Many men may not love church, but Orthodox men do.

by Frederica Matthewes-Green

In a time when churches of every description are faced with Vanishing Male Syndrome, men are showing up at Eastern Orthodox churches in numbers that, if not numerically impressive, are proportionately intriguing. This may be the only church which attracts and holds men in numbers equal to women. As Leon Podles wrote in his 1999 book, “The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity,”

“The Orthodox are the only Christians who write basso profundo church music, or need to.”

Rather than guess why this is, I emailed a hundred Orthodox men, most of whom joined the Church as adults. What do they think makes this church particularly attractive to men? Their responses, below, may spark some ideas for leaders in other churches, who are looking for ways to keep guys in the church.

Challenges. The term most commonly cited by these men was

“challenging.”

Orthodoxy is

“active and not passive.”

“It’s the only church where you are required to adapt to it, rather than it adapting to you.”

“The longer you are in it, the more you realize it demands of you.”

The “sheer physicality of Orthodox worship” is part of the appeal. Regular days of fasting from meat and dairy, “standing for hours on end, performing prostrations, going without food and water [before communion]…When you get to the end you feel that you’ve faced down a challenge.”

“Orthodoxy appeals to a man’s desire for self-mastery through discipline.”

“In Orthodoxy, the theme of spiritual warfare is ubiquitous; saints, including female saints, are warriors. Warfare requires courage, fortitude, and heroism. We are called to be ‘strugglers’ against sin, to be ‘athletes’ as St. Paul says. And the prize is given to the victor. The fact that you must ‘struggle’ during worship by standing up throughout long services is itself a challenge men are willing to take up.”

A recent convert summed up,

“Orthodoxy is serious. It is difficult. It is demanding. It is about mercy, but it’s also about overcoming oneself. I am challenged in a deep way, not to ‘feel good about myself’ but to become holy. It is rigorous, and in that rigor I find liberation. And you know, so does my wife.”

Clear Disciplines. Several mentioned that they really appreciated having clarity about the content of these challenges and what they were supposed to do.

“Most guys feel a lot more comfortable when they know what’s expected of them.”

“Orthodoxy presents a reasonable set of boundaries.”

“It’s easier for guys to express themselves in worship if there are guidelines about how it’s supposed to work—especially when those guidelines are so simple and down-to-earth that you can just set out and start doing something.”

“The prayers the Church provides for us — morning prayers, evening prayers, prayers before and after meals, and so on — give men a way to engage in spirituality without feeling put on the spot, or worrying about looking stupid because they don’t know what to say.”

They appreciate learning clear-cut physical actions that are expected to form character and understanding.

“People begin learning immediately through ritual and symbolism, for example, by making the sign of the cross. This regimen of discipline makes one mindful of one’s relation to the Trinity, to the Church, and to everyone he meets.”

A Goal. Men also appreciate that this challenge has a goal: union with God. One said that in a previous church

“I didn’t feel I was getting anywhere in my spiritual life (or that there was anywhere to get to — I was already there, right?) But something, who knew what, was missing. Isn’t there SOMETHING I should be doing, Lord?”

Orthodoxy preserves and transmits ancient Christian wisdom about how to progress toward this union, which is called “theosis.” Every sacrament or spiritual exercise is designed to bring the person, body and soul, further into continual awareness of the presence of Christ within, and also within every other human being. As a cloth becomes saturated with dye by osmosis, we are saturated with God by theosis.

A catechumen wrote that he was finding icons helpful in resisting unwanted thoughts.

“If you just close your eyes to some visual temptation, there are plenty of stored images to cause problems. But if you surround yourself with icons, you have a choice of whether to look at something tempting or something holy.”

A priest writes,

“Men need a challenge, a goal, perhaps an adventure — in primitive terms, a hunt. Western Christianity has lost the ascetic, that is, the athletic aspect of Christian life. This was the purpose of monasticism, which arose in the East largely as a men’s movement. Women entered monastic life as well, and our ancient hymns still speak of women martyrs as showing ‘manly courage.’”

“Orthodoxy emphasizes DOING. …. Guys are ACTIVITY oriented.”

No Sentimentality. In “The Church Impotent,” cited above (and recommended by several of these men), Leon Podles offers a theory about how Western Christian piety became feminized. In the 12th-13th centuries a particularly tender, even erotic, strain of devotion arose, one which invited the individual believer to picture himself or herself (rather than the Church as a whole) as the Bride of Christ. “Bridal Mysticism” was enthusiastically adopted by devout women, and left an enduring stamp on Western Christianity. It understandably had less appeal for guys. For centuries in the West, men who chose the ministry have been stereotyped as effeminate. A life-long Orthodox layman says that, from the outside, Western Christianity strikes him as

“a love story written for women by women.”

The Eastern Church escaped Bridal Mysticism because the great split between East and West had already taken place. The men who wrote me expressed hearty dislike for what they perceive as a soft Western Jesus.

“American Christianity in the last two hundred years has been feminized. It presents Jesus as a friend, a lover, someone who ‘walks with me and talks with me.’ This is fine rapturous imagery for women who need a social life. Or it depicts Jesus whipped, dead on the cross. Neither is the type of Christ the typical male wants much to do with.”

During worship,

“men don’t want to pray in the Western fashion with hands clasped, lips pressed together, and a facial expression of forced serenity.”

“It’s guys holding hands with other guys and singing campfire songs.”

“Lines about ‘reaching out for His embrace,’ ‘wanting to touch His face,’ while being ‘overwhelmed by the power of His love’—those are difficult songs for one man to sing to another Man.”

