Joshua Treviño

It’s in trouble. Clark Carlton:

“The United States has certainly become a threat to our Orthodox brethren around the world. Witness the US-backed persecution of our brethren in Kosovo and Palestine. Certainly the Christians in Iraq are much worse off now than they were before the US invasion. Furthermore, if current policies continue in place, we will be headed for an inevitable confrontation with a resurgent Russia. Our children and grand-children may be in for another Cold War — only this time we may just be the Evil Empire.”

To be kind, this is ridiculous. I used to like both Carlton and Daniel Larison, but I can’t take either seriously any more. Too many Orthodox Christian converts in America — and especially those who participate in the public square — seem pulled toward perceived originalism or anachronism in the political realm. This has the appearance of being motivated by the same aesthetic sensibility that appears to draw them toward Orthodoxy: the sense of a necessary fidelity to the foundational faith is basically the same, translated from the religious to the political sphere. But in both spheres, it leads them to falsehood. Witness, for example, Larison’s endorsement of the schismatic Esphigmenou Monastery — and witness his, Carlton’s, and even Dreher’s enthusiasm for Ron Paul. A true fidelity to Christian Orthodoxy, of course, would not lead one to endorse schismatics who have declared the Patriarch in Constantinople a heretic(!); and a true fidelity to the American Constitution would not lead one to endorse Ron Paul, who, despite his propaganda, is antagonistic to some key provisions of the Constitution — notably, but not solely, the Fourteenth and Sixteenth Amendments.

This yearning for the dead purity of antiquity is, in fact, alien to both Orthodoxy and America. Both, as Jaroslav Pelikan would remind us, are rooted in certain foundational ideas, texts, and traditions, and both are incomprehensible without those things. But both are also alive. Orthodoxy does not require the abdication of moral sense on behalf of barbarous autocracies in places like Serbia and Russia, majority-Orthodox though they may be; and America does not require the abdication of common sense on behalf of the imaginary Constitutional never-was of Ron Paul. If the voices of Orthodox Christianity in the public square increasingly do both those things, then it falls to the American Orthodox who don’t to riposte. And we will.

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