Yes, to all of those who have written — I have seen the National Public Radio feature that ran with this headline: “Orthodox Christian churches are drawing in far-right American converts.”
It would be hard to imagine a more vicious, one-sided propaganda piece than this one and, if you want to see a blow-by-blow breakdown, read this post by Orthodox convert Rod Dreher: “The Cathedral Vs. The Orthodox Church.”
Rod is using the term “cathedral” as a reference to a particular set of elite media and cultural institutions on what used to be called the “left.” Needless to say, NPR — like the editorial pages of The New York Times — plays a crucial doctrinal role in this cathedral. Dreher (a close friend for nearly 30 years) notes, right up top, concerning this NPR sermon:
… I concede that it is based on a kernel of truth: some outsiders are finding their way to Orthodoxy, thinking that it will be the far right at prayer. A friend who attends a large parish told me last year that they are seeing some young men showing up with that in mind, only to find out otherwise. Let me be clear at the start of this essay that I concede that this phenomenon is not invented out of whole cloth.
In my own small parish, we have seen a surge of young inquirers, but they are coming not with far-right politics in mind, but because they are looking for something more stable and deeper than the churches they had been attending. And yes, it is true that some come because they correctly sense that Orthodoxy is much less likely to surrender to the wokeness that is infesting many Protestant and Catholic congregations. Note well, though, that to NPR, all of this is “far-right.”
Veteran GetReligion readers will know that I am a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, as well — coming from a Texas Baptist family with several members in the center of Southern Baptist life. If you want to know more about my own journey, see this lecture/essay from 2006: “What do the converts want?”
When people ask why I converted, my short response is that I was seeking a beautiful, conservative, ancient form of Christian tradition that didn’t include ties to American fundamentalism. Since my conversion 23 years ago, I have talked to — conservative estimate — several hundred converts in various settings, including my own parishes.
I would like to focus on the most obvious errors of omission and commission in the NPR piece — an important detail or two about the actual history of the “convert era” in “American” Orthodoxy, which began in the 1980s (click here for link to a crucial book). But first, here is the overture:
When Sarah Riccardi-Swartz moved from New York City to a small Appalachian town in West Virginia in the fall of 2017, she was searching for an answer to a puzzling question. Why had a group of conservative American Christians converted to Russian Orthodoxy?
"It's typically an immigrant faith, so I was really interested in that experience and why it spoke to converts," said Riccardi-Swartz, a postdoctoral fellow in the Recovering Truth project at Arizona State University.
Riccardi-Swartz's study focused on a community of mostly former evangelical Christians and Catholics who had joined the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). The West Virginia location, in addition to having a church parish, was also home to the largest English-speaking Russian Orthodox monastery in the world.
Over a year of doing research, Riccardi-Swartz learned that many of these converts had grown disillusioned with social and demographic change in the United States. In ROCOR, they felt they had found a church that has remained the same, regardless of place, time and politics. But Riccardi-Swartz also found strong strains of nativism, white nationalism and pro-authoritarianism, evidenced by strong admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
If you know anything about trends in Orthodoxy these days, it’s obvious that the roots pf this article run deep into a strategically located (New York City, for example) circle of Orthodox and close-to-Orthodox activists who are lobbying to change centuries of Orthodox teachings on moral theology. This camp sees the decades of Orthodox converts as its primary enemy in this doctrinal struggle and the existence of some genuinely alt-right converts has provided a chance to slam the convert era, in general.
Here is another crucial chunk of that transition from the narrow, valid story hook to the broader, ridiculous thesis.
Aram Sarkisian, a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Northwestern University's Department of History, said this new growth from converts has helped some branches of Orthodoxy offset a decline in multigenerational families in the church. Sarkisian said these converts often find their way to Orthodoxy because they seek a haven for what they consider to be the most important cultural issues of the day.
