Orthodox Reflections

Archbishop Elpidophoros has followed up his awful July 4^th encyclical with an equally atrocious prayer at the Republican National Convention.  In this part he embraces the spurious claim that the political institutions of the United States are the ‘world’s best hope’ for human freedom:

That they may embrace the needs of all Americans, and shine the light of good government upon the venerable institutions of the “world’s best hope” for every person’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

More perceptive Orthodox leaders have never been quite so sanguine about the Enlightenment political ideals that lay at the foundation of Americanism.  St Theophan the Recluse, to name one:

“When royal authority falls,” Theophan had said, “and the people everywhere institute self-government (republics, democracies), then there will be room for the Antichrist to act.  It will not be hard for Satan to prepare voices in favor of renouncing Christ, as experience showed during the French Revolution.  There will be no one to pronounce the authoritative veto.  And so when such regimes, suitable for disclosing the Antichrist’s aspirations, are instituted everywhere, then the Antichrist will appear.”

The Elder Athanasios Mitilinaios pulls the curtains back further on the anti-Christian nature of the US government and others.  Speaking of the battle of Armageddon in Revelation 19, he says (via Fr Peter Heers’ presentation):

These ungodly powers will consist of the atheist communism with its stronghold in the East, the atheist materialism of the West [i.e., the US, Western Europe, and their allies—W.G.], and the atheist Zionism of the Jews. Although these are different ideologies they share one common interest, which is to do away with Christ and His Church.  . . .  They set aside their differences in order to accomplish the goal.

So much for the US as protectors of all those vaunted freedoms, particularly the priceless pearl of MAGA Evangelical Protestantism, ‘religious freedom’.  How many times have Orthodox Christians watched in horror as the US military brutally attacked their brothers and sisters, in Serbia and Syria, in Gaza, the Ukraine, and Russia?  And yet here is Abp Elpidophoros solemnly invoking God’s (which God, we wonder?) protection on the US military at the RNC:

Finally, preserve, protect, and defend the Service men and women who daily safeguard our freedoms, so that in prosperity and tranquility we can worship You, the Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier of the Universe, and be the blesséd People whose God is the Lord.

Does his Eminence follow the news at all?  If he did, he might have been somewhat reluctant to say those lines.  There are other dreadful stories about the US military apart from those we have mentioned regarding the Orthodox:

 . . . US Central Command announced that it launched new strikes targeting the Houthis in Yemen. Since January, the US has carried out hundreds of strikes in Yemen as part of a new war that has not been authorized by Congress.

US naval commanders have described the fight against the Houthis in the Red Sea as the largest naval battle the US has been engaged in since World War II. Back in April, US military officials said the munitions used in the Red Sea and other bombings Biden ordered in Iraq and Syria since October 7 had cost the US about $1 billion.

 . . . At the end of 2023 and the beginning of this year, the US was fighting Shia militias based in Iraq that began targeting US bases in response to the US support for the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. In January, three US troops were killed in a drone attack on Tower 22, a secretive base in Jordan near the Syrian border.

The US launched multiple rounds of airstrikes against the Shia militias, which are part of Iraq’s security forces. The bombings enraged the Iraqi government, which asked the US to withdraw, and now the two sides are negotiating the future of the US presence.

The US has also bombed Somalia multiple times this year to support the Mogadishu-based government against al-Shabaab. The US also launched an airstrike that it said targeted ISIS in Somalia back in May.

The purpose of the US military is not to bring ‘tranquility’ to any part of the world, nor to advance any Christian goals.  Elder Athanasios continues:

We hear about peace summits between heads of state aiming to avoid these destructive results…these meetings are terribly hypocritical. The simple citizens do believe in peace but those who move the strings of history and of wars do not believe in peace. They call for peace long enough to complete their armament and reach the necessary number of warheads. One day these bombs will begin to dance over our heads and they will lead to the massacre of humanity. None of the superpowers believe in peace. They are simply buying time to fully expand their arsenals.

