Orthodox Reflections

The Republican National Convention has ended, and to no one’s great surprise, Donald Trump laid out some big, swaggering, and ambitious goals in his acceptance speech on 18 July.

One of them is the goal of so-called national unity.  As he put it, ‘Just like our ancestors, we must now come together, rise above past differences and disagreements, and go forward united, as one people, and one nation, pledging allegiance to one great and beautiful American flag.’

This he will accomplish with the following prescriptions:

Together, we will launch a new era of safety, prosperity and freedom for citizens of every race, religion, color, and creed.

 . . . I will END the devastating Inflation Crisis immediately, bring down interest rates, and lower the cost of energy—we will DRILL, BABY, DRILL, which will lead to a large-scale decline in prices.

I will END the Illegal Immigration Crisis by closing our border and finishing the wall, most of which I have already built.

I will END every single International Crisis that the current administration has created—including the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine, and the war caused by the attack on Israel, both of which would never have happened if I were president.

One will perhaps notice that religion is not at the heart of Mr. Trump’s plan to achieve unity.  Peaceful coexistence in the United States is predicated on worldly, materialistic success.

Prayer to a demon is required for political unity in contemporary America

Now, there is nothing wrong with secure borders, a sound economic policy, etc.  However, it is precisely the nature of Antichrist to define life primarily in terms of material well-being, while ignoring or downplaying the importance of spiritual well-being.  St Seraphim Rose of Platina, California, is emphatic on this point:

At the beginning of the essay, Eugene [i.e., St Seraphim—W.G.] outlined the principles of the reign of Antichrist as described in Patristic writings and in the works of the Orthodox authors Soloviev and Dostoyevsky.  The religion of Dostoyevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor,” he wrote, “is the religion of earthly bread.  It has one central doctrine, and that is:  the welfare of man in this world is the only common and indispensable religious concern of all men.  . . .  The religion of the “Grand Inquisitor,” Eugene maintained, takes fundamental Christian values—peace, brotherhood, unity, love—and distorts them to be used toward the furtherance of purely earthly aims.  It does not openly do away with Christianity; it only reinterprets it, so thoroughly that sincere Christians are eventually led to work for the same goals as secular idealists who are seeking to build their kingdom of heaven on earth (Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, 3^rd edn., St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Platina, Cal., 2010, pgs. 241, 242).

The last line is really the core of Americanism:  building up in ways, unknown before, the ‘kingdom of heaven on earth’ with its ‘religion of bread’.

Mr. Trump illustrated this in his speech beyond what we have already noted:

‘America is on the cusp of a new Golden Age, but we must have the courage to seize it.’  ‘Together, we will SAVE THIS COUNTRY, we will restore the Republic, and we will usher in the rich and wonderful tomorrows that our people truly deserve.’

In other words, elect me, and you will all experience an economic bonanza.  But the Holy Apostle Paul’s words are a staggering rebuke to the worldly wealth and safety gospel of Trump, Biden, etc.:  ‘When people say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape’ (I Thessalonians 5:3).

St Seraphim over and over again tried to point folks in the States in the right direction:

All of the spiritual falseness seems to me but raw material that is waiting to be exploited by the Prince of Evil for the establishment of some monstrous, deceitful “Kingdom of this world”:  . . . most of all forgetfulness of Christ and of the fact that the “problems” of our age are not external but internal, for they are the product of our turning away from the Face of that terrible God Who expects so much from us, and has promised us an eternal life that will be unbearable to men who want only to “get along in the world” (Life and Works, p. 195).

But we have not listened.  We have made spiritual things secondary, irrelevant.  It must be this way in order for there to be peace in the US.  If all the adherents of the different religions and sects living in the States were lively believers, there would be horrible levels of conflict, just as there were in the past between Roman Catholics and Protestants, and between the Protestant denominations, just as there still are between Muslims and Hindus, etc.  But the wicked, deceitful devil has found a way to calm the rage:  smothering the religious zeal of one and all by fixing their desires on material gain rather than spiritual advancement.  This is the brilliant solution of Americanism to religious strife.

(Mr. Trump’s choice for Vice President, US Senator J. D. Vance, and his wife Usha seem to exemplify this religious indifferentism for the sake of pursuing and achieving various worldly ends, as he is a Roman Catholic and she a Hindu.)

