There is a movement in America, for young people to convert from being protestant, evangelical and atheist, to the Orthodox Church. Judging by the interviews I've seen, its predominantly young men, who appear generally to be looking for something with more meaning, rigor and challenge. Finding modern society, or the faith they were brought up in, lacking in integrity, too shallow, liberal, permissive and generally wishy washy.
One chap was inspired by Donald Trump to challenge the religious status quo. Weird as that may seem, you might sense from it what a lot of this maybe in response to - a loss of confidence in permissive liberal democracies. This is a very different type of fundamentalism, to find a purer, unsullied, less reformed or moderated form of Christianity, by going back to basics, the earliest surviving version of the Christian Church. Bypass the Reformation - Skip over the smoldering corpse of Roman Catholicism - Find the Orthodox Church - Make Christianity Great Again.
The romantic in me imagines something of such ancient origin, still speaking to us today through the power of its rituals and liturgy. And in truth, vestigial remains of the earliest manifestations of formalised Christian Churches, does survive within it. Something established prior to the split from Roman Catholicism. Continuing unruffled by the world and its religious travails in the Reformation. In fact the whole idea of reform appears somewhat anathema to them, as they operate from a position of already being in possession of the Truth.
However mild a flirtation this may turn out to be, my interest in Orthodox Christianity is driven by a genuine enough desire to understand it better. To touch base with the earliest surviving manifestation of the Christian church. Many innate values I hold, are Christian in origin, however neutral or secularised they may appear now. There is much I admire generally in Christian activism for social change. And as regular readers will know, I have an abiding love for Church architecture. My identity, for better or worse, has wobbly old Christian foundations.
My appreciation comes to a screeching halt, however, the moment I approach the nuts and bolts of Orthodox Christian faith, of what they actually believe. The somewhat bafflingly convoluted theological assertions on the nature of God and Christ, that underpin it all. Or their less than welcoming views on the LGBTQ + community. Then I get a 'woah there cowboy' moment. Take a more skeptical stance towards it, and re-experience with greater clarity some of the things that made becoming a Buddhist appealing.
None the less, I've had a non conformist Christian upbringing. There was my past involvement in Spiritualism, brief interest in Unitarianism, and my thirty plus years as a Buddhist, eighteen of those as a member of a Buddhist Order. All of them ingrained into my being, almost on a cellular level, informing who I am today. These days I've tended towards consciously embracing any contradictions in my current religious standpoint. To understand the values that underpin what I believe, the mistaken views, faults'n'all, etc. To not automatically let the Buddhist or Christian within me, rule them out as doctrinally inadmissible.
Christian Orthodoxy, itself, has barely been touched by the advance of secularism and atheism. Its been largely able to stay relatively removed, aloof from it all, by maintaining firm allegiance to its founding beliefs. That steadiness, I recognise, has its appeal. Unlike the C of E, its not fallen prey to the temptation to adjust or compromise its beliefs, simply in order to court popular relevance. No heavy metal communion services, or discos in the nave, here. As a result many of Orthodoxy's beliefs about the woes of our contemporary culture, are defiantly, and I'll admit, somewhat worryingly, old school.
The present crisis in masculinity, for instance, undoubtedly has some of its roots in post feminism, where men have found themselves distanced from traditional masculine behaviour and role in society. Confusion reigns because there is a distinct lack of a clear stance on the way forward. The Orthodox view, looks at our modern malaise and the meaning crisis, and does what it has always done and points back to long held traditional mores.
The Orthodox Church insists the way to restore confidence to modern manhood is to restore the traditional paradigm. They are not alone in this. In their own way the appeal to younger men of Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, draws on similar ideas of reconnecting with traditional male role models. I can recognise that is what might draw them to the Orthodox Church. Its young men craving a firmer, less passive or mind numbingly nuanced, sense of personal purpose and meaning.
Marriage from an Orthodox perspective is a gift from God, one that demonic forces in contemporary society are actively undermining. People from the LGBTQ+ community being described as the primary demonic sources of this degradation of God's benevolence. Marriage in Orthodoxy sanctifies the union of man and woman for the purposes of propagating humankind. So any other form of marriage to them is literally a travesty.
I'd interpret some of these Orthodox viewpoints as primarily cultural ones, or at least not entirely scriptural in origin. If there are biblical sources for them,I'll bet they'll be largely citing the Old Testament as their justification, not the words of Christ, as recorded in the New Testament. Not that its that easy to separate the two testaments, I know. Christ had his Jewish heritage to contend with too. Being the Messiah is a weighty label.
Foundational texts of religions from the Axial Age, are rarely written down till hundreds of years after their founders death. If an identifiable founder can be clearly established historically at all. So there is always a discussion to be had, over to what degree one can treat religious texts as authentic or truthful. Whether they are the original teachings of one specific founder, or a composite figure. All one can ask of religious teachings is - are they helpful? - are they effective? Whether they are verbatim the words of Buddha or Christ, demands a level of authenticity that is pedantic and impossible to verify.
The Buddha's teachings as they survive, have been structurally reformatted over hundreds of years, with countless revisions and grouped according to theme and length. The primary sutras are so repetitively formulaic, partly as a result of this re-editing for consistency.
To connect with the Buddha's character, personality and undoubted charisma, you have to do a lot of conjectural imaginative reading between the lines. It's almost impossible through textual analysis alone, to clearly discern whether his teaching style evolved over his lifetime. Any sense of time and sequence is hard to pin down. It's as though someone is constantly throwing a jigsaw into the air, and a thousand linked pieces are once again shattered into minute fragments.
Christians in the immediate decades after Christ's death had to be quite improvisatory, eclectic, even anarchic in their religious practice. In a time of persecution and exclusion, things had of necessity to be more informal. The formalised rituals and firm doctrinal belief structures that we now recognise, were millenia in the making.
Whole tranches of Christian texts, such as the Gnostic Gospels, were excluded from the Authorised Bible. because the philosophical views expressed within them didn't fit in the required narrative. The Bible has over the years, in this sense, said whatever its editors wanted it to say. Depending on how selectively it is quoted. What we read in the Bible today, has been edited for doctrinal uniformity by theologians, to keep even Jesus Christ 'on message'.
But then who am I to say? I'll informed, or misinformed, as I no doubt am in these things.This has prompted a thought. Like most people, I've not read the Bible as an adult. The last time I looked at a biblical text was in my school days at a C of E primary, my comprehensive, or Methodist Sunday school. Perhaps now is an opportune time to re-read the New Testament, if only as a fact checking mission. A copy of N T Wright's recent translation of The New Testament is winging its way to me, as I speak.
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