Part of why the red scare and "it's a distraction" reactions to Trump and Putin are so personally disturbing to me is that this unholy alliance between the US and Russia has been my nightmare for a long time because of my own #EmptyThePews story. I grew up in a cult that sat right at the intersection of US Evangelicalism and Russian Orthodoxy.

The Russian church was attractive to American fundamentalists in part because of its active engagement with social issues - in other words, united by the so-called culture wars.