US-Born Orthodox Priest: Why Western Christians Seek Shelter in Russia
15:26 GMT 26.08.2023 (Updated: 16:16 GMT 26.08.2023)
© Sergei Pyatakov
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Father Joseph Gleason, an American-born Orthodox priest, moved to Russia with his wife and eight children in 2017. He is now helping other Westerners settle down in a land where traditional family values and Christian faith are respected.
Roughly six years ago, Father Joseph Gleason fled the "Land of the Free" for Russia, pursuing the freedom of faith.
The US has become an environment that is very hostile to Christians, says the priest. Even though religious liberties are guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, a radical liberal ideology is being forced down the throat of Americans.
"This is happening all over America," the priest told Sputnik. "This is not people being allowed to do what they want in the privacy of their own homes. That's been legal for a long time. You know, this is not about critiquing or, you know, worrying about what two adults are doing in the privacy of their own home. We are talking about changing the very definition of the family, changing the very definition of marriage, and then forcing everybody in health care and health insurance, everybody in the government and in multiple other places in society, basically everywhere in society where it matters, who is the mother, who is the father, who is the spouse."
Father Joseph argues that when the very definition of marriage and family as a faithful, exclusive, and lifelong union of a man and a woman is distorted, it breaks the societal moral compass and turns things upside down.
It's not what the Christian church and Founding Fathers taught the American people for centuries, argues the priest. However, even the US Supreme Court, which has long served as guardian and interpreter of the Constitution, has forced the people of the US to accept the idea of homosexual marriage in every state. One dreads to think what will happen next.
Currently, in some states one can lose one's job and be denied an education in the US for simply not embracing the ideas of transgenderism or same-sex marriage, says the cleric.
"Now, in America, there are cases of people losing their jobs, not being able to find a new job, being denied an education, not being able to get into a university, simply because they're opposed to homosexual behavior, and because they're opposed to this lie of homosexual marriage, or because they're opposed to transgenderism. It's become an environment that is very hostile to Christians. And in a number of places in America, if you are a true Christian, if you reject these perversions, you can find it very difficult to get a good job or to get an education. And unless America repents of these things, I think it's only going to get worse."
It's impossible for a pious Christian to bow down to modern Western liberal values, which are propagating and glorifying the same sin for which God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah; the same sins that were being committed by the Canaanites when God told Israel to come and wipe out the Canaanites, Father Joseph highlights.
Why Russia is Good Place to Raise a Christian Family
It is for this reason, among others, that Father Joseph decided to move to Rostov Veliky (not to be confused with Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia), one of the oldest cities in Russia, located on the banks of the vast Lake Nero in the Yaroslavl region, three hours north of Moscow.
"You know, my wife and I have eight children, and we came to Russia because we want a better future for them," the priest says. "Now, if the only thing you're interested in is money, then maybe it's better to stay in America. You know, at least six years ago, when we moved here, you know, I easily could have made more money by staying in America than I could have by coming to Russia. But that's not the primary thing we're supposed to be concerned with, because you make money, you spend money, you lose money, you die, and you don't get to take any of it with you. But your eternity... Where are your children, or your grandchildren, or your great grandchildren going to spend eternity? And in my opinion, it's easier to raise a Christian family in a society where such abominations as homosexuality and transgenderism are not tolerated as it is to, you know, try to raise a Christian family in a society where those things are treated as normal."
However, Russia is not heaven and not everything is perfect here, the cleric says. However, the country offers spiritual freedom, which has been increasingly curtailed in the West, according to him.
Russian President Vladimir Putin reflected on the phenomenon while addressing the Valdai Discussion Club in October 2021. Per Putin, the battle for equal rights in some Western nations has translated into cancel culture, reverse racism, attacks on history and basic values such as respect for mothers, fathers, families, and even basic definitions concerning gender difference. According to Putin, the Bolsheviks propagated strikingly similar ideas in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution. Russia has learned this lesson, turning its historical experience into a competitive advantage.
22 October 2021, 10:50 GMT
Why Father Joseph Became an Orthodox Priest
Father Joseph was not raised as an Orthodox Christian: initially, he came from a Protestant family and had long served as Calvinist pastor in a small church in Omaha, Illinois.
