit engagement and being satisfied with superficialities is a powerful solvent of traditional religious morality.  The experience of penicillin and fertiliser have probably been more effective de-Christianisers than nominalism.  For the day to day believer, penicillin cures, prayer doesn't. Fertiliser, rather than fasting, ensures the crops. God becomes increasingly irrelevant to our day to day lives.  Faith atrophies rather than is rejected and it is lived as if it is increasingly irrelevant. Only the troubled and the deep end up engaging religion.

The point here is that technology, in it's success, undercuts a powerful psychological mechanism which powers moral values, namely dependency, especially in the midwit class. As they say, "there are no atheists in foxholes" which simply is a recognition that in desperate times the midwit is prepared to give God some consideration: atheism and degeneracy being luxuries of comfort. 

Christian forensic philosophers have laboured to identify and combat the errors of modernist thought but the fact is that stupid ideas have been around since time immemorial. What distinguishes the  modern world from the past is the traction these stupid ideas have now, or appear to have now. The average man does not engage life like a Pascal, Nietzsche, Heidegger or Kant: in fact he's probably never even heard of them. The fault of Christian philosphers has been to map the thought of dissident philosophers on the brains of midwits, combating a process that isn't naturally occurring in their minds, wondering why their arguments don't work. The fault lays in the failure to recognise that  Homer Simpson doesn't do Heidegger and the widespread consumption of internet porn is not due the average man's acceptance of the arguments of Foucault.

Rather, how modernity attacks religion is "psychologically", through material comfort, security and abundance. The "argument" of modernity is not logical but existential. God is not needed, or sought, among people who are fat, happy and in-control enough.  Stupid ideas, which never would have been given the time of day in  a precarious world are suddenly given a hearing. Hubris, ingratitude and sloth act on a population-wide level consigning "hard" religion as an irrelevancy. The rejection of God is more pragmatic rather than philosophical. The relationship of Christianity to modernity is much bigger than just the world of ideas.

Pushing Ukraine West

Vladimir Solovyov is one of Putin's chief propagandists.

Back in 2008 he sang a different and more sensible tune.

 

As many Russian analysts have recognised,  the Ortho-con policies of Putin have pushed the Ukrainians away from the Russians.  Had Putin simply followed the the ideas expressed by Solovyov in 2008, he--and Russia--would he would be in a much stronger position than now.

It even gets weirder than this. Here's a link to Solovyov and Zelensky singing together on Russian TV in 2013.

Bonus: For Comrade Vatnik who likes to populate my comments thread with vulgarities. It appears that Solovyov is a bit of a fan of Mussolini.

Russia's war against Nazism in Ukraine is in safe hands!

You can't make this stuff up. This really is Clown World.

Ortho-connery.

The truth is this war has its roots much further back than Obama. If you want to point to an incident as a starting place, it would be American involvement in the Balkan war during the Clinton years. American support for Kosovo against Serbia was the start of a new conflict with Russia. At the time, it was viewed in Moscow as a deliberate offense to the Russians. In the years that followed, this affair has become a warning for the Russians about what Washington plans for them.

One of the things about being of the right it is the desire to calibrate one's beliefs to reality. So its with some surprise that I read the above over at Z Man's blog. Quite simply its a revision of history.

Unlike the current situation in Ukraine, when the war in Yugoslavia started the American's did all they could to stop the country from breaking apart, including placing an arms embargo on the Croats, Slovenes and even the Bosnians. The Americans was so concerned about the stability of the former Soviet Union that they did not want to set a precedent by recognising the breakaway republics. Even the Baltics had a hard time gaining recognition from the U.S. The fact of the matter is that the Bush administration of the early 90's did all it could to support the continuity of the the former Soviet Union and turned a blind eye to much of the slaughter in the former Yugoslavia. The Republicans, for all their mouthings of liberty, did bugger all.

The entry of the Clinton administration initially didn't really change much. But it was the nightly reports of slaughter and murder, perpetrated mainly by the Serbs that turned public opinion in the U.S. and Europe against Serbian/Russian interests.  By the time the issue of Kosovo had come around, the largely accurate public image of the Serbs had taken such a beating that Serbian claims to Kosovo fell on unsympathetic ears.  American policy in Kosovo was designed to save lives and if the Serbians hadn't a policy of extermination I doubt that there would have been any intervention at all.

This of course bothered the Russians and their apologists who somehow felt that their right to dictate what happened in that theatre of operations trumped the human rights of the inhabitants of that region. What's really weird about this is that it was supported by large sections of the American "right".

While the fine detail of U.S. foreign policy towards Russia is beyond this blog post the fact of the matter is that U.S. Russian relations were quite cordial, even to the extent that Russia was mooted as a potential NATO member until the Orange Revolution where the Russians were outmaneuvered by the Americans, failing to get their man installed. (Unlike in Belarus.)

