Culture war: the distraction from spiritual war

Image courtesy White Fear Chain, from their album Visceral Life - go support them, they are an awesome band

Fair warning: I am going to speak primarily to the Orthodox version of this, because this is the corner I know best. However, the dynamics that I am going to describe here cut across confessional demarcations. Despite the theatrical protestations from each group against the other, Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Studies Centre and the formation around Rod Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative are coming to look strangely like mirror images of each other. It is intriguing that in their attempts to firm up the ranks in the intra-Orthodox culture war, both of them have identified both an internal ‘enemy’ (whether LGBTQ activists or Christian nationalists) as well as a common external ‘enemy’.

It isn’t and shouldn’t be news that Rod Dreher has been gunning for China for several years now. And he’s not just going after the government, but also after Chinese people and people of Chinese descent. This is part-and-parcel of what appears to be a concerted editorial policy under Arthur Bloom’s utter mismanagement at The American Conservative (though not just there) with a peculiarly-racialised form of Cold War liberal red-baiting.

But now it seems that Fordham’s Public Orthodoxy blog (however happy it is to pose as ‘liberal’ on culture-war issues) is happily getting in on that action. Witness Cyril Hovorun’s execrable, kneejerk Eurocentric piece on that outlet which manages, at the same time, to elide African voices entirely from the conversation about their own religious and political life, and also to repeat tired, racial-paranoid lies about Chinese ‘colonisation’ of the continent. He even uses the literal language of ‘Scramble for Africa’ that echoes the British-imperialist apologetics of the neoliberal rag The Economist in regard to the continent. As my Yiddish ancestors would say, ‘Oy vey.’ (Please, for the love of God, somebody page Yanis Varoufakis. It’s a long shot, but there’s an off-chance the rich Greek-American cradle types at Fordham might listen to an economist from the Old Country.)

In the meanwhile, you have Hovorun’s fellow Public Orthodoxy affiliate the ‘Very Reverend Doctor’ John A Jillions (and you know he’s Serious Business when he puts that many titles in front of his name, like a tonsured Reader still wet behind the ears) and oyster-snarfing pearl-clutching closet-case DreRod going after each other over who gets to give lecture gigs at St Vlad’s, with all the name-calling you’d expect to be attendant on such a high-stakes fight. It’s quite comical. It’s hilarious to me, in fact – even though I have mixed-race kids attending an Orthodox parish, so it’s not like I’m unaffected.

But this shows that Orthodoxy in America reflects American politics – and however unfortunate that may be, there is no escaping it. Nor should there be: as Fr Georges Florovsky says, this world is where we Christians live and serve, and we shouldn’t try to barricade ourselves off from it. American politics is dominated by the likes of Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson, and we will have to deal with these forms of political hæresy – and, yes, hæresy is the correct term – infiltrating the Church from both ‘sides’ of the culture war. Just as historical hæresies have usually come in pairs, so too do these ones.

The overall punchline is still this: don’t be ‘orrid, and don’t be a twerp. That is to say: it’s fine to stand for all of Orthodox teaching, consistently, on issues of race and sex. You shouldn’t have to be ‘soft’ on rainbow-flag wokelib nonsense the way Public Orthodoxy wants you to be; and you shouldn’t have to be ‘soft’ on white Christian nationalism the way The American Conservative wants you to be.

Moreover, Orthodox Christians need to beware of these wolves in sheep’s clothing, and not compromise the revealed truth of Christ for any partizan facsimile thereof, regardless of whether it’s Democrat-flavoured or Republican-flavoured. The culture war is always and ever a distraction from the spiritual war that we all face. Remember that the demons have many wiles, and they attack with illusions. Hostile powers find it easier to attack us with half-truths that sound pleasing and convincing, rather than with outright lies. It’s easier for them to attack us with those half-truths when they can distract us with the wrongness of someone else – someone outside. Therefore we must keep our mind always on our own wrongness, our own failings, and seek to correct those. Personally speaking, that means always examining ourselves for cognitive biases, blind spots, emotional hangups. And collectively speaking, as a country, that means attending first to the problems that we face at home rather than the problems that exist overseas.