Tag Archives: American Politics

God’s Controversy with the United States
Rod Dreher and the Orthodox Jeremiad

by Aram G. Sarkisian

torn American flag

“Beware, O sinful land, beware;
And do not think it strange
That sorer judgements are at hand,
Unless thou quickly change.
Or God, or thou, must quickly change;
Or else thou art undon:
Wrath cannot cease, if sin remain,
Where judgement is begun.”

-Michael Wigglesworth, “God’s Controversy With New England” (Written in the Time of the Great Drought, Anno. 1662)

“Christian faith is in steep decline and a softer form of totalitarianism is on the march. I firmly believe that we American Christians, and in truth Americans of any traditional faith and convictions, that we’re now living in exile. We know from the Hebrew Bible how God deals with His people when they have become unfaithful to Him. He judges them.”

-Rod Dreher, September 13th, 2022

In the United States today, public pronouncements from prominent Orthodox Christians often take the form of jeremiads, grave sermons decrying general social and moral transgressions for which humanity faces imminent persecution from an angry and vengeful God. Jeremiads follow a typical structure: a reference to a doctrinal baseline, ordinarily culled from the Old Testament; an outlining of the covenant between God and His people; and then an explanation of the contemporary significance of that covenant, first through a grave and graphic exposition on how God’s people had so catastrophically failed, and then in an explication of how they may reverse their perilous fate. 

From the settler colonialist preachers of seventeenth-century New England to the circuit-riding revivalists of the nineteenth-century to the televangelists and YouTube preachers of the present day, jeremiads have warned that without atonement and correction, God’s people in America were doomed. Many such jeremiads are premised on the notion that the United States is a Christian nation, exceptional and ordained above all to serve God’s plan for humanity, and burdened with that should it fail to retain its covenant with the divine, the nation would fail and its people suffer. A renewed upsurge of Christian Nationalism has caused such rhetoric to swell in recent years, and as we have seen, such ideas too ripple through Orthodox Christian institutions and communities.

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Political Polarization and Christian Unity

by Will Cohen

polarization

When politics is as toxic as it’s become today in North America, Church unity would seem more than ever to require quarantining the life of faith from current political and social questions. Broader society’s most polarizing issues do get taken up eagerly, it’s true, in Christian congregations (of whatever tradition) that lean hard ideologically either to the left or the right, but how fruitful that engagement has been is unclear. In any case, most Orthodox parishes I know aren’t overwhelmingly partisan in that way. As a consequence, North American Orthodox parish and diocesan life steers mostly clear of the pressing issues of the day.

There are exceptions. Continue Reading…

Trump and Humiliation

by Will Cohen

A recurrent refrain in Donald Trump’s 2011 book Time to Get Tough is that America is being laughed at–by China, OPEC, Russia, Iran. Compared to their leaders ours are weak and stupid.  Trump describes Barack Obama’s approach on geopolitical and economic issues as “embarrassing”. Obama is said to “grovel,” “kiss the feet” of foreign leaders and dignitaries, “kowtow” and engage in “pretty-please” diplomacy with our enemies.  Vladimir Putin, by contrast, is someone “of whom I often speak highly for his intelligence and no-nonsense way”.

If America is to be a winner we have to elect a winner to lead it. “Every day in business I see America getting ripped off and abused. We have become a laughingstock, the world’s whipping boy, blamed for everything, credited for nothing, given no respect.” We need a president “who knows how to get tough with China . . . and how to keep them from screwing us at every turn.” Continue Reading…

Trump and Transgression

by Will Cohen

Although there are, as many commentators have observed, social and economic factors at play, a perhaps more significant key to understanding the popularity of Donald Trump’s campaign is its sheer transgressive quality.  In this sense I would suggest that Trump’s campaign is a phenomenon entirely in keeping with an essential dynamic of our cultural fabric.

Not every flouting of established norms is a transgression in the proper, theological sense of being a sin; it depends why it is being flouted, and what the norm is.  Continue Reading…