Orthodox Reflections

More than anything else, the inauguration of Donald J Trump looked and sounded like a religious service to the Greatness of America: Her Stalwart People, Her Mighty Military, Her Blessed Federal Government, and Her Dearest Leader. That statement may not sit well with MAGA Americans, but the truth is often painful. What was on display in Washington was pure hubris – excessive pride that is the root of all other sins. From the stage, viewers were constantly assured that while Trump’s America may have inherited difficult problems, going forward the Federal Government will be all-powerful enough to fix everything. Not all Trump voters were happy with what they saw. Many Americans thought they were voting for a peaceful Republic: secure within its borders, respectful to the Christian Faith (in general, given our religious diversity), humble in its foreign policy, and respectful of the rights of states, counties, and cities to as much local rule as possible. Through his inauguration, Trump has blatantly shown us that we have gotten a very different outcome. 

—-OR Staff

By Walt Garlington, 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.

President Trump’s 2025 inaugural address gave a clear indication of the direction he wants to take the peoples of the States. Overall, it isn’t a good one.

Yes, there were positive things in it, such as promises to end some of the transgender and DEI nonsense in the federal government, to better manage immigration, etc.  But they cannot blot out the danger that is also present within it. That danger being the establishment of a deeper and more pervasive idolatry in the States. And the idol is us, the people themselves.

Here is Trump’s vision, in his own words:

Above all, my message to Americans today is that it is time for us to once again act with courage, vigor and the vitality of history’s greatest civilization. So, as we liberate our nation, we will lead it to new heights of victory and success. We will not be deterred. . . . The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.

He goes on:

And it’s the lifeblood of a great nation. And, right now, our nation is more ambitious than any other. There’s no nation like our nation. Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers. The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls. Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth. No one comes close. Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted millions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand. If we work together, there is nothing we cannot do and no dream we cannot achieve.

The ‘American people’ are presented as the Gnostic demiurge that will bring perfection to the world:

Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback. But as you see today, here I am. The American people have spoken. I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do. In America, the impossible is what we do best. From New York to Los Angeles, from Philadelphia to Phoenix, from Chicago to Miami, from Houston to right here in Washington, D.C., our country was forged and built by the generations of patriots who gave everything they had for our rights and for our freedom. They were farmers and soldiers, cowboys and factory workers, steel workers and coal miners, police officers and pioneers who pushed onward, marched forward and let no obstacle defeat their spirit or their pride. Together they laid down the railroads, raised up the skyscrapers, built great highways, won two world wars, defeated fascism and communism, and triumphed over every single challenge that they faced.

 . . . In recent years, our nation has suffered greatly. But we are going to bring it back and make it great again. Greater than ever before. We will be a nation like no other. Full of compassion, courage and exceptionalism. Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable.

 . . . From this day on, the United States of America will be a free, sovereign and independent nation. We will stand bravely. We will live proudly. We will dream boldly, and nothing will stand in our way. Because we are Americans. The future is ours. And our golden age has just begun.

If folks will recall their Gnostic lore, the demiurge makes a mess out of the task of fashioning the material world; the same has been (and will ever be) true of Americanism.

There are the obligatory shallow references to ‘God’ at a few points in the address.  In the closing, it appears in the usual blasphemous way so often used by political leaders of the States, being a command rather than a prayer: ‘God bless America,’ which is reminiscent of how the Talmudic Jews approach God (He obeys the rabbis, not the other way around; see Michael Hoffman, Judaism’s Strange Gods, for more on that).

That this ‘God’ is not the Holy Trinity of the Orthodox Church may be discerned rather easily from President Trump appointing to his cabinet several LGBT officials:

President Trump is assembling an administration stocked with prominent gay and lesbian Americans — defying hysterical Democratic rhetoric.

“When it comes to whether you’re gay or straight, black or white and all those markers others calculate — President Trump is decision blind. He bases his decision on the kind of job he knows you will do, period,” said Bill White, a top Trump fundraiser — who was tapped to serve as the US ambassador to Belgium.

Among the picks:

• • • • • Scott Bessent, 62, treasury secretary. If confirmed, the hedge fund manager would be the highest-ranking openly gay official in US history.
        • Ric Grenell, 58, presidential envoy for special missions. He was Trump’s director of national intelligence during his first term.
        • Tammy Bruce, 62, the new State Department spokesperson was a Fox News contributor.
        • Jacob Helberg, 35, undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment.
        • Bill White, 57, ambassador to Belgium.
        • Art Fisher, 49, ambassador to Austria.

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Taken altogether, Trump’s riveting of the focus of ‘Americans’ solely to worldly ends, to acquiring earthly ‘greatness’ rather than the Kingdom of Heaven, is a blunder the Orthodox saints warn us against over and over again, with both their words and actions.

St Macarius the Great of Egypt (+4^th century, celebrated 19 Jan.) is prominent among them.  His teaching about the purpose and focus of this life is in direct opposition to the Trumpian position:

Man’s highest goal and purpose, the union of the soul with God, is a primary principle in the works of Saint Macarius. . . . Earthly life, according to Saint Macarius, has only a relative significance: to prepare the soul, to make it capable of perceiving the heavenly Kingdom, and to establish in the soul an affinity with the heavenly homeland.

Such a theme is completely absent from Trump’s inaugural.  For Trump/MAGA, building American pride and conquest of the earth/cosmos are all that matter – i.e., worldly success is salvation (one of the key errors of New England Yankee Puritanism).  If we follow the Trumpian MAGA path, however, we will be totally unprepared for death, as St Macarius points out:

“For those truly believing in Christ, it is necessary to change and transform the soul from its present degraded nature into another, divine nature, and to be fashioned anew by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

This is possible, if we truly believe and we truly love God and have observed all His holy commandments. If one betrothed to Christ at Baptism does not seek and receive the divine light of the Holy Spirit in the present life, “then when he departs from the body, he is separated into the regions of darkness on the left side. He does not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but has his end in hell with the devil and his angels” (Homily 30:6).

