The Orthodox Left Wails

This week, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary made this announcement:

 

Here is more information, including a form to register for the livestream.  I won’t be traveling for this — it will be entirely online — but places for the livestream are limited.

This is an incredible honor for me, as an Orthodox Christian and reader of Father Schmemann. This lecture is usually delivered by an eminent churchman or an academic. I am a layman and a mere journalist. I am grateful to St. Vladimir’s rector Father Chad Hatfield and to others at the seminary for their confidence that I have something important to say to the Orthodox theological community. My lecture, of course, will be based on my bestselling book Live Not By Lies, which continues to sell like gangbusters.

It is no surprise that the Orthodox theological left in this country is wailing and gnashing its teeth over the announcement. I have made it my business for almost a decade to keep my snout out of Orthodox church politics, so I don’t follow the discussion on social media or elsewhere, but I am told by readers that the Orthodox left believes that inviting a louse like me to give this lecture is trampling on the Holy of Holies. When a friend e-mailed me this thread by a Greek Orthodox professor at Fordham, I literally laughed out loud:

Golly. Let me answer these comments specifically, but then tell you readers who are outside the very small world of American Orthodoxy what’s going on.

Dreher has no credentials. Can’t even put ‘Doctor’ in front of his name. Well, they’ve got me there. On the other hand, I’ve written two New York Times bestselling books of cultural analysis from a Christian perspective, for the popular reader. The Benedict Option has been translated into twelve languages. Live Not By Lies is in the process of being translated into six, I think, and we expect more. Clearly, a lot of people think I have something worth listening to.
I wouldn’t even know what an “anti-Schememann ideology” is. In no way do I deny the “inherent goodness of the world.” Where does these nuts get this? Not from reading my books. Moreover, they’ve got their nose out of joint not because I won’t talk to people who disagree with me. They’re mad because I won’t talk to them, and I encourage other actually orthodox Orthodox to avoid these phony dialogues. Many of these people apparently want to turn Orthodoxy into Greco-Slavic Episcopalianism (especially on the issue of LGBT). People who came to Orthodox from the Mainline Protestant churches, or from the Catholic Church (as I did), understand quite well the process of “dialogue” here. It’s a shopworn but effective strategy of the theological and moral left, by which they seek to get a foothold within church institutions and parishes, claiming that they’re only interested in talking about issues. Once the institution (parish, whatever) has legitimated their heterodoxy as a valid point of view, the battle is lost. These people will not stop until they have transformed the institution in their image, at which point the “dialogue” ends, and it becomes a matter of justice to silence the conservatives. I advise actually orthodox Orthodox not to walk into that trap.
The sacramentality of the world is the antithesis of Dreher’s point of view. This is crazy. The only people who can say that are those who have not read my books. It is quite common to find people — usually of the theological left, but sometimes on the right as well — who have not read my books at all, but are sure they know what I’m saying, and that it is WRONG and DANGEROUS.
Live Not By Lies is a political statement. Wrong. It’s about theology, economics, politics, technology, and culture. This is an attempt by this ideological tribe to dismiss what I have to say as a species of conservative politics. Again, these are not people who have read Live Not By Lies, and therefore, I don’t take them seriously.

What’s going on here, more broadly? Well, I have no idea why, specifically, the seminary invited me to give this talk, but I can make an informed guess.

The seminary is training priests and teachers to serve the Orthodox Church in the 21st century. It naturally wants them not only to understand the contemporary world (which is post-Christian, but also to equip them to disciple people faithfully, within Orthodox doctrine and tradition.

Live Not By Lies is a book whose genesis was in the warnings of emigre Christians who grew up in the Soviet Union, or in one of the nations of Central Europe that it held captive. They sense something similar to what they left behind rising here in the West — a totalitarian mindset that is conquering the institutions our society, and the modern mind. It’s not going to be Stalinism 2.0, but they are certain that it will be in some real sense totalitarian.

The first half of my book identifies the nature of the threat, and talks in part about identity politics, woke capitalism, technology, and “the Myth of Progress” as all being threatening to Christian fidelity, to the truth, and to religious liberty. The second half of the book is composed of testimonies from Orthodox Christians, as well as Catholics and Protestants, from that world, who lived through the totalitarian nightmare. They offer advice for what Christians today should do to prepare ourselves to identify the dangers, and to build resistance. At no point does anybody recommend voting for the Republican Party. Rather, this is about organizing prayer groups, and networks of dissidents, about educating our families for resistance, about living counterculturally, and most of all, preparing ourselves to suffer for Christ.

Why would Orthodox Christians like these theological lefties oppose this? Because the book implicitly identifies them as the problem. 

The big project of many of these people is normalizing LGBT and gender ideology within the Orthodox Church. George Demacopoulos, for example, is one of the directors of the Orthodox Studies Center at Fordham, the Jesuit university. Here’s one of the big initiatives the center is highlighting now:

Read more about it here. This is one of those phony “dialogue” things. You may be quite certain that Fordham does not host an Orthodox Studies Center interested in finding out how to defend and to live out traditional Orthodox teachings on sex and sexuality in the modern world. I don’t know where the Orthodox Studies Center stands on the matter of identity politics, but I doubt very much that the people who are shouting loudest for me to be disinvited to St. Vladimir’s are people who are prepared to tolerate a point of view that opposes identity politics, especially from a Christian perspective. (Live Not By Lies talks about how identity politics advocates think and act in ways that parallel Bolshevik patterns.)

The point is, there is no escape from these battles in the world, certainly not in the Orthodox Church. Last week an Orthodox laywoman wrote to say that her priest is telling their parish, especially the young, that Orthodoxy should update itself to modernity, and embrace same-sex marriage and the rest. This is a priest, in a large parish (I looked it up). This is not common, to the best of my knowledge, but it’s not as rare as it should be. My estimation is that many priests and leaders within the Orthodox Church would rather this whole issue go away. It’s not going away — and the clergy cannot always be counted on to teach and disciple others in faithful Orthodoxy.

My guess is that St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary wishes to inform its students of the greatest challenges to Orthodoxy in this modern world, and set them to thinking of what they can and should do to prepare themselves and their flocks to be faithful in what is sure to be a very trying time. My guess too is that St. Vladimir’s, as the heir to a church that suffered horribly under the totalitarian Communist yoke, appreciates the warnings that Slavic Christians and others who know about this suffering firsthand are sounding to the rest of us. And the seminary, in keeping with the spirit of Father Schmemann, who had a gift for communicating to broad audiences, in language they could understand, might well appreciate that an Orthodox journalist (me) amplifies the voices of Orthodox men like Alexander Ogorodnikov, a Russian Orthodox believer who was tortured in prison for confessing Christ.

The kind of Orthodox Christians who are screaming their heads off about my upcoming talk are the kind of Orthodox Christians who would prefer to keep the next generation of priests, as well as Orthodox laymen, in the dark about what they are doing. The world is moving in their direction, and they are laboring to move the Orthodox Church in the same direction, encouraging their fellow Orthodox to live by the modern world’s lies.

I say: No!

If others wish to “dialogue” with them, fine by me. But I hope you will observe what they all reveal by their reaction to this announcement. If I were a PhD or a priest, they would find some other reason to howl their protests. It’s not the man they hate; it’s the message. It is good to get this learned. If people like this ever got control of St. Vladimir’s, you can be confident that Orthodox teaching that conflicts with contemporary mores, especially in terms of sexual orientation and gender identity, would be driven out, or at least underground.

By the way, if you have read or are reading Live Not By Lies in a church or student group, here is a free, downloadable study guide that I wrote.

 

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