The administrators of the Church would sooner renounce nine tenths of its teachings than one tenth of its property.
Karl Marx
Foreword
Today’s Western world lives without Faith. Its last variant, Protestantism, was discredited for its spiritual emptiness and delusions. Devoid of spirituality, it was left only with sectarian moralism, which was focused on sexual puritanism, never getting to the source of sin, and making it rejected by hundreds of millions. As for Roman Catholicism, it survived longer, but has also been discredited by its State ideology, absurd dogma of Papal infallibility and pedophilia. Are any of its clergy normal? This leaves only the Orthodox Church. However, the devil is doing his best here to wreck our presence and mission by inspiring certain Orthodox clergy to behave like popes of Rome and certain others to behave like moralising Protestant sectarians, who have only hatred for real Orthodox.
Introduction: False Conversion
Protestants have been joining the Orthodox Church for well over sixty years, especially in the USA. The last thirty years have seen relatively large numbers, especially in the USA. And many of them have come from strict, ultra-conservative Evangelical backgrounds, especially in the USA. And quite a few of them have become members of the clergy, especially in the USA. Here they have been joining two small jurisdictions in particular: the small Antioch and ROCOR, which both desperately lack clergy. (Those from moderate backgrounds have joined the much bigger Greek Archdiocese, OCA and Serbs. They generally do become Orthodox). The problem here is that those from such ultra-conservative Lutheran/Calvinist backgrounds are tainted by them.
Such extreme Protestantism hardly exists in any Western country outside the USA. After all, the extremist Puritans emigrated to the USA precisely because of their intolerance of others and there they started witch-hunts. It is this intolerance which they also bring with them when they ‘join the Orthodox Church’ – notice we do not say that they ‘become Orthodox’ in their case. These are the individuals who believe that being as conservative and fundamentalist as possible is somehow Orthodox. So far are they from the truth, for they clearly have no idea whatever of the realities of the Orthodox Church and Faith. This trend had already become apparent among converts, especially in California, in the 1970s, in their ‘supercorrectness’.
However, today, in this rootless, internet age, this fake Orthodoxy has become a veritable epidemic. What are the symptoms of this sick pseudo-Orthodoxy, which began in the USA, especially among the oddballs of California, though it has affected a few others, especially from a Protestant background, especially in English-speaking countries? Such converts may enter the Orthodox Church sacramentally; but if left unhealed by obedience to Tradition and the mind of the Church, the Evangelical imagination simply reappears under icons, cassocks, mispronounced Russian or Greek titles, and misunderstood and distorted quotations of the canons, instead of from the Gospels. Below are twelve characteristics of these unconverted converts:
Twelve Characteristics
- These individuals have never lived for any time in any Orthodox country or spent years in an ‘ethnic’ Orthodox monastery or parish. Such they despise. This is why they do not speak or read any Orthodox language with any fluency and do not wish to. Indeed, they scorn Orthodox languages and immigrants. Everything must be in American, including in England!
- The life of ancient, suffering and often very poor peoples, who have preserved the faith through centuries of prayer, liturgy, exile and martyrdom and handed it down through the generations, remain foreign to them. Indeed, they despise and even hate them. They do not turn to the ancient, deeply rooted Orthodox countries. The historical ethnic Churches have preserved an unbroken heritage, born of centuries of profound sacrifice, exile, and martyrdom and have handed down the faith rooted in their ancestral soil of humility. But the unconverted converts want an abstract (the Protestant manner) Anglo-American product, stripped of memory, language and people, constructed as a Neo-Protestant revisionism. They want the Disney fake.
- They demand total loyalty and cult-like obedience in an ultra-rigid, high-demand environment. This is marked by intense expectations of personal compliance in a high-control system of psychological pressure and discipline. This is the suffocating pressure of guru-style control freakery and emphasis on purification (they are after all Puritans) in their tightly-governed religious ghetto.
- They speak with ‘authority’ and confidence about tradition, obedience, order, and duty. This message is especially used to manipulate and prey on insecure and lonely young men, who are disoriented and confused by the modern world. Such young men may never have had a father, may suffer from autism, may be awkward with girls, may be victims of the covid period and seek certainty of any sort.
- Imbued with Old Testament phariseeism, domination and conservatism (which is quite different from the living Tradition of the Holy Spirit), they know nothing of Orthodox spiritual fatherhood, self-sacrificial love, patience, gentleness and the bearing of shame for the sake of the sinner. In Orthodoxy, spiritual fathers are called to take up the Cross first, to protect and repent for others. They do not place the burden of shame on spiritual children. Orthodox spiritual fathers bear the burdens of their flock with tears, patience and unconditional love. Imported Protestant administrators impose only bullying and threats. Clinging to the works of the law divorced from mercy, they remain under the curse of the very law they mistake for righteousness, substituting self-sacrificial love with rigid, self-righteous pharisaic control. Intoxicated by self-righteousness, they never cease to fashion weapons out of holy things. The whole Church, Scripture and Tradition are cudgels for them. For the betrayal of Judas does not always come with a kiss. Sometimes it comes through ‘protocols’, calculation and signatures, and above all through intense jealousy of real Orthodox and through taking money and ‘subscriptions’ off the naïve and deluded.