Rather than naïve trust in the idol of Americanism, Elder Athanasios presents us with the true source of peace, freedom, etc.:

One first needs to have peace with Christ, the Prince of peace; we can only talk about lasting peace when we stop sinning.

While the peoples of the US and much of the West remain intransigent in their apostasy, this will not happen.  Their enthusiasm for ‘freedom of religion’, for a multiplication of sects and denominations, though nominally Christian (though even that requirement has disappeared in most of the West), reveals how closely allied with Antichrist they really are.  St Theophan the Recluse teaches:

The Gospel will be known in the whole world.  However, one part of humanity will remain unbelieving, while another, the majority, will persist in heresy, not following the teachings revealed by God, but instead through their own thinking establishing their own faith, though seemingly based on the words of Scripture.  These self-invented faiths will be countless.  The one who laid the groundwork for these heresies was the Pope, followed by Luther and Calvin, whose foundational principle of personal interpretation of the Scriptures gave a firm push to the invention of new faiths.  Even now, there is a great multitude of such faiths, but there will be even more.  Every new kingdom will have its own new faith, and eventually every region, then every city, and in the end, maybe, there will be one’s own confession in each and every head [we seem to have reached this point with non-stop talk of ‘one’s own truth’—W.G.].

Whenever they construe their own faith, rather than receive what was handed down by God, no other eventuality is possible.  And many of these will assume for themselves the name of Christians.  There will also be a minority that holds to the faith as it was handed down by the holy apostles and preserved in the Orthodox Church; however, many of these will be right-believing in name only, while their hearts will not have the foundation required by faith, for they will love this age more than Christ.  This is how great will be the general apostasy.  Though the name of Christians will be heard everywhere, and everywhere we will see churches and worship, all this will be merely an appearance, while inside there will be genuine apostasy.  In this world the Antichrist will be born, and he will grow in the same apparent godliness, but actual inner apostasy (Quoted in Archbishop Averky Taushev, The Epistles and the Apocalypse:  Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament, Vol. III, Nicholas Kotar, transl., Vitaly Permiakov, edr., Holy Trinity Seminary Press, Jordanville, New York, 2018, pgs. 103-4).

All of this is a remarkable picture of the United States today.

Despite that grim reality, however, there have been and remain dissenters from the deadly ideology of Americanism within the US.  A rather weighty one was the Antebellum South.  A representative figure from this era of Dixie’s history is the Reverend James Henley Thornwell, who saw the anti-Christian spirit that was gestating in New England and the rest of Yankeedom, although, then as now, that spirit dressed itself up in various cunning disguises, including the pleasing garb of ‘human rights’:

Implicitly, sometimes explicitly, the Abolitionists were attack­ing all class distinctions and legitimate authority. Indeed, they were attacking Christianity itself since the Bible commanded social stratifi­cation and subordination in the wake of the Fall. Thornwell charged that the Abolitionist argument “fully and legitimately carried out, would condemn every arrangement of society, which did not secure to its members an absolute equality of position; it is the very spirit of socialism and communism.” And in one of his fiercest polemical out­bursts, he added, “The parties in this conflict are not merely Aboli­tionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground, Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake.”

It is distressing to see this same Southland now so utterly prostrated to MAGA Protestant Zionism.  And yet the Lord has mercifully not turned His Face away from her completely, as Orthodox parishes across Dixie are growing, along with organizations like the Ludwell Orthodox Fellowship.  The Lord is even harvesting the first-fruits from among Dixie’s Yankee cousins, as may be seen in Theophan (Michael Warren) Davis’ uniting himself with the Orthodox Church, named, interestingly, for the same St Theophan quoted above.

In Bill Kaufmann’s 2010 book Bye Bye, Miss American Empire, one will meet other dissenters from the idol of Americanism within the States, some older and some newer (caution:  strong language).

Those States (or parts of States) that have any spiritual discernment at all ought to separate themselves from the Antichristian American union as quickly as they can, seeking traditionalist allies elsewhere – a union which, contrary to Abp Elpidophoros, Tony Perkins, et al., is not the ‘last best hope of mankind’, but rather the forerunner of the last great enemy of mankind, the Antichrist.

–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.