It's clear now that the U.S. is hostile to the Kremlin but it wasn't always this way and while both sides are responsible for this deterioration in their relationship. The way the Kremlin and their apologists paint it, one would think that the Russians were victims of exploitation instead of contributory agents. Putin is a Russian Nationalist with an imperialistic vision and his desire to restore a modern version of the tsardom is what rubs many people the wrong way and in the playbook of Russian diplomacy, when Russia doesn't get what it wants it is a "victim." 

While it is true that Putin's nationalism is in someways more "wholesome" than Western Liberalism in some ways it's far more rotten. Putin's anti-sexual-deviancy needs to be balanced by his disregard for the loss of innocent life. His appeal to family values has to be balanced by his blind eye to civic vices. What surprises me is just how many of the right are blind to them, or even worse, how many of them see as justifiable. From my perspective Putin's "badness" is a different "badness" to the "badness" of the West: But it is still bad.

Just as Neoconservatism wants to build a conservatism without reference to Christ, Orthoconnery wants to build a conservatism subordinated to Russian/Orthodox Nationalistic interests*. In this schema, the Church blesses whatever the State wants and reinterprets facts to further that narrative. The truth be damned. The idea that NATO is a threat to Russia is laughable as is the idea that Ukraine is a fascist state and so on.  The fact that many on the Western Right buy into this is a measure of how pitiful their understanding of when membership of the right entails.  i.e. a commitment to the truth and justice.

*Note: I'm not criticising legitimate Orthodox patriotism but its a patriotism that must be grounded in the truth.

Service Announcement

Even though not much has been posted recently on the blog it's not dead yet. I won't be posting for the next two months due to personal reasons. I'll still be keeping my eye on things though.

Defending Christianianity?

I'm getting a bit of heat from the idiot Right in criticism of their view of Russia the new defender of Christianity. So I wonder how the guys will spin this.

This is the new "decoration" of the ISS courtesy of the Russians.

Russia is rehabilitating the Soviet Union and our idiot "Christian" Right are cheering them on. Let that sink in for the moment. The Christian "dissident" Right is supporting the party of Marx and the Gulag. Let's not forget which country spent millions of dollars trying to undermine the West. A lot of the Globohomo that we have now was a direct result of the subversion policy's of the USSR from a long time ago.

This is why the Right loses all the time: They're too stupid to see that they're supporting the forces that will ultimately undermine them.

Some More Military Religious Art

I got a fair amount of grief from the pro-Russian crowd in my last post about the Russian Military Cathedral which I felt tried to reconcile communism with orthodoxy.  Commo-Orthodoxy much like Judeo-Christianity is fundamentally incompatible due to their foundational premises.  As I tried to point out in my last post, patria and Christianity are compatible, Communism (and fascism for that matter) is not.

The allies destroyed of confiscated a lot Nazi art following the war, and I'm not sure how much of it had a religious element. But I managed to find an example of religious art produced in a time of totalitarianism that gets it right.

Oskar Martin Amorbach was a well renowned painter during the time of the Third Reich. He painted one of my favourite works from that time, The Sower. What I was not aware of is that he also painted a mural in the The Holy Trinity Chapel in Waldsassen. The mural was completed in 1940 while the Reich was on the rise. Titled, The Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles, the mural of the German soldiers is seen as an allegory of the corporal acts of mercy. Of note, you have to look very carefully to see any Nazi imagery. The emphasis is clearly on German soldiers being good Christians.

They guys are clearly Wehrmacht but it's very difficult to see an Nazi symbolism at all.  In this image we see the German give a drink to French, Italian and Spanish prisoners of War, visiting the sick...

...and burying the dead. Note, the grave next to German grave is French. The imagery is clearly one of Christian morals, rather than a celebration an attempt to reconcile Nazism and Christianity.

Even this sort of thing from another Church and from the First World War, put in a Russian context would have been  more appropriate.

I'm not an artist, but it isn't too hard to see how faith and patria could be depicted in a way which acknowledged historicity while criticising totalitarianism.  Even some of the icons of Alexander Schmorell, a saint of the Russian Church, acknowledge his German military background in their depiction of him:

Note the German uniform under the white overshirt.

Now the guys who built the Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces weren't stupid, they could have chosen to depict the Russians who fought during the Soviet era in a way which emphasised the faith and downplayed the Soviet.

They didn't and that's the problem, they're trying to reconcile the two.

BTW, I have taken most of the images here from the site of a Russian Photographer, Vladimir Pomortzeff,  The Woe of the Vanquished. Great site, have a look.