Orthodox Reflections

Evangelical Protestants are mighty pleased over the ascension of Rep. Mike Johnson to the Speaker’s chair in the US House.  A taste:

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a conservative Christian activist, took to X to express his support for Johnson’s election. “Mike has been a friend for a long time, and I believe God has answered our prayers with his election,” Perkins tweeted shortly after Johnson was elected House speaker. “Mike will be the America First Speaker we need and will lead with spiritual insight and political courage. Join me in giving thanks to God and covering our new Speaker in prayer.”

But MAGA Mike won’t be able to ‘save America’ from his new perch in Congress.  For the America they are trying to save was doomed from the beginning.  Any people that places the freedom of the individual as the cornerstone of their societal foundation is doomed to failure, as the centrifugal forces such a principle unleashes tear apart all meaningful ties between people and generations.

First of 7 Core Principles of Conservatism – official House Speaker Website of Rep. Mike Johnson

Indeed, most of US history is nothing more than the continued attempts to keep the inevitable splintering from occurring – the unlawful writing of a new constitution in 1787, the violent suppression of Shay’s Rebellion, the Sedition Act of 1798, the several compromises over slavery, Lincoln’s illegal invasion of the South, the immoral actions involved in the Radical Reconstruction of the South, the federal government’s waging ‘wars of righteousness’ against other countries (beginning with the Spanish-American War and continuing right up to today with the Ukraine war), the murder of dissenting factions (Waco, Ruby Ridge), the imprisonment of political protestors (January 6^th), the censorship of narratives the Establishment doesn’t like (covid, climate change, etc.), corporations and governments forcing folks to accept wokeness, etc., etc.

The MAGA Protestants believe that a renewed fidelity to constitutional principles, especially what they call religious liberty or freedom of conscience, will solve all ills.  But it won’t:

Despite the manifest illiberalism of the dissenters, the old Tories intuited that subordinating religion to private conviction after the dissenter fashion, and thereby relegating it from the public form of the state to the subjective sentiments of the private conscience, would lead to the kind of relativism which would fragment society into a crowd of atomic strangers, as we have witnessed under the global regime of liberalism. This is a point that was well argued by St. John Henry Newman in his “Biglietto Speech,” delivered in 1879 on becoming a cardinal of the Catholic Church, wherein he offered an apologia for the English conception of establishmentarian Christianity, and condemned the Protestant dissenter tradition as the true enemy of Christendom. Liberalism and revolution in religion, Newman argued, was inherently bound up with liberalism and revolution in politics.

Some Roman Catholics offer much better insights into the nature of society and the role of government than MAGA Protestants could ever do, such as this passage from Vatican II:

 . . . These duties towards God oblige, towards the divine Majesty, not only each one of the citizens but also the civil authority, which, in its public acts, incarnates civil society. God is indeed the author of civil society and the source of all the goods which flow down through it to its members. Civil society must therefore honor and serve God. As for the manner of serving God, this can be no other, in the present economy, than that which He Himself has determined, as obligatory, in the true Church of Christ; and this not only in the person of the citizens, but equally in that of the Authorities who represent civil society [From Vatican II—W.G.].

Roman Catholic writer Thaddeus Kozinski gives a realistic appraisal of the source of our societal ailments. One that is almost incomprehensible for the typical MAGA supporter:

. . . The problem is not that we have an elite oligarchy imposing its will on the majority; the problem is that human will itself has been established and institutionalized as the ultimate authority, both individually and politically. It is this classical liberalism, now logically morphed into global totalitarianism—for both are grounded in nothing but the human will detached from any publicly recognized, transcendent moral and spiritual authority—that has invited the demons that now rule us through their human proxies.

 

We will never be able to exorcise these demons by attempting to replace them with ‘medical freedom,’ ‘individual sovereignty,’ or ‘the will of the people.’ These are counterfeit replacements for a freedom based upon the truth about human persons with immortal souls teleologically ordered to the natural and supernatural good, the sovereignty of the family, the Church, and all the natural communities that organically and corporately embody the common good and the will of God as known through the Logos, the Tao, the Natural Law. Now, I am a proponent of the natural, God-given freedoms and rights that legitimately authorize the use of political, coercive power to secure and protect them. But these freedoms and rights, properly understood as being grounded in natural and supernatural reality and interpreted definitively and authoritatively only by the Catholic Church, are not the same as the ‘American freedoms’ granted to us, ostensibly, by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

 

Though rhetorically our rights come from ‘Nature and Nature’s God,’ there is no actual, historical religious tradition or institution to give determinate meaning and theological authority to such a claim, only unreal, ahistorical, abstract counterfeit of the actual tradition of Catholic Church. As D.C. Schindler has demonstrated, the “god” of the Declaration is not the Christian one, but an Enlightenment, deist, rationalist (and I would add, Freemasonic) substitute for the actual God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and of Jesus Christ. Thus, it has only as much authority as it has rhetorical and political power. It was quite easy for later generations of rulers to completely ignore and even reject this artificial civil theology when it was no longer persuasive, and to replace it with progressivism, secularism, and now Wokeism. Because there was no universally recognized transcendent moral and spiritual authority in the American Founding other than the Constitution and “We the People” (which meant, in practice, the will of those empowered to represent the people—when we actually still had representative government—and now the will of psychopathic and Luciferian elites at war with the entire human race), American power, both domestically and abroad, is authorized by nothing but itself.