This union with God is attained primarily by humility, one of the central themes of the life of St Macarius (and all Orthodox saints), a virtue which is anathema to most adherents of Americanism:

Saint Macarius survived many demonic attacks against him. Once, he was carrying palm branches for weaving baskets, and a devil met him on the way and wanted to strike him with a sickle, but he was not able to do this. He said, “Macarius, I suffer great anguish from you because I am unable to vanquish you. I do everything that you do. You fast, and I eat nothing at all. You keep vigil, and I never sleep. You surpass me only in one thing: humility.”

Rather than weighing ourselves down with worldly things per Trump/MAGA, St Macarius shows us that we ought to cast them away as much as possible:

One time the holy abba caught a thief loading his things on a donkey standing near the cell. Without revealing that he was the owner of these things, the monk began to help tie up the load. Having removed himself from the world, the monk told himself, “We bring nothing at all into this world; clearly, it is not possible to take anything out from it. Blessed be the Lord for all things!”

Trumpism/Americanism vs the Orthodox Church is nothing more than the latest instantiation of what Paul Kingsnorth and Jonathan Pageau discussed recently:  the way of deification via obedience to God or the Luciferian/satanic way of becoming godlike via rebellion against God, the choice which mankind has been faced with since he was placed in the Garden of Eden.  There will never be peace between the devil and his hordes and God; neither should we expect much between the man-worshipping false church of MAGA and the Christ-worshipping Orthodox Church.

How should an Orthodox Christian relate to the American Empire, then? An Orthodox fellow from Dixie, Enoch Cade, answers well.  Picking up with his thoughts about WWII being the ‘good war,’ he writes (in an essay folks should take a minute to read),

“The Good War” is one of the High Holies of America, just like Lincoln’s war. America the good, America the liberator, America granted the divine right to impose its universal values on the entire world, and by the bayonet if needed. The South’s role in its ridiculous fantasy? We are the cautionary tale, the road less travelled, the “original sin” that must be expunged from the body politic; we must die so that America might live and fully realize its promise. When the Americans say, “That’s not who we are,” Southerners are who, or what, the Americans desperately do not want to be.

Again, grounds for agreement. I do not want to be an American.

Shelby Foote once said we struck a deal with the Americans. We would fight in their wars, slave in their factories, pump the oil and keep the machinery working and putting up with their stupid insults with good humor – provided they kept their disgusting fingers from our monuments and our memories.

And they broke the deal. They lied. Has America ever honored an obligation? Americans break treaties with abandon, justifying themselves with the same abstractions used for all of their monstrous deeds: freedom, justice, equality. The Americans have not only drained those words of meaning: they have positively inverted them. Was it Kissinger who said it’s dangerous to be an ally of the Americans? Ask the English, or the French. Or the Germans, de-industrialized by that mysterious Nord Stream explosion. Is someone seeking to reduce Germany to a nation of peasant agriculturalists?

It does, though, remove me from an obligation to them. I do realize it’s ridiculous; I cannot change my passport. But I want nothing to do with any “polity” whose national myth is a bullsh*t defamation of the Southern people. I want nothing to do with your flag, and your Air Force flyovers at the football games, your Black Friday sales, your endless movie remakes and whatever else it is that makes you Americans. A “nation of ideas,” you say. A “propositional nation”; assent to these four points and you and your family are and will forever be, Americans.

That is not a nation. That’s a political party. I don’t assent to your bullsh*t propositions. Does that mean I’m no longer an American?

By God, I think we have a deal!

That is how Orthodox Christians, from whichever of the authentic cultural regions of the US they live in, ought to view the phony Proposition Nation of America – as an enemy they should renounce and separate from as much as possible. It rests upon false premises; it will collapse one day because of that.  The Orthodox in the States must cling to what is true and real and lasting – to the Holy Trinity, to saints and angels, to the Holy Eucharist, to relics and icons, to prayer, to fasting, etc.: in a word, to the life of the Orthodox Church as it has been passed down to us from the Holy Apostles themselves.

The consequences for idolatry are terrible.  The book of the Holy Prophet Ezekiel reveals them to everyone who has eyes to see.  Idol worshippers will one day wind up dead, slaughtered before their lifeless gods:

[1] And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,

[2] Son of man, set thy face toward the mountains of Israel, and prophesy against them,

[3] And say, Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord GOD; Thus saith the Lord GOD to the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys; Behold, I, even I, will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places.

[4] And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken: and I will cast down your slain men before your idols.

[5] And I will lay the dead carcasses of the children of Israel before their idols; and I will scatter your bones round about your altars.

[6] In all your dwelling places the cities shall be laid waste, and the high places shall be desolate; that your altars may be laid waste and made desolate, and your idols may be broken and cease, and your images may be cut down, and your works may be abolished.

[7] And the slain shall fall in the midst of you, and ye shall know that I am the LORD.

 . . . [13] Then shall ye know that I am the LORD, when their slain men shall be among their idols round about their altars, upon every high hill, in all the tops of the mountains, and under every green tree, and under every thick oak, the place where they did offer sweet savour to all their idols (Ezekiel 6:1-7, 13).

We do not wish that for anyone in the South nor for anyone else in the US.  May there be repentance by the peoples of the States for their MAGA-induced self-worship that such an end might be averted.