Cradles, Converts, and Orthobros
I spent the first ¾ of the show exasperated and the last ¼ penitent
Parked. Around sunset on Wednesday in Holy Week I was just past the halfway mark on my 430-mile journey, parked at a gas station somewhere in Virginia. The journey was a melancholy one; our friend and godson Fr. Timothy Barkley had died in his sleep the evening of Palm Sunday, even though he was perfectly healthy, as far as anyone knew. Bishop Thomas asked my husband to drive up to Maryland to comfort his congregation and take over the Holy Week and Pascha services, and stay over for the Bright Week funerals. So Fr. Gregory drove up Tuesday, and I went on Wednesday.
I had pulled over to participate in a surprisingly contentious show on Australia Radio National (analogous to NPR in the US), called “God Forbid.” This episode had the title “Rise of the Orthobros.”
Aggressive. Our host, Justine Toh, began our conversation with a quote from George Demacopoulos of Fordham University, who asserts that there is an “aggressive Orthobro culture consisting of recent male converts,” marauding through our villages, burning hayricks, abducting dairymaids, and quaffing ale.
Justine started off by asking me to explain the difference between Eastern and Western Christianity. I launched in, enthusiastic as usual, saying that I love Orthodoxy because it has continued the faith of the early church, remaining largely unchanged. That’s because no one has the authority to change it; instead of a pope, we have community memory. No one can go back in time and change that memory.
Then Justine invited comments from Fr. Doru Costache. (His impressive credentials are too numerous to list; you can see them at the link.) He said:
“What we just heard from Presbytera Frederica is actually a very idealistic view of Orthodoxy which I think sells well, and perhaps this brings us closer to the topic, you know, why so much effervescence, you know, especially among younger gentlemen when it comes to embracing it.
“But this changelessness is utopian, it doesn’t exist,” he went on. “If we look at documents, and thankfully we have manuscripts and all that, that attest to earlier liturgies, what we have today as the ‘unchanged apostolic’ liturgy of the Orthodox Church is something that happened much later. I believe that this idea of an unchanged Orthodoxy since day one is, yeah, a good marketing point.”
What the heck? I thought. Why the hostility? Here we are in Holy Week, and this is how he talks to people?
I hadn’t said anything about the Divine Liturgy; I know it evolved in the early centuries. But that’s change that’s going in the same direction, like the stretching-forth of a vine. I’m talking about “change” that’s going in a different direction—you know, like when something changes.
Later on, I saw that there were three points at which the conversation could have benefitted from pinning down some distinctions:
1. “Changeless,” compared to what?
2. “More masculine,” compared to what?
3. “Selling” or “marketing” Orthodoxy, compared to what?
Let’s get started.
Changeless, compared to what? It’s possible that people raised in the Orthodox Church, “cradle Orthodox” (I’ll adopt Fr. Doru’s term), don’t see the Church’s essential changelessness like outsiders do, because they’ve never experienced the raucous, rending change that drove converts to their doors. I could only think, you have no idea what I mean by “change.”
Change is when your bishop says that the Theotokos was not a virgin, and the evangelist Matthew “invented the Virgin Birth to respond to criticism that Jesus was a bastard.”
Change is when your bishop says it wouldn’t matter if an archeologist found Jesus’ remains, because the Resurrection was not “a conjuring trick with bones.”
Change is when a Protestant pastor asks his bishop what he thinks of a famous bishop’s assertion that Jesus did not rise from the dead, and he replies, “I haven’t made up my mind about that yet.”
(This pastor told me, “I went home and started packing.” He ended up as an Orthodox priest.)
Change is when a national gathering of bishops doesn’t have enough votes to pass this resolution: “Clergy should abstain from sex outside of marriage.”
Change is when a diocesan convention doesn’t have enough votes to pass this resolution: “Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father except by him” (John 14:6).
Or, to go from tragedy to absurdity:
Change is when your bishop builds a giant “helter skelter” carnival ride inside the cathedral.
Change is when your bishop builds a mini-golf course inside the cathedral.
Change is—and “God Forbid” indeed—a “clown communion service.”
Oh yes indeed, I know what change looks like. But the evolution of the Liturgy in the early centuries? That’s not what I mean by “change.”
