Why History Matters: That Tucker Carlson – Putin Interview

Here is a quick blog post about the recent Tucker Carlson exclusive interview with Vladimir Putin. I finally made my way through the entire 2-hour video, and I had one big takeaway part.

The posts that I write for the Veracity blog are mainly about Christian apologetics (how to defend your faith in an age when many hold Christian convictions to be rather suspect), but I also write about church history. It is not simply because I am a fanatic about history as a subject (a description I willfully accept), but because I fervently believe that historical amnesia is destructive to the church. The Tucker Carlson – Vladimir Putin interview is Exhibit A in making my case.

In the interview, President Putin took up about the first half an hour of the interview giving an historical justification for why Russia began attacking Ukraine two years ago.  Putin’s historical argument goes back over 1,000 years, to make the case that Ukraine is really part of Russia. But the argument is not just about ethnic identity. There is a deeply seated theological interpretation of history at work here.

Church history now bubbles up to the top of the 24-hour news cycle.

President Putin is convinced that Russian Orthodox Christianity also binds Russia and Ukraine together into an inseparable bond. The current war in Ukraine is a kind of “civil war” between different factions within the same Russian ethnic and religious family.

Nothing Putin said in the interview is really anything new.  But as historian Tom Holland comments in his reaction to the Carlson – Putin interview, the church history argument being advanced by President Putin is akin to the idea of the British government somehow coming up with a scheme to justify a complete takeover of the whole of Ireland because Saint Patrick came from Britain centuries and centuries ago to establish Christianity in Ireland.

Others have offered additional analysis of Putin’s assertion of certain “facts,” but Tom Holland’s utterly perceptive comments raises a crucial point. When an ideology becomes so strong that it keeps someone from entertaining the possibility that they might be wrong in their understanding of certain historical “facts,” then the consequences can be devastating.

Well over half a million casualties can be associated with the war in Ukraine over the past two years, with hundreds more being killed or wounded every day.

We see the same thing in the Israeli/Gaza conflict, as the body count increases daily, spawned by competing historical and theological narratives that extend back hundreds if not thousands of years.

We see this in disputes in church history, as different flash points continue to divide Christians today, due to theological differences which all look for historical justifications for such divisions.

Why does history matter, and even church history, in particular? Because without a proper grasp of history, the consequences can be devastating.