But the Roman Catholic system is no less susceptible to the evils of individualism than Protestantism (who inherited that mindset precisely from Roman Catholicism), as the Papacy itself is nothing more than the rebellion of an individual bishop against the Orthodox Church the Lord Jesus Himself established upon the faith of His Holy Apostles.  This leads to some truly astounding distortions in Church life:

The dogma of Vatican 1-2, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to an ecclesiology in which the Church is ultimately not grounded on apostolic succession, but rather on the office of one man, and this Church dies with the death of each Pope, leaving only a husk of an institution lacking its divine lifeforce, and rises again with the election of each new Pope. This is not in any way acceptable to the Orthodox Church, which has an ecclesiology grounded on apostolic succession, according to which no break in the Church’s existence can ever occur, as the death of a bishop or Patriarch (Patriarch just being a bishop with higher ecclesiastical office) does not interrupt the apostolic succession, for the power of priesthood subsists in the whole episcopate of the Church and has Christ as its source. If one were to argue that the death of the Pope somehow does not have these consequences because Christ continues to exist, then they deny that the Pope is necessary for the Church’s indefectibility, infallibility, power and universal authority and unity. To make this admission would however be to disagree with Vatican 2 which says, “this teaching (referring to the dogmas of Vatican 1) about the institution, the perpetuity, the meaning and reason for the sacred primacy of the Roman Pontiff and of his infallible magisterium, this Sacred Council again proposes to be firmly believed by all the faithful.”^[16] But what was the reason given at Vatican 1 that the papacy was instituted for and why it had to perpetually exist? Precisely all these things one would have to deny the Pope is necessary for if they made the argument hypothetically given, and so by denying Roman Catholic dogma they anathematize themselves.

We are to believe that fidelity to this bizarre Papal system will bring all temporal and spiritual good to the United States?  It will not.

America is a zombie, one of the walking dead, stumbling along almost insensibly until something comes along to finally seal it in its grave. We are moving quickly toward some kind of ending, it would seem. Though whether the final straw will be war, debt, anger over immigration, disagreement over moral issues, etc., remains unknown at the moment.

What will the United States look like after their corrupting individualist religion is overthrown?  If they go in a sensible direction, probably a lot like pre-Modern civilizations, with a division into mostly homogenous populations whose public and private life revolves mainly around the natural environment and some sort of religious calendar.

Professor Allan Carlson, writing about the better days of the Midwest, illustrates the possibilities for the authentic ethnos/cultural groups that are currently being suffocated under the very artificial and superficial culture of America:

By 1914, however, a “Midwest identity” of sorts was taking form, much as Kjellen had seen, one defined by small towns, agricultural pursuits, the village socialism of the early cooperatives, and a distrust of centralizing government and foreign adventuring. Strong elements from the German and Scandinavian culture and characters could be found in this mix, as could influences from the English-speaking America that produced agrarians like “Tama Jim” Wilson. From 1900 to 1914, this Midwest began to find artistic expression as well, in sculptors such as Loredo Taft; architects such as Wright and Saarinen; artists such as Wood, Sandzen, and Benton; poets such as Lindsay, Sandburg, and Masters; and novelists such as Ole Rolvaag.

Bill Kaufman’s Bye Bye, Miss American Empire also offers some intriguing possibilities vis-à-vis reclaiming local and regional culture.

The Orthodox Faith, if adopted widely, would reinforce healthy culture amongst these peoples since it avoids one-sidedness:  The individual human personality would not be lost in forced conformity to edicts of the Pope, nor would the history/tradition/culture of the community be destroyed by the continual ferment and fragmentation and revolution that occurs within Protestantism.  Both individuality and community, diversity and unity, find a proper balance, a reflection of Orthodox Triadology (or Threenesslore, for the English lovers out there), in which neither the Individual Persons of the Trinity nor the divine essence They share in common are overemphasized.  (One will find echoes of this proper balancing of individual and community in traditional Southern life and thought, e.g., the philosopher Richard Weaver speaks of what he calls ‘social bond individualism’ that he finds in Dixie in an essay titled ‘Two Types of American Individualism,’ which is included in The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver.)

Another contributing factor to healthy culture that the Orthodox Faith offers is the very natural development of society that occurs in Orthodox countries.  They are not founded on distorted ideas of rights and freedoms of individuals, on fictitious social contracts, or on the unnatural absolutist authority of a Pope, but on the outgrowth of the family:

The family is older than the State. Man, husband, wife, father, son, mother, daughter and the obligations and virtues inherent in these names existed before the family grew into the nation and the State was formed. That is why family life in relation to State life can be figuratively depicted as the root of the tree.  . . .  from the pure elements of family there should arise similarly pure principles of State life, so that with veneration for one’s father veneration for the tsar [king – W.G.] should be born and grow, and that the love of children for their mother should be a preparation of love for the fatherland, and the simple-hearted obedience of domestics [children – W.G.] should prepare and direct the way to self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness in obedience to the laws and sacred authority of the autocrat . . . (Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, Sochinenia (Works), 1848 ed., vol. 2, p. 169; quoted in Vladimir Moss, Politics from Cain to Constantine.

We wish Speaker Johnson well, but the triumphalism of the MAGA crowd is deeply misplaced.  America is dead already.  He cannot revive it (in fact, he already sounds like a mindless, scripted neocon robot on foreign policy), but perhaps he can help ease the corpse quietly into the grave while keeping catastrophes at bay as the 50 States transition to a more traditional way of living, one built, God willing, upon the sturdy beams of a robust regional and local identity and the Orthodox Faith.

–Walt Garlington is an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland.  His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.