Department for External Church Relations
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Metropolitan Hilarion: European ideology is becoming antireligious
Anxiety grows out of the current processes in European society, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations, said in ‘The Church and the World’ TV programme.
“One should say openly that Europe, to which Russia looked in the 1990s, is no more. Today Europe is entirely different, and the European ideology is becoming basically antireligious. Many postulates which are sacrosanct to religious people are not only being subject to revision, but fall under the ban in certain situations,” Metropolitan Hilarion said.
He mentioned that even more often one might hear about Christians banned to wear baptismal cross upon pain of dismissal and people coerced into adhering to the so-called gender ideology according to which everyone should have a choice to sel ect his/her gender.
“It could be easy to ban the Bible as we read on its first pages that God created humankind in his image and according to his likeness, “male and female he created them.” We are convinced that gender is vested to everyone when born and to change it is impossible. Moreover, to change a gender is impossible even from the point of view of biology. One can have a reassignment surgery that would give a person of one gender an outer appearance of the other, but woman will not become a real man, and vice versa.”
Gender ideology is an ideology of deceit in some areas; the entire industry of gender transformation is based on this deception and the system of discriminating the differently minded people built on this deception is gaining strength, the archpastor said.
Metropolitan Hilarion added that cancel culture, or ‘call-out culture” was becoming a mechanism of such discrimination allowing to bar people from discussion. A bright example of cancel culture is given by the situation with the US ex-president Donald Trump who had been ousted from public realm and denied an opportunity to voice his opinion in the mass media and social networks.
Metropolitan Hilarion drew a parallel between this situation and Orwell’s “1984” in which the technology of writing people out of history is described and the period of mass repressions in the USSR when people had been erased fr om memory as though they never existed.
“Something similar is going on in the West. That what was initially presented as a culture of tolerance is developing into an extensive system of discriminating people who uphold traditional values, religious ones including,” the archpastor emphasized.
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