The Changeless Core. When I say Orthodoxy is changeless, I mean that there is an inner core that persists across all nations and jurisdictions, across all centuries. It is a practical thing, a way to get closer to Christ. And that’s what I love about Orthodoxy, that it has brought me closer to him. (Fr. Doru asked “Why so much effervescence?” That’s why.) The Apostles must have known this deep-rooted longing, and it stretches from them to the present, through everyone who loves him, through all the ages.
In Orthodoxy I found a whole way of life that helped me make real progress in knowing him and being with him. I had found some help in Catholic and Episcopalian resources, but it’s not the same; it’s piecemeal, it’s not a whole way of life. In the Orthodox Church I learned that there really is a way to be in his presence all the time, to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).
I love Jesus so much. That’s the most foundational thing about me. I am deeply grateful to the Church for bringing me closer to him.
This “way” (some call it a science) has evolved, but still remains the same. It takes on a different face in every culture, but remains inwardly the same. There’s a practical test that ensures the changeless core is still there: Does it make saints?
About this time, I heard BANG BANG BANG BANG on my window. A lady wanted to inform me that I had parked too close to the air hose. V-e-r-r-r-y quietly, still on the air, I put the car back in gear and crept to another parking place, while attempting to murmur along in an intelligent-sounding way.
Obnoxious Orthobros. Fr. Doru’s mention of “closer to the topic” refers to the intended theme of the show, the theory that excessively hirsute “Orthobros” are taking over the Church.
But the Orthobro effect simply isn’t evident in parish life. As our fellow panelist, Aethelwold Jenkins (catechist and head of the Parish Council at Good Shepherd Orthodox Church in Melbourne) said, “Fr Doru says he doesn’t have an Orthobro problem in his parish, Frederica says she doesn’t have an Orthobro problem in her church, we certainly don’t have an Orthobro problem in our church.”
Aethelwold went on, “I’m aware of the Orthobro phenomenon, but only through Facebook.” On social media, anyone can be a loudmouth, but that doesn’t make him a leader. Andy Warhol’s famous edict can be rephrased for the online world: “In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”
Some may be surprised to learn that American Orthodox oppose racism, sexism, tribalism, fascism, Neo-Naziism, etc. There are plenty of obnoxious people on social media, but pastors are naturally cautious about who they add to their flock. A loudmouth who wanted to join the Orthodox Church would go through some close, challenging examination. You can’t stamp out every brushfire on the Internet, but you can protect the health and unity of the worshiping community.
“More masculine,” compared to what? It’s long been clear, in American Orthodoxy, that we have more male than female converts (though that is changing). Orthodox pastors began noticing this trend about 20 years ago. It came as a surprise, because the opposite has long been the case in Western Christianity. In Protestant and Catholic churches, it’s women who fill the pews, while men are harder to find.
The evangelism website Got Questions pictured it this way:
It’s a real concern, and has inspired book-length treatments:
You see that first book, on the left? It was published in 1899. This is a longstanding problem.
In his book The Church Impotent, Leon Podles found that American churches have been regarded as female enclaves going back to colonial times. This is the case despite the tradition, till very recently, of an all-male clergy. The clergy were just seen as effeminate.
When Western Christian men are asked why they don’t like going to church, the same answer keeps coming up: it’s too feminine. Their church treats them like a big baby. Worship is couched in pampering terms, and harps on the worshipers’ pain, weakness, and brokenness. Jesus is depicted as endlessly sympathetic, and endlessly focused on them. Worship songs in this style have been called “Jesus is my boyfriend” music.
When I speak at Protestant colleges I’m often the chapel speaker, so I get to experience some of this worship. A particular low point was when a girl with a guitar stood on stage and sang to Jesus, “I want to rest my head on your chest.”
Men further complain that life in their church is not going anywhere. Once you make a “decision for Christ” and “take Jesus as your personal savior,” you’re “saved.” After that, you just wait to die and go to heaven. Men complain that there’s no goal, no challenge, not even something men could band together and tackle. It’s just a vat of soft emotions. No wonder men, and not a few women, are itching to get out of there.
Some people say, “Well, women are just more religious than men.” But that’s not true of other world religions—Islam or Buddhism or Orthodox Judaism. Somehow Western Christian worship acquired a soft, affirming contour, which those who reject it perceive as feminine.
