Tag Archives: Rod Dreher

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

“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 13^th, 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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“The Master’s Hospitality”: Jesus and Dialogue

by Very Rev. Dr. John A. Jillions

Jesus teaches in the Temple — *^{Image: iStock.com/sedmak}*

Come, O faithful, let us enjoy the Master’s hospitality:
the banquet of immortality.
In the upper chamber with uplifted minds,
Let us receive the exalted words of the Word, whom we magnify.
(Holy Thursday, Canon Ode 9)

In January 2022, I was invited to give the annual Father Georges Florovsky Lecture for the Orthodox Theological Society in America and one of the issues I addressed was the disturbing trend among some Orthodox to reject dialogue with their fellow Orthodox Christians on controversial topics.

Especially now, with the violence in Ukraine largely pitting Orthodox Christians against each other, one would have thought that this was precisely the moment to value conversation. Indeed, Vladimir Putin’s armed forces are devastating Ukraine with barbaric ferocity, and millions of Ukrainians have fled their homes as refugees. And yet, negotiators from Russia and Ukraine are still talking. If enemy governments can negotiate, can we who share the same Eucharist refuse dialogue with one another, even on the most sensitive topics?

Rod Dreher of The American Conservative is the most prominent champion against dialogue. “I only engage people who come to me in good faith and are willing to listen. I don’t waste my time with those who don’t. It’s not worth it. I’m not interested. I don’t grant legitimacy to those who are just trolling me or trying to own conservatives.” In the lecture I drew attention to Dreher’s views on dialogue, and a couple weeks later he responded with a blistering critique in The American Conservative. “If you listen to Father Jillions’s speech, you’ll see that it’s a classic example of progressive obfuscation—the kind of thing that well-meaning priests and laity who have never dealt directly with it can easily fall for.”

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The End of “Conservative Ecumenism”

by Will Cohen

Not all critiques of secular liberalism over the past fifty years have involved flirtations with fascism, but in the apocalypse (literally, the unveiling) that Putin’s war on Ukraine has been, we can see more than ever the horrific consequences of not clearly separating the two.

In January 1975, Fr. Alexander Schmemann, dean of St. Vladimir’s seminary at the time, signed the Hartford Appeal, initiated by the future founder and editor of First Things, John Richard Neuhaus. The declaration named thirteen “pervasive, false, and debilitating” trends its signatories considered characteristic of the age, among them the idea that in comparison to “all past forms of understanding reality,” “modern thought is superior” and “normative for Christian faith and life.” The Hartford Appeal was an early instance of what Andrey Shishkov has called “conservative ecumenism.” It was a joint statement of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians critical of liberalizing, secularizing trends in society and religion.

Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority had yet to be formed in 1975. Among the 25 religious leaders who signed the Hartford Appeal were Peter Berger and Stanley Hauerwas, names little if at all associated with Christian conservatism today. Also notable in light of ascendant anti-democratic tendencies of Christian conservatives of recent years is Schmemann’s great gratitude for the freedoms afforded by liberal democratic society. In this he differed from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose worldview Schmemann in his Journals described after their first meeting in 1974: “Absolute denial of democracy. Yes to monarchy” (p. 43).

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The Moral Conservative Wayback Machine and the Deeper Sense of the Closure of Memorial

The identification of moral conservatives in the twenty-first century with historical periods that predate the experience of twentieth century totalitarianism reveals a fundamental blind-spot in contemporary conservatism. Conjuring up political constellations of the 1920s to 40s as analogies for contemporary struggles between conservatives and progressives willfully ignores the ‘lesson’ of totalitarianism. Nothing exemplifies this forgetfulness better than the recent closure of Memorial, the NGO dedicated to the critical memory of Stalinism, by Russian authorities.

On the pages of Public Orthodoxy, Aram G. Sarkisian recently pointed out the odd affinity which some American Orthodox cultivate vis-à-vis the time of the American Civil War and how ultraconservative Orthodox groups appropriate an eighteenth-century story to fit a twisted and ahistorical agenda of the twenty-first. The identification with past epochs it nothing unique to American Orthodox. In my own studies of moral conservatism in Russia and the US, I have also encountered this identification with the past, in particular with the period of the 1920s to 40s.

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