- Ascetic life, fasting and abstention are viewed by them as parts of a punitive authoritarian regime of control freakery and abusive discipline, and not as the free offering of the heart to God for the acquisition of mercy.
- All who quickly see through their fakery and hypocrisy and whistle blow are put under intense pressure, fear of permanent exclusion and swift retaliation, as their ‘authority’ has been challenged by those who actually know the Tradition. All this comes from their harsh and punitive Lutheran/Calvinist mentality. Those who resist these bullies and do not give them obedience and personal loyalty (and their cash) will disappear as ‘non-people’ – they never existed.
- Any objection to their fake Orthodoxy is for them a source of hurt pride, wounded reputation, embarrassment, emotional distress (which causes them to turn to drink, among other things), business harm, loss of professional standing and of future economic advantage. They are money-obsessed narcissists.
- Such unconverted Protestants justify their pride by referring to the ‘Ancient Faith’, which is selectively borrowed and deployed to create an artificial authority, which is in fact only Neo-Evangelical fundamentalism, not the ascetic, eucharistic, conciliar Orthodox Faith. Orthodoxy for them is just an excuse for personal spiritual reinvention, renewed fakery and a very profitable personality cult. How they love raking in teh dollars, just like any Protestant tele-evangelist!
- Their theatricality does not stop with legalistic honorifics and borrowed academic or ecclesiastical titles. They teach themselves to speak with a foreign cadence, stylised, Old World delivery, ‘an Oxford accent’ (which is in fact nothing of the sort, but could sound like one in crazy California), or Eastern European vocal inflections. These are all simply part of their brand: an artificial pose intended to project frowning severity, antiquity and the pseudo-exotic spiritual authority of the guru. Their deliberate adoption of affected speech patterns and foreign cadences to command an audience is not the sound of Tradition, it is the fake theatrical vanity of the preening narcissist. When the theatre of their legalism replaces the Church, the letter is weaponised against the Spirit and a fake juridical process is mistaken for the life of the Church. This only works among naïve and uneducated American neophytes, who know no better. It does not export. We saw through him in five minutes, but then we have been around for a long time, since before any of them were born.
- Tradition and the canons are not respected with humility and prayer. They are selectively ‘harvested’, weaponised and then discarded. They are only observed when they appear to justify their crazy punishments. Orthodoxy is kept only to elevate personal status, command obedience and play at being Orthodox, in order to increase their beloved income, power and prestige. The Orthodox ethos, accountability before the Tradition, spiritual fatherhood, humility and compassionate love for the sinner are discarded. Orthodox symbols on the outside, Evangelical content on the inside. Patristic language on the surface, legalistic and bullying control beneath. Tradition for them is mere conservatism a la Trump, not the Holy Spirit and repentance. For them it is all just a clerical costume, an exotic credential, a borrowed title and weaponised obedience for income for their guru selves.
- These unconverted converts make of the Orthodox Church a platform for their own pseudo-charismatic self-construction. They build a personality cult, used as authority, it is the Evangelical will-to-rule in outward Orthodox forms, the Protestant fundamentalist world of misogynistic patriarchal authority (how they hate women!), puritanism and punitive control. Orthodoxy is merely symbolic, it is only there to provide them with self-justification for their proud egomania and narcissism, it is only the personality-driven religious performance of Evangelical show.
Conclusion: Bringing Spiritual Death
When the Protestant cultural framework is not healed and transfigured by repentance and the sacraments, it survives. Byzantine furniture is only added to their extremist Protestantism. Their literalism (The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life, 2 Corinthians 3, 6) and Puritanical instinct to ‘purify’ (‘drain the swamp’) and witch-hunt survives. Those of Protestant background can become Orthodox. However, the old Protestant mentality, severity, control and legalism to repress what they see as impurity by enforced discipline, loyalty and ‘spiritualised’ obedience to their personality cult may remain. If so, this means spiritual abuse, exclusion and erasure, demands for submission, rigidity and a carefully curated image of self-righteousness, which also fool uninformed American bishops in the USA.
Reception into Orthodoxy requires more than changing outward jurisdiction, vocabulary, ancestry and dress. It requires inward repentance, the death of the religious ego, humility and not pride. It requires obedience to the Catholicity of the Church, not the conquest of the Church by the inherited bad habits of domination and personal ambition a la tele-evangelist. Like all Protestants, these individuals are possessed by Judeo-Christianism, a term invented only a hundred years ago. It is not in the language of the liturgy, in the Philokalia, in the Fathers, saints and ascetics. It is only in the Old Testament political language of American conservatism and Protestant fundamentalism, part of the legalistic, punitive, authoritarian, Evangelical heresy of Christian Zionism.
This is why their missionary endeavours always fail. They understand nothing of the people they are trying to convert and have no compassion for them. They are spiritually suffocating, which is why they are sooner or later thrown off. Their emphasis is not on repentance, mercy, joy, healing, the gentle restoration of sinners, but on the arrogance of puritanical moralising and hate-filled condemnation. This is why so many such bullies end up in old calendarist sects a la Boston. Bostonitis does not need theology, it needs psychiatry, for it is a pathology. Their faces express disapproval, but that is all theatre. Subjugation to them is ‘spiritualised’. Resistance to their heresy is framed as ‘rebellion’. Disclosure is disloyalty and betrayal. They kill the Church. Their name is spiritual death.