More men than women. When Orthodox pastors started talking about the unexpected quantities of men they were seeing, I wondered what the appeal was. So I did the obvious thing: I asked them. I emailed about a hundred guys, asking why the Orthodox Church was attractive to men. I compiled their responses into a lengthy article, which has circled the web ever since.
But that article was written in 2007. We’ve been observing this situation for 20 years. And in all that time, no troop of muscly macho-men has taken over the Church.
Converts, even male converts, don’t want to change things. The changelessness is what they came for. Their main interest is in deepening their life in Christ, and they find what they’re looking for. If a troublemaker showed up, the pastor would set him straight.
In Competition. I’m sure it sounds strange, to cradle Orthodox, that Western Christians could have developed a sappy form of worship. They might well wonder how that could happen.
The first thing to grasp is that Western churches are in competition with each other.
This goes back to the Protestant Reformation, which got kicked off in 1517. It began energetically, when a number of intelligent men challenged the Roman Catholic Church, declaring their new interpretations of Scripture.
But these men differed from each other, and then they multiplied. Before you knew it, they were popping up every time you looked around. And disagreement was the very air they breathed. If you wanted to be a leader, if you wanted to make a name for yourself, you had to criticize your predecessors’ interpretation and come up with something new. Theological speculation took on a restless edge.
In time, the whole situation turned upside down. Instead of a few highly-trained scholars interpreting Scripture, individual Christian were picking the interpretation they liked best. Everyone felt competent to interpret the Bible in original ways. Every man became his own pope.
So churches split, and split again; that’s the recurring story of the last 500 years of Western Christianity. Now, it’s said, there are thousands of Western denominations. There’s an old joke that rescuers pick up a shipwrecked man on a desert island, and notice that he has built two churches. They ask why, and he says, pointing, “That’s the church I go to, and that’s the church I used to go to.”
Thus churches found themselves in competition with each other, like stores competing for customers. For many centuries this was a competition among theological ideas, and there were some odd and even tragic ideas that emerged. (Did Jesus suffer so horrifically on the Cross, not only to pay the penalty for our sins, but also to absorb the Father’s righteous wrath? That’s what your Calvinist neighbor believes.)
We care about you. Something happened in the 1960s, though. Modern advertising experimented with a shift in tone, focusing less on the product and more on how much the consumer deserved the product. Affirmation was emphatic, and flattery traipsed freely about. Businesses vowed that they lived to serve the customer, and rejoiced only in catering to his wishes. There were incessant hollow claims that “We care about you.” Store managers starting requiring cashiers to say “Have a nice day,” as if “caring” could be dispatched by recitation.
Churches picked up on this fresh way of appealing to the public. “Relevance” became the catchword. The mood lingered and evolved into a mandate to identify the “felt needs” of the unchurched. If they could only identify what unbelievers thought they needed, they could pitch Jesus as the answer. By the mid-1970s, “seeker-sensitive” churches were appearing, with megachurches in their wake.
Quantities of new worship songs were now being written, emphasizing how much Jesus cares about you, and old-fashioned talk about repentance and discipleship was put in a box in the attic. Churches competed to proclaim their exquisite sensitivity to churchgoers’ sadness, brokenness, and endless appetite for comfort.
Worship was changing, in these churches. Originally it was aimed at God, but now it got confused with “reaching” the worshiper. The worship team’s goal for Sunday morning was to give the worshipers a good worship experience.
There’s some poignancy here, because the impulse to reach and serve others is honest and self-sacrificial. But the approach is fundamentally misguided. Making the worshiper the focus of attention just makes him squirm. It’s not only that the prospective “seeker” doesn’t have a clear, much less accurate, idea of what his true needs are. It’s also exhausting, to be the focus of such eager, caressing solicitude. Believe it or not, it’s a relief to put self aside and focus on God instead.
An Orthodox priest told me that an irritated woman came up to him after the Sunday Liturgy and said, “Father, I didn’t get a single thing out of worship this morning.” He replied, “That’s all right, I wasn’t doing it for you.”
If you’re a cradle Orthodox, you may never have experienced this kind of church; maybe you didn’t know that non-liturgical worship even exists. When converts visit the churches they left behind, the tone of the worship may feel actively unendurable. It feels strangely invasive. The atmosphere is subtly cloying. Despite all the worship leaders’ good intentions, they have an uncanny need to flee.
