Orthodox Reflections

Last night another American city was lit on fire by a mob, while the citizens and the police simply looked on helplessly. Following another police shooting, the little city of Kenosha in Wisconsin faces the possible obliteration of its entire commercial center if the rioting continues. May God protect the innocent there.

Riots, gun violence, murders – it seems as if the mayhem is everywhere. How is that a powerful nation like ours seems to have just burst into flame? Because no matter how storied our history, or how convincing our current facade of greatness, in reality American society is a total mess.

Among developed nations, the United States has the greatest debt, the highest military spending, the highest murder rate, the most guns, the highest rate of incarceration, the highest income inequality, the highest level of obesity, the highest level of personal debt, the highest poverty rate, the highest level of illegal drug use, the highest rate of porn production and consumption (60% of all porn sites are in the United States), and has initiated more foreign wars since WWII than any other nation. This is a partial list. America actually leads the world in even more pathologies than those. The list just gets too depressing to continue.

How did we get here? Americans have forgotten God, of course, as I have heard many priests say before. But why have they forgotten God? Why have we drifted so far when at one point, not so long in the past, most Americans practiced some form of Christianity in safe neighborhoods? Perhaps one major problem has been that our towns and cities never really became communities.

American religion, outside of areas influenced by Roman Catholicism, has been a very individualistic, pietistic affair. In most of the country, we take it as a given that our religion is different than that of our neighbors, even if all of us profess Christ in some way or another. They found their niche in the Kingdom of God, we have found ours, and never the twain shall meet. On a Sunday morning, rather than church bringing us together, it scatters us to the four winds. Even within most churches, the emphasis has been less on community than on “your personal relationship to Christ.”

America seemed to hum along well enough when strong civic associations knitted people together across denominational lines. Political parties, labor unions, reform movements, fraternities (Elks, Masons), VFW lodges, the Boy Scouts, sports leagues, etc. all brought people together who might otherwise never associate. The people in your “organization(s)” became your neighbors, while the people next door were … the people next door. Unless your kids played together, what did you really have in common besides accidentally buying homes in the same area?

But what is referred to as “civic engagement” has waned. We don’t join the local Rotary Club. We don’t participate in our political party. We don’t bowl in a rec league or play softball. Outside of work, which is increasingly done at home, most Americans seem to be held in isolation while seeking some kind of meaningful connection on “social media.”

The American churches have been unable to pick up the slack. Many have tried to provide a sense of community with home gatherings, charities, and various other programs. It has been an admirable attempt, but at the center of their message is still a radical individualism that hampers efforts at building real communities. Sure, the pastors encourage the people to come sing and listen to a sermon. But that can be done remotely as there are no sacraments, so there is no practical need to be in one place.

This is not new to the era of streaming by the way. I remember more than one family growing up in the South whose “pastor” was a televangelist and whose “church” was on TV every Sunday morning. If you can’t keep people coming to Sunday worship, how do you plan to get them to your meetings?

Despite the deficiencies of the ecclesiological structure, many millions continue to show up to Protestant Churches in person and try to make it all work. Such is the crying need for community within our human souls. While these churches continue to draw millions on Sunday mornings, these fragmented, make-shift communities are having less and less real impact on the society around them. The country is on fire, and these churches are trying to douse it with leaky buckets.

While the Christian churches flounder in bringing people meaningfully together, more and more Americans are finding a sense of community in new age faiths, radical politics such as BLM / Antifa, paganism, Satanism, witchcraft, and the new religion of Antiracism. Individuals in those “communities” seem to be confident, unified and organized, while the “traditionally” religious appear rudderless, alone, and afraid.

Which brings us to the Orthodox Church, and its emphasis on community as the very core of Christian life. At one of my first catechism classes, the priest introduced me to a saying of the early church, “unus Christianus, nullus Christianus” – One Christian, no Christian. Christian life is meant to be celebrated and lived in communion with others. A Christian Community is not a nice-to-have addition to our faith in Christ. It is at the heart of it.

As one priest recently wrote:

America needs a model of community, and who better to accomplish this great need of community within America than the Orthodox Church, who has built the greatest empire on earth from a grass roots gathering of people that rescued babies from the streets and widows from the ghettos? Orthodox build communities because that is what the gospel is about. We love our neighbor and that love looks like something much more than what heretical Protestantism looks like. We are not about the hireling ways of making it LOOK like we are an empire, by packing in mega church temples only to give some sort of Christian entertainment for the remainder of the week. We worship God in spirit and truth to build, to have victory in life with our neighbor. Anyone or anything that wedges its ugly head in to destroy this love of neighbor, needs to be eradicated and exposed by the Church.
Orthodoxy has always first built their core community of pious people who often associated themselves with monastics and/or ascetic people, and then their national community that extends into the greater populace. Not the reverse! It’s impossible and in my opinion, apocalyptic. We cannot just flood ourselves into pagan lands because we have some special financial abilities. We must do as the great evangelists of all time have done it. We must build the core community first, where people are interdependent on each other and not dependent on the secular/pagan system of the antichrist world.

American society is increasingly disintegrating as individuals and families fall into greater and greater social isolation. Isolated individuals are incapable of resisting tyrannical forces (of the mob or the state) and cannot meaningfully influence what happens around them. Individual families, by themselves, can neither build a culture, nor can they defend one successfully.

For Orthodox Christians, the situation could not be clearer. We must build strong, local communities that bring people together centered around the shared worship of Jesus Christ, under the leadership of holy priests and bishops. Strong communities influence the world around them. Strong communities build strong Christians. Strong Christians invite more people in and the faith spreads.

One Christian is no Christian.

There are some issues that are hampering the ability of the Orthodox Church in North America to build strong communities. Those will be explored in future posts. But first, a word of caution. Orthodoxy is not a tool for building civic virtue. If your goal is to have more honest and moral citizens so your political party can “save” America in its current form, then Orthodoxy could be more dangerous to your plans than Marxism. Orthodoxy, like the love of God, is an all-consuming fire. Strong Orthodox communities will transform the United States in ways few can fully foresee, and many might not like.

– Nicholas, member of the Greek Archdiocese of America