"I was raised in America by Protestant parents and little Protestant churches just around the United States," he says. "They would travel from church to church, and my dad would do some preaching, and they would also sing and play musical instruments, singing Christian songs and things like this. And so I was raised in a very Protestant atmosphere."
However, as an adult he started to read more about history and found that Protestantism has only been around for about 500 years. According to the priest, the teachings of Protestantism are very different from what came before it. He started to dig into what the earliest Christians believed, and came to the conclusion that Orthodox Christianity has largely preserved the spirit of the same church that Jesus Christ and the Apostles founded. This is how he became an Antiochian Orthodox Christian in America. So whether one is Antiochian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, it's all the same teaching and it all goes back to the apostles, he explains.
"And, you know, a priest or a bishop in the Russian church can serve in Georgia, you know, a priest or bishop in Georgia can serve in Syria, and vice versa. So it's really all one church. The only reason they have different names is because the bishop who leads the Russian church is located in Russia, and most of the Russian churches are in Russia. The only reason they call it the Serbian church is because most of the Serbian churches are located in Serbia and the patriarch is in Serbia. But the teachings themselves are all the same. It's all one big church, regardless of location. So in America, I became a Christian in the Antiochian Orthodox Church."
A few years later, he was ordained as an Antiochian Orthodox priest, and only after he moved to Russia did he join the Russian Orthodox Church.
"So at that point, it was just as simple as my bishop in America, you know, sent a letter giving a blessing for me to become a priest in Russia. And then my bishop here in Russia accepted the letter and received my application. And he received me as a priest here in the Russian Orthodox Church," Father Joseph says.
9 August 2023, 18:48 GMT
Russia Welcomes Christian Immigrants From All Over the World
Now Father Joseph is helping others from around the world to travel and move to Russia.
"There's different ways that people come here, and people have different reasons. Some people come here because they're wanting to start a business or because they have family here. But in particular, the people that I try to help are people like me, who are living in America, Canada, Australia, England. And they don't have any Russian ancestry. They don't have a Russian wife or husband. And so it's a really big deal to move to Russia if you don't have those things. If you do have those things and you already speak the language fluently and you already have family here, it's much easier."
He meets people who are largely like himself: they speak English, they're from a Western country, but "they're sick and tired of the rainbow flags and the LGBT and the transgender stuff and a number of other problems in America, in the West." They see that a lot of Orthodox Christians live in Russia, he says. And these Westerners just decide that Russia is a better place to live and a better place for their families.
On his Substack blog, Father Joseph has outlined "nine great reasons" to move one's family to Russia. Among them: "the GloboHomo LGBT Rainbow Mafia is not allowed to force their views down your throat here"; one won't be subjected to cancel culture and one "won't get called a 'racist' every five seconds"; "the American military-industrial complex has no power in Russia"; "inexpensive, fertile, beautiful land is in abundance here"; taxes are low when compared to Western countries; and, above all, "there are gazillions of Orthodox churches and vibrant Orthodox Christian communities here."
Some Western families have already come to Russia, per Father Joseph: as of August 2022, two English-speaking families moved to Rostov – one from America, the other from Brazil; three English-speaking families moved to Pereslavl-Zalessky — two from America and one from France; meanwhile a whopping eight English-speaking families are building a community in the rural outskirts of Borisoglebsky, a half-hour drive west of Rostov Veliky, to name but a few. And this number is growing, according to the priest.
Moving to Russia is a difficult process, but it's getting easier, the cleric says: the Russian authorities "have been doing a lot of work trying to help smooth the process for, for good, family oriented, hard-working Christian immigrants who want to come here from America and the West."
"What I'm most grateful to Russia for is that the Russian government and the Russian people are smart enough not to judge American people because of the stupidity and the evil of the American government. They see those are two different things. Is the American government evil? Is the American government wicked? Is the American government crazy? Yes. But the American people are not necessarily like that. There's a lot of really good American individual people. And so when some good Christian, hard-working traditional families want to come from America and settle here in Russia, the Russian government is smart enough to see this is a different thing. These are not the people that we are enemies with. These are our friends."