That’s just a quick sketch of what men mean, when they say that Orthodoxy is “more masculine.” It’s focused on God, not on the worshiper’s emotions or “felt needs.” It’s refreshingly objective. It includes a plan, a challenge. It knows how to help people get closer to Christ.
That’s why men become Orthodox. It’s what draws women, too.
Back to the Orthobros. Fr. Doru, in one of his articles, says it is American priests who are pushing this macho theme:
“Certain North American ‘Eastern’ Orthodox priests (in both Canada and the United States of America) preach a macho ‘gospel,’ claiming that Orthodox Christianity aims to restore the lost manhood of males.”
Are these priests preaching that “restoring lost manhood” is the aim, the purpose, the whole point of Orthodoxy? That this is the Gospel? That would be horrifying, and heretical. But I need to see some evidence that this threat actually exists.
Fifteen names. So I asked Fr. Doru to send me the names of 15 Orthodox leaders who are promoting this new theology. A movement capable of threatening the whole Church must have at least 15 advocates. But it’s been over a month and, so far, nothing.
Here’s something that occurred to me later on. It’s kind of weird.
If a horrifying macho-gospel were really making inroads into Orthodoxy, I would be very distressed. But if someone explained to me that it was a false alarm, that it was just a self-perpetuating “Reds under the bed” kind of rumor, I would be very relieved.
So I would expect that Fr. Doru and others who fear an Orthobro takeover would feel relief, since it’s not a real threat, after all. Loudmouths are out there, but pastors are holding the line. No takeover is going on.
The weird part is, I think that won’t happen. I think they’ll prefer to go on insisting that this danger is real. In that case, what they feel toward it may not be fear or distress, but something else.
Maybe it’s contempt. Unfortunately, that can be addictive. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Beautiful. I agreed strongly with much of the remainder of Fr. Doru’s article. And I love the way he described our beautiful Orthodox faith during our radio conversation, too. The Orthodoxy he talks about is the one I love—the one converts, male or female, love. And his background is Romanian; I have many personal connections that make Romanian Orthodoxy dear to me.
Later on in our conversation, he said:
“Orthodox Christianity is supposed to be faithful and truthful to itself, its principles, its fundamentals, and we don’t sell masculinity.”
Yes!
“Orthodox Christianity … is not focused on serving or ministering to a certain segment of the population. It’s a holistic approach to humanity where the ideal should be the humanity as revealed to us in the divine-human form of Jesus Christ. A humanity with which we can resonate, regardless of our gender.”
Yes!
I agree absolutely with these statements. I would be tenaciously opposed to any macho-Orthobro uprising. But, though I’ve spoken at hundreds of Orthodox churches, I’ve never seen it.
I noticed that when our episode landed on its own webpage on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation site, the title had changed. It was no longer “Rise of the Orthobros,” but now “The Orthodox Surge.” I wonder if the course of our conversation reoriented the producers’ expectations.
Buddies. While denouncing any evil macho project, I want to put in a good word for guys being guys. It’s good for men in a congregation to form strong friendships with other men. They need a chance to get together without the women, just like the women get together without the men.
When I was invited to be on this radio show I was surprised, in fact, to hear the term “Orthobros” applied to something frankly evil, because I’ve always heard it to just mean Orthodox guys who have formed hearty friendships. Those bonds are a good thing, and it’s good that the Church enables them; the secular outside world does little to support close male relationships.
Here’s a funny Facebook video showing what Orthobros actually talk about at church, and the tenacity of the default male setting of competition.
Male friendships are a good thing. Women benefit when men build brotherly ties. Women need good men because there are bad men.
We’ve been through some confusing decades, as far as the two sexes go, and talking about male and female differences would frankly be healthy. All healthy cultures love those differences (“Vive la difference!” say the French), and for a good reason: that’s where babies come from. The difference between men and women is the direct cause of new life appearing in this old world. That difference is the most ancient and fundamental grounds of hope.
So guys being guys, and guys talking about being guys, is a good thing. The cure for toxic masculinity is not censorship, but healthy masculinity.
Beards! Fr. Doru brought up beards several times, laughing, apparently thinking they are a vanity display on the part of American converts.
But aren’t beards in fashion everywhere these days? Even Hollywood stars have beards. Is that not the case in Australia?
You can estimate the breadth of the ongoing beard fad by scrolling the endless display of beard products for sale on Amazon. The Orthodox convert market is too small to merit such attention.
