In February 2022, when Russia launched its second invasion of Ukraine, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia blessed the invading forces as “the active manifestation of evangelical love for neighbors.” Later that year, Kirill dubbed Vladimir Putin “fighter against the Antichrist” and “chief exorcist.” This kind of thing is hard to reconcile with the rationalist creed of American analysis, so the analysts mostly ignore it or adduce it as proof that Putin has gone mad. The liberal dogma known as political science can, in its realist mood, comprehend Russia’s strategic interest in Ukraine, and especially Crimea. We all recognize imperialism as the vice of a disordered and depraved past, and postimperial revanchism as the twitch of a phantom limb that was sawn off for everyone’s benefit. But we prefer not to recognize our own shadow.

Our world was made by empires and religions, not nation-states and constitutions. The liberal world order that the United States sponsored after 1945 is, like its domestic order, an empire in all but name. The United States was the first postcolonial society, so perhaps it should not surprise us that it became the first postmodern empire. America walks and quacks like an imperial duck, but it chooses not to take up the burden of the feathered helmet, the imperial signifier that had previously marked the species. The rest of the world is not taken in. We see you.

We also see the similarly postmodern way in which the United States is a Christian nation in both observance and the breach, especially when it believes it is not. Patriarch Kirill’s observations about anti-Christs and exorcists are typical of the snug alliance of religion and politics throughout imperial history. The breach is the Anglo-Saxon rhetoric that substituted the transnational legalism of human rights for the Christian imperative of saving souls. Both God and the United Nations presume universal dominion. Neither can enforce it without an army. All empires have proudly hung their banners on their palaces and called it eternity. The American non-empire happens to hang the Pride flag from its embassies and call it progress. As Eric Voegelin noted at extravagant length in his survey of politics as religion, the exceptionalism of Western imperium lies in its missionary discontinuities.