"They're drawn to what they believe to be conservative views on things like LGBTQ rights, gender equality. Abortion is a really big issue for these folks, the culture wars issues, really," Sarkisian said. "And so they leave other faith traditions that they don't believe to be as stringent about those issues anymore."
Sarkisian said he began to see white nationalist and nativist views surface within Orthodox spaces online just around the time that these shifts began taking place.
"I first started noticing this around 2010, 2011 on Orthodox blogs, where I started to see language and rhetoric that was subtly racist and was subtly engaging in what we would now know as the alt-right," Sarkisian said. "They bring it with them into the church because they see Orthodoxy as amenable to these goals, to these viewpoints."
If you know your history, you know that a tiny stream of converts into Orthodoxy turned into an important river in the mid-1980s when a dozen or so evangelical leaders — Campus Crusade for Christ was a common touchpoint — ended a decade of studies in theology and church history with the decision to join canonical Orthodoxy.
The voice of this group was the late Father Peter Gillquist, along with the late Father Gordon Walker of Franklin, Tenn. (who became my family’s spiritual father). After they were rejected by Orthodox bodies linked to Greece and Russia, they were embraced by the ancient Antiochian Orthodox Church, which has its roots in Syria and Palestine.
Any story about the rise of Orthodox converts that does not discuss this movement is shallow, to say the least. This is especially true because, as we will see, that name — Gillquist — and its link to another important figure in this story. Let’s head back to the NPR report:
Perhaps the most well known among Orthodox converts who worked within alt-right circles was Matthew Heimbach. He had established the Traditionalist Worker Party, which helped organize a deadly gathering of neo-Nazis and white nationalists at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. But years before that, Heimbach's activities had already created waves within some Orthodox circles.
In 2014, he was excommunicated from the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America shortly after he had been accepted into it. During his brief time there, Heimbach's activities with other Orthodox converts on a college campus in Indiana drew scrutiny. In explaining the decision to cut Heimbach off from the church, the priest who had brought him into the church explained, "I did not understand at that time that he held nationalistic, segregationist views."
The Orthodox priest who rejected Heimbach and sought his excommunication was Father Peter Jon Gillquist, the son of the leader of the evangelical Orthodox circle that started it all. Turning to scripture, Gillquist the younger stated: “For, ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ ”
Did the NPR editors know any of this?
Did they know that every single voice in this feature came from one extreme camp in these Orthodox debates and that the bogeyman in this piece — a valid one, I will stress — represented another extreme point of view, to say the least?
Maybe, but I doubt it. The result is, of course, a slam piece that ignores the actual story of what is happening in American Orthodoxy.
Now, I live in the mountains of East Tennessee — a region in which there are small pockets of alt-right extremists who have turned to Orthodoxy. I know people hurt by them.
At the same time, I attend a parish with Russian ties (in the Orthodox Church in America) that has been rejected by these folks. It’s a very conservative church and we are, during COVID-tide, seeing a surge in converts. The last thing they are looking for is some alt-right fellowship with Vladimir Putin looming in the background (and that includes our parish’s Russians and Romanians). Most of the converts are former evangelicals, while others were Catholics or part of liberal “mainline” Protestant bodies.
They have unique and complex personal stories. Are they seeking doctrinal conservatism and a very traditional approach to worship and faith, to one degree or another? Yes. Are other parishes seeing this across our Diocese of the South and elsewhere? Yes, and it is also true that many of the young men have dug into the work of the iconographer and thinker Jonathan Pageau (a name that would cause those in the New York CIty circle to grind their teeth in fury).
Let me recommend this “On Religion” column about Pageau and these new converts: “When facing cultural chaos, priests need ancient symbols and truths, not more political talk.”
If you want to know more about the convert era in Orthodoxy, this NPR hit job is not going to help you very much. You need to back up to some earlier people and facts — to times before Putin and even Donald Trump.
Just saying.
FIRST IMAGE: Uncredited illustration of the inside of an Orthodox church sanctuary featured at the Journey to Orthodoxy website.