This before-and-after, below, floored me. Can anyone possibly think “After” is more attractive?
How did they get here? Cradle Orthodox may not know the route by which converts arrive. Well, they proceed with great caution. They hear about Orthodoxy somewhere and look it up online, and then start browsing and gathering information. They read books, watch videos, listen to podcasts, and scour the Internet. They meet Orthodox people online who don’t mind answering questions. They stumble across bad information as well as good information; but when they see a consensus among the good guys, it puts them back on track.
They can stay in this “information gathering” phase for years. I guess it’s a sign of the times, that people are so afraid of being cheated. A lady passing through town visited us for a Vespers service, and told me she had been studying Orthodoxy for five years, but it was the first time she’d set foot in an Orthodox church.
Sometimes, though, a man delays because his wife objects to Orthodoxy, and he’s hoping she’ll come around; if she doesn’t, he may eventually be chrismated without her. About one time out of five the roles are reversed, and a wife is chrismated without her husband.
Sometimes the delay is because parents and friends are alarmed, and insist that Orthodoxy is a cult. Many a Protestant employed by a Christian ministry faces losing his job but, eventually, they do it anyway. When Protestant radio host Hank Hanegraaff was chrismated, early the next morning radio stations started canceling his show. Some of his old friends with global ministries announced that he was no longer a Christian. For some converts, there’s a price to pay.
Sometimes, though, the delay is caused by their own theological blocks. They may keep wondering if icons really are idols, or if it’s wrong to pray to saints. Fr. Peter Gillquist used to say that the three biggest roadblocks to conversion, for Protestants, were “Mary, Mary, and Mary.”
“You taught me about my own church.” That reminds me of a paradox I began to see, after a few years in the Church. My first book about Orthodoxy was Facing East, published in 1997. I was astonished that many purchasers were people who had grown up in the Orthodox Church. Whenever I met them I would say, “But you’ve been Orthodox all your life! You already know all this!” and they would say, “No, we don’t! Nobody ever taught us!”
Eventually I perceived a pattern. People who grow up in the Orthodox Church have deep memories of being vigilantly monitored in church, and hearing continuous corrections: “Stand up straight, keep your toes pointed at the altar, keep facing the priest, get your hands out of your pockets, don’t cross your legs,” and so on. (A man from Greece told me he wanted to go through the congregation and staple all the pockets closed.) This monitoring and scolding makes a deep impression; twenty or thirty years ago, it had made the same deep impression on the parent. This goes on for generations.
This childhood experience teaches a good thing: that the Orthodox temple is a holy place, and deserves our greatest respect. But sometimes that was all they had been told. They learned a Sunday School version of Orthodoxy, but were never taught the depths of the grown-up faith. I often heard, “You taught me about my own church.”
Converts, on the other hand, get themselves thoroughly educated about Orthodoxy, often before even joining the Church. But they don’t know the thing cradle Orthodox do, some indefinable thing about living the Orthodox life, about the kind of respect to show to its elements, and the awesome holiness of the church temple.
But consider where those converts were coming from. Maybe “worship” was held in a mega-church with movie-theater seats and Starbucks in the lobby. Maybe they had coffee and doughnuts during worship, and rocked in those comfy seats. Maybe “worship” meant rock songs and funny skits.
Or maybe “worship” meant sitting in a classroom-like auditorium with blank walls, while the pastor gives a 45-minute expository sermon on the book of Numbers. Or maybe “worship” took place in a church with an interior painted black, to look like a cool music venue, and worship songs had an emo flavor.
Converts don’t have those deep memories of being scolded for insufficiently respectful church behavior. In general, they’re more casual. They don’t dress up on Sunday, and don’t stand at attention in church. They don’t monitor their kids as closely. They feel comfortable looking around during worship and smiling at children. That could still be more reverent than the behavior in their old church.
Of course, some converts come from a rich liturgical Western tradition, and understand the holiness of a church and the sacraments very well. (These converts won’t put things off for years; their hunger for the Eucharist is too strong.) But, depending on their prior experience, converts may need time and assistance in understanding the intense holiness of an Orthodox temple.
Statistics. Statistics on American converts show some surprising changes.