Look everywhere in the history of traditional Orthodox countries, and one will find the opposite of Americanism’s inversion of values.  Amongst Orthodox peoples, it has not been forgotten that beatitude is attained through self-denial.  St Seraphim affirms this:

Let not us, who would be Christians, expect anything else from it than to be crucified.  For to be Christian is to be crucified, in this time and in any time since Christ came for the first time.  His life is the example—and warning—to us all.  We must be crucified personally, mystically; for through crucifixion is the only path to resurrection.  If we would rise with Christ, we must first be humbled with Him—even to the ultimate humiliation, being devoured and spit forth by the uncomprehending world (Life and Writings, p. 159).

The kingdom that the Orthodox long for is not of this world:

And we must be crucified outwardly, in the eyes of the world; for Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world, and the world cannot bear it, even a single representative of it, even for a single moment.  The world can only accept Antichrist, now or at any time (Ibid.).

This transformational imperative of the Orthodox Church, to be crucified and remade in the image of the Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ, which Fr John Strickland emphasizes in his Paradise and Utopia series of books, will act as a leaven, affecting all of society at times.  The result, we repeat, is the opposite of Americanism, which puts religion in the lowest, last place.  Orthodox countries, from the Queen City of Constantinople/New Rome to Bulgaria to Georgia to England and Ireland place Christianity at the heart of everything.  From Fr John Romanides:

The Byzantine State sought to have Orthodoxy as its official religion and it made so many efforts to preserve Orthodox doctrine intact.

Why did it do so? Simply to preserve doctrine as doctrine? Or perhaps because Orthodox doctrine in particular was a precondition for the cure of its citizens, which cure would occasion a social restoration to health through the healing of the personality of each and every citizen? More likely the latter.

What was the national anthem of the Byzantine Empire? Was it not “Save, O Lord, Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance; grant victories to the emperors over barbarians, and through Thy Cross preserve Thou Thy commonwealth”?

This hymn expresses the ideology — if we can call it that — of the implementation of Orthodox teaching, faith, and life within the State; that is, on a nationwide scale.

Since the State foresaw the contribution to society and the benefit that would result from the Orthodox therapeutic teaching and method, if it were implemented, it instituted and promoted the Orthodox Faith as the official State religion, such that the State would be filled with parishes in which Priests would practice this therapeutic regimen.

Thus, the parishes would grow with time into [communities of] healthy citizens, as would the State itself, by extension. The Church naturally did not refuse this, but rather worked in consort with the State.

But Americanism fails even in a secular sense in its quest for unity.  Mr. Trump laid out the dilemma as he sees it:  ‘The discord and division in our society must be healed. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.’  And again, ‘Just like our ancestors, we must now come together, rise above past differences and disagreements, and go forward united, as one people, and one nation, pledging allegiance to one great and beautiful American flag.’

And yet he proceeded to define one big component of the American people as enemies – i.e., the South.  In Mr. Trump’s own words:  ‘When our way of life was threatened, American patriots marched onto battlefields, raced into enemy strongholds, and stared down death to keep alive the flame of freedom. At Yorktown, Gettysburg, and Midway, they joined the roll call of immortal heroes.’

Who were the armies of Americanism fighting at Gettysburg?  That’s right – folks from Dixie.  In his and his MAGA supporters’ minds, Southerners who wanted a safe distance from the haters of tradition and Christianity in DC and Yankeedom are no different than the British during the War for Independence or the Japanese at Midway; we got in the way of the ‘glorious destiny’ of the grand empire of Americanism and were punished accordingly.  No Southerner who loves his ancestors and his culture and his land should think himself welcome in Mr. Trump’s America.

This is unfortunately true of any authentic culture in the US:  If it offers any substantial resistance to assimilation into the Borg collective of Americanism, it must be brought to heel, by violent means if need be.

But let us return one last time to religion.  Americanism is antithetical to authentic Christianity, as we have said above.  This can be illustrated in another telling way – the metrics used to gauge progress are always clamped tightly to categories of the earth, of the Kingdom of Man:  GDP, unemployment, home ownership, car ownership, stock valuations, etc.  When have the adherents of Americanism ever tracked regularly the numbers of people in the States baptized and chrismated, numbers of churches and monasteries built, of monks and nuns tonsured, of clergy consecrated, of missionaries sent, of saints canonized, etc.?  Not often, if ever.  Yet such are the true metrics of progress, from the Christian point of view.

The believers in Americanism worship an idol, but they do not realize it.  We understand why they support Mr. Trump over Kamala, and will likely vote ourselves for Mr. Trump as the lesser of two evils.  Even so, should Mr. Trump win the election in November, the peoples of the States will be the losers in the long run if there is no repentance from their idolatrous worship of Americanism, no acceptance of 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.