In a moving interview, Christian YouTube star Ruslan opened up about his family’s escape from an oppressive communist regime, his experience immigrating to America, how he came to faith, and the origins of his ultra-successful YouTube channel.
For context, In an interview with CBN’s Billy Hallowell on August 27, 2024, Ruslan said that his family narrowly escaped the horrific Armenian Genocide and travelled with his family to the United Staates, where Ruslan later became a Christian and started his YouTube channel, which he now uses to discuss topics related to faith and culture.
During the interview, Ruslan explained to Hallowell that his family had escaped oppressive conditions in Eastern Europe, living in locations where Armenians such as himself were fiercely persecuted for decades. Ruslan explained, “As the Soviet Union was starting to go through things in the ’80s and things are becoming tumultuous … my father, my grandfather … pretty much all the men had to get out of there as quickly as possible.”
Moving on, Ruslan shared that his family immigrated to the United States in 1991, when he was six, adding that America was dramatically different from what he was used to. He explained that in Azerbaijan, “I remember we would have a tub of water that we’d have to share amongst my family — my dad, and my mom, and my grandparents.”
In addition, Ruslan told Hallowell that when he was at a low point in his life, a friend’s mother became a Christian and evangelized to Ruslan, who explained, “They started sharing the Gospel with me, and they would tell me things like, ‘You’re going to do great things for God someday.” He later added that he started going to church and “hearing the gospel…hearing about this Jesus.”
Continuing, Ruslan explained that several years later, he ended up “fully surrendering my life to Jesus at the end of my junior year of high school.” He went on to say that not long after, he became a YouTuber, telling Hallowell, “During the pandemic, people started asking my opinion on other things. They knew that I was a Christian, and so I was doing, kind of, like, music reviews. I had seen some success as an independent musician, and people just started asking my opinions on other things.”
Later in the interview, Ruslan told Hallowell that he believes that “the culture has devolved,” explaining that he thinks that the main source of the decline is that “the faith we had as Americans wasn’t really a faith anchored in Jesus.” He added, “Whether [Americans are] Christian, Jewish, Muslim, agnostic, they kind of all believe the same core tenets of this moralistic, therapeutic deism.”
Building on his point, Ruslan explained that after he became a Christian, he pay attention to “certain things that God had an opinion on, and it was about how I was conducting my life,” explaining that he changed his life based on the teachings of Jesus rather than on the culture around him. He added, “Following God, and God’s ways, and God’s kingdom, and living His way, seeking His kingdom is not just to make my God happy for whatever arbitrary standards. It’s actually in the way He designed for me to live.”
Watch a clip from the interview:
Featured image credit: Screengrab from the embedded video