“Converts to Orthodoxy: Statistics and Trends” says that “Between the years 2013-2020, the difference between numbers of male and female converts was slight.” In 2015 it was equal but, oddly enough, in 2016-2017 there were more female than male converts. In 2018 there was a swing back to more men, and the study ended in mid-2023.
More recently, when I travel and speak to pastors, they tell me they’re seeing fewer singles, and more couples and young families. Lots of children, babies, and toddlers.
Perhaps more notable than the diminishing gender imbalance is the geometric increase in numbers overall, the “Orthodox Surge.” I don’t know if anyone can explain that.
The Home Front. The parish I know best is my own, Christ the Savior Greek Orthodox Church in Bluff City, Tennessee, where my son, Fr. Stephen Mathewes, is the pastor. This is a small city in the American South, in the Appalachian Mountains, with a population that’s historically been rural and poor. These are the people derided as “hillbillies.”
Before covid, we had 60-70 worshippers on a Sunday morning. Now it’s routinely 250. On Pascha, we had 325.
We baptized 34 on Holy Saturday, and here they are, smiling in their new white garments.
Just the previous Christmas we had baptized 27, using a setup like this one: two Rubbermaid horse troughs, improved with fancy drapery, side by side. (Those horse troughs are what new churches usually buy to accommodate adult immersion). My husband (Fr Gregory Mathewes-Green) and son (Fr. Stephen Mathewes) kept going down the line, one at each font, till they all had been baptized.
Fr. Stephen tells me that there are already another 60-80 inquirers talking with him about Orthodoxy, ranging from the merely curious to those who want to be catechumens. As in most parishes, the catechumenate is a process of study and lived experience, and takes at least a year.
And another thing: these new members are young. Look at that photo. We have only a handful of gray-haired people, while a third of our congregation is under 18. We are being overrun by toddlers.
There’s also a growing core of Hispanics, which I hear is a trend across the South. At my parish we say the “Our Father” in many worshipers’ native languages, and the Hispanics are most numerous. We say it in English, Greek, Spanish, Swahili, French, Ukrainian, Russian, German, Arabic—I think that’s it, at present. Quite a cosmopolitan crew, considering that it’s Appalachia.
The loveable thing about these converts is they’re so teachable. They hunger to know more about Orthodoxy. They will do anything you tell them. This past Lent the congregation noticed one member of the church was doing some extra prostrations, and now they’re all doing the extra prostrations. They love Orthodoxy so much, and want to embrace it completely.
But there’s a serious problem: the clergy shortage. My son’s congregation has multiplied three or four times over, but there’s still only one of him. Since those seeking ordination are sent to seminary for three years, new priests can’t be conjured out of thin air. It is not clear what the solution will be.
The Show. I want to quote something Fr. Doru said later in the show; it’s a long quote, but I’ll give it intact so he can speak for himself. Fr. Doru said:
“Who’s running the show? If you have priests who are just selling Orthodoxy, a kind of marketing exercise, of course you have the pews filled with all these disgruntled young and not so young people. [At this point you can hear me laughing and saying “No! no!”] Who’s running the show? When you have priests who are ordained without a personal experience in Christ, on the one hand, and on the other hand without proper education, then this kind of exercise becomes the norm.
“There is a lot of discussion on this front in North America and I read articles by priests and theologians and so on and so forth on this topic, and I am stunned to see certain priests, usually they are converts to Orthodoxy, especially from evangelical denominations, they sell a kind of Orthodoxy, I prefer to call it macho Orthodoxy, which somehow is ‘relevant,’ which ‘responds to the needs of the time.’ But this is a very NGO kind of approach to things. Now you are serving or ministering to a group of disgruntled people who for some reason don’t find within their own traditions a response, or whatever they expect.
“But this has nothing to do with Orthodox Christianity, which is not focused on serving or ministering to a certain segment of the population. It’s a holistic approach to humanity where the ideal should be the humanity as revealed to us in the divine-human form of Jesus Christ. A humanity with which we can resonate, regardless of our gender. [At this point I’m nodding emphatically and murmuring in agreement.]
“When we isolate a certain group within the community and we focus on that group and market the entire Orthodox Church for that group, ‘We are the solution for you’ says the bearded priest preaching and looking like, I don’t know, someone from a biker gang, then you realize that for a while, for 10 days or so, that kind of preaching can bring a certain disgruntled people who otherwise would look for Nazi groups or chat rooms, where their masculinity is affirmed. Orthodox Christianity is supposed to be faithful and truthful to itself, its principles, its fundamentals, and we don’t sell masculinity.
“The best of the Orthodox tradition is not about males. From St. Paul onwards we have the message that as Christians, as renewed in Christ, we are supposed to transcend the binaries, Greek-Jew, male-female, slave-free, and so on and so forth. I have no sympathy whatsoever for this phenomenon and I believe we should get serious about it.”
Sorting it out. I strongly affirm parts of the closing paragraphs, but a lot of this is a stack of misconceptions, balanced on top of each other like Jenga blocks.
- “Who’s running the show?” I actually don’t know what this means. Locally, that would be parish priests, and we have excellent bishops.
- “Selling Orthodoxy”? Selling is the last thing we need. We are already overwhelmed with people who found us on their own.
- Priests ordained without a personal experience in Christ? What a strange idea. Converts who seek ordination are motivated by a deep relationship with Christ. Evangelical Christianity has its limitations, but it gets good marks for emphasizing this relationship diligently.
- Priests ordained without proper education? This is puzzling. In the US, the norm is for men to attend seminary for three years and earn a Masters’ degree.
- “There is a lot of discussion on this front in North America, and I read articles by priests and theologians and so on and so forth on this topic.”
Are these articles by Orthobros, exulting in their takeover? Or articles about evil Orthobros?
I expect it’s the latter. This can be a circular thing, where people who agree on something write articles affirming each other’s opinions. (It seems to me this happens most often among academics.) Each new article is taken as additional proof of what they already agree on.
But the theory of dangerous Orthobros has this flaw, in that we can’t see them. We can see men, and it’s fine for men to see each other, and become friends and brothers. But a threatening super-masculine menace cannot be seen. It seems unlikely that one would suddenly emerge after 20 years.
- “Relevant” and “responding to the needs of the time” is curiously outdated language; I don’t think anyone uses it today. This language came into use a full sixty years ago, in the wake of Vatican II.
And it has proved futile. The “relevance” idea is embarrassing and hopeless, but it took hold, and now look. There’s a lurking, glowing helter-skelter in the cathedral.
People don’t talk about “relevance” now, certainly not Orthodox clergy.
“Certain priests” are saying it. I wonder who. Maybe they’ll be in that list of fifteen names.
- “Disgruntled people who for some reason don’t find within their own traditions a response, or whatever they expect.”
This is also dated language; nobody’s disgruntled these days. Maybe it’s a reference to Protestant pastors of the early 1990s, who heard their bishops deny the Nicene Creed—and discovered, to their shock, that no one had the authority to stop them. I think it’s reasonable to feel disgruntled over that.
I saw a shirt like this at the 1991 Episcopal convention. For us, it was an agonizing time. My husband’s family had been Episcopalian for many generations. He graduated from an Episcopal seminary, and served as a priest in that church for 15 years. But—well, I’ll try to apply Fr. Doru’s language to ourselves—we could not “find within our own tradition” what we should rightly “expect:” a commitment to theological stability, and continuity with the faith of the ages.
The tragedy is that all the liberalizing and updating of the mainline churches was designed to attract new members. The thinking was: If we loosen up, get with the times, suspend the more-supernatural theology and the more-difficult morality, people will come flocking in.
And the opposite happened. The Episcopal Church has been decreasing in size for decades now, with one in seven churches closed in the last 20 years. Two-thirds of church membership is over the age of 60. It’s brutal, but near-extinction projected around 2050.
I’m sorry to see this happen. There was so much to love about the Episcopal Church when we were getting started, fifty years ago.
Maybe cradle Orthodox are not aware of this history. Maybe they can’t fathom why converts would leave our home-churches. Aren’t all churches the same? And I can only say: You have no idea.
When we arrived at the Orthodox door, we were bearing our share of grief. We could fairly be described as disgruntled then. But we were able to to put that aside, and gradually were healed in soul, and came to trust the stability of Orthodoxy.
So you don’t hear about the disgruntled any more. That wave of converts arrived thirty years ago, and exchanged their sorrow for joy.
Marketing, compared to what? I kept puzzling over why Fr. Doru thinks we’re “marketing” or “selling” Orthodoxy. It can’t mean that he thinks we literally hired a PR agent and bought advertising space. It must mean that the way we talk about Orthodoxy sounds like advertising, to him.
This is where the penitence came in. It finally came to me that the American style, all by itself, is going to feel like marketing to more-sober Europeans. They are more sober with good reason, because the invasion of your homeland is unsurpassed in delivering suffering. Mutual invasion has crossed and re-crossed Europe for millennia. We’d call the World Wars “tribal warfare” if they’d happened on a different continent.
But America, it’s been said, has no tragic sense. Maybe that’s because our oceanfront borders protect us so well from invasion. (It was Native Americans who got the tragic sense, in that case.) We enjoy a gratuitous sense of invincibility, which makes us buoyant and extroverted.
That must be offensive or even painful to those who have known centuries of suffering. The line from Proverbs seems to fit: singing a cheerful song to someone with a heavy heart is like taking away their coat in wintertime (Proverbs 25:20).
I tried to express this to Fr. Doru, but went overtime, and some of it was cut from the ending of the show. But here’s a summary of what I wanted to say, with some further thoughts that came to me, as I drove on into the night:
Penitence. I love Romanian Orthodoxy. I was blessed to have Fr. George Calciu, a survivor of Soviet torture, for my spiritual father. And I loved Fr Roman Braga, another survivor of the prisons. It was something Fr. Roman said that I’m thinking about now.
Fr. Roman always said that every ethnic group has to work out its own kind of Orthodoxy. Americans will have to make an American Orthodoxy, and it won’t look like Romanian or Greek or any other kind. We will create our own American kind of Orthodoxy.
But I suspect that this American kind will be offensive, to some Romanian Orthodox. We’re too loud, too bold, too informal. We smile too much. From your perspective it must look like, “This is clearly selling something, it’s marketing.” But it’s just what Americans are like. We laugh, we’re loud, we’re expansive.
An example of the difference is that cradle Orthodox don’t want to have noisy children or babies in the church. People raised in Orthodoxy have a profound sense of awe about the temple, and treat the building itself with great respect. So they say, “Don’t bring a baby in the church! This is a holy temple, not a nursery!”
But Americans like having babies in church. They say, “If you can’t hear crying, the church is dying!” A church with wandering toddlers, and little boys gazing at a candle flame, and schoolgirls cuddling newborns—all that seems exactly right.
I know how beautiful Orthodoxy is, so I need to ask your forgiveness, because what Americans are going to do with it might look cheap to you. It might look like marketing. It might even look disrespectful. It won’t look like Romanian Orthodoxy. It will be the Orthodoxy that grows out of our distinctive American life. Forgive me, forgive us, for what we are nevertheless going to do, as we create this thing never seen before, American Orthodoxy.
Toward the end there I could hear him murmuring in a kind way. We disagree on some things, but agree on the most important thing. I think it ended well.
Back on the road. It was dark by that point. Jennifer wrapped up the show, very pleased with how it had gone. We hung up, and I took off my headset and started the car. It would be close to midnight when I got to that little town in Maryland, but I was going to get there.
I've always thought that Americans convert to Orthodoxy because of the ABSENCE of marketing - specifically the type of marketing that targets us, the customers. If the faith doesn't change to suit anyone and applies universally, there's no obvious opportunity for marketing in its modern form.
Oh Presbytera Frederica, this hits home. I'm a former Southern Baptist who converted to Orthodoxy in the mid-'90s.
In college I went to an ELCA church in Hoboken. After graduation I moved to Long Island and there was an unaffiliated Baptist church within walking distance from my residence. I went to 1 service and never went back. It was an early manifestation of the "feel-good, Jesus loves you" type of church you describe. I ended not not attending any church for a few years. Then I met the woman who would eventually be my wife.
She's the daughter of Greek immigrants, and of course attended a Greek Orthodox parish. I started attending with her. We got married in her parish (the priest graciously allowed my BIL, a Baptist minister, to administer vows before the Orthodox service began; he just could not pronounce us husband and wife).
We had a daughter and we baptized her in the parish. And soon after, it hit me: this is the Church. I became a catechumen and was eventually chrismated.
We moved to North Carolina and a friend invited me to go to his church, since an astronaut was going to give his testimony. We went and I saw the drum kit, electric guitars, etc., on the stage. If I were alone, I would have walked out.
Our current parish is convert heavy, and we're at home there.
(Sorry for the mini-essay.)