“A friend of mine told me that the first thing he does when he walks into a church is to look at the curtains. That tells him who is making the decisions in that church, and the type of Christian they want to attract.”

“Guys either want to be challenged to fight for a glorious and honorable cause, and get filthy dirty in the process, or to loaf in our recliners with plenty of beer, pizza, and football. But most churches want us to behave like orderly gentlemen, keeping our hands and mouths nice and clean.”

One man said that worship at his Pentecostal church had been

“largely an emotional experience. Feelings. Tears. Repeated rededication of one’s life to Christ, in large emotional group settings. Singing emotional songs, swaying hands aloft. Even Scripture reading was supposed to produce an emotional experience. I am basically a do-er, I want to do things, and not talk about or emote my way through them! As a business person I knew that nothing in business comes without effort, energy, and investment. Why would the spiritual life be any different?”

Another, who visited Catholic churches, says,

“They were conventional, easy, and modern, when my wife and I were looking for something traditional, hard, and counter-cultural, something ancient and martial.”

A catechumen says that at his non-denominational church

“worship was shallow, haphazard, cobbled together from whatever was most current; sometimes we’d stand, sometimes we’d sit, without much rhyme or reason to it. I got to thinking about how a stronger grounding in tradition would help. It infuriated me on my last Ash Wednesday that the priest delivered a homily about how the real meaning of Lent is to learn to love ourselves more. It forced me to realize how completely sick I was of bourgeois, feel-good American Christianity.”

A convert priest says that men are drawn to the dangerous element of Orthodoxy, which involves “the self-denial of a warrior, the terrifying risk of loving one’s enemies, the unknown frontiers to which a commitment to humility might call us. Lose any of those dangerous qualities and we become the ‘JoAnn Fabric Store’ of churches: nice colors and a very subdued clientele.”

“Men get pretty cynical when they sense someone’s attempting to manipulate their emotions, especially when it’s in the name of religion. They appreciate the objectivity of Orthodox worship. It’s not aimed at prompting religious feelings but at performing an objective duty.”

Yet there is something in Orthodoxy that offers

“a deep masculine romance. Do you understand what I mean by that? Most romance in our age is pink, but this is a romance of swords and gallantry.”

From a deacon:

“Evangelical churches call men to be passive and nice (think ‘Mr. Rogers’). Orthodox churches call men to be courageous and act (think ‘Braveheart’).

Jesus Christ. What draws men to Orthodoxy is not simply that it’s challenging or mysterious. What draws them is the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the center of everything the Church does or says.

In contrast to some other churches, “Orthodoxy offers a robust Jesus” (and even a robust Virgin Mary, for that matter, hailed in one hymn as “our Captain, Queen of War”). Several used the term “martial” or referred to Orthodoxy as the “Marine Corps” of Christianity. (The warfare is against self-destructive sin and the unseen spiritual powers, not other people, of course.)

One contrasted this “robust” quality with

“the feminized pictures of Jesus I grew up with. I’ve never had a male friend who would not have expended serious effort to avoid meeting someone who looked like that.” Though drawn to Jesus Christ as a teen, “I felt ashamed of this attraction, as if it were something a red-blooded American boy shouldn’t take that seriously, almost akin to playing with dolls.”

A priest writes:

“Christ in Orthodoxy is a militant, Jesus takes Hell captive. Orthodox Jesus came to cast fire on the earth. (Males can relate to this.) In Holy Baptism we pray for the newly-enlisted warriors of Christ, male and female, that they may ‘be kept ever warriors invincible.’”

After several years in Orthodoxy, one man found a service of Christmas carols in a Protestant church “shocking, even appalling.” Compared to the Orthodox hymns of Christ’s Nativity,

“‘the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay’ has almost nothing to do with the Eternal Logos entering inexorably, silently yet heroically, into the fabric of created reality.”

Continuity. Many intellectually-inclined Orthodox converts began by reading Church history and the early Christian writers, and found it increasingly compelling. Eventually they faced the question of which of the two most ancient churches, the Roman Catholic or the Orthodox, makes the most convincing claim of being the original Church of the Apostles.

A lifelong Orthodox says that what men like is

“stability: Men find they can trust the Orthodox Church because of the consistent and continuous tradition of faith it has maintained over the centuries.”

A convert says,

“The Orthodox Church offers what others do not: continuity with the first followers of Christ.”

This is continuity, not archeology; the early church still exists, and you can join it.

“What drew me was Christ’s promises to the Church about the gates of hell not prevailing, and the Holy Spirit leading into all truth—and then seeing in Orthodoxy a unity of faith, worship, and doctrine with continuity throughout history.”

Another word for continuity is “tradition.” A catechumen writes that he had tried to learn everything necessary to interpret Scripture correctly, including ancient languages.

“I expected to dig my way down to the foundation and confirm everything I’d been taught. Instead, the further down I went, the weaker everything seemed. I realized I had only acquired the ability to manipulate the Bible to say pretty much anything I wanted it to. The only alternative to cynicism was tradition. If the Bible was meant to say anything, it was meant to say it within a community, with a tradition to guide the reading. In Orthodoxy I found what I was looking for.”

Men in Balance. A priest writes:

“There are only two models for men: be ‘manly’ and strong, rude, crude, macho, and probably abusive; or be sensitive, kind, repressed and wimpy. But in Orthodoxy, masculine is held together with feminine; it’s real and down to earth, ‘neither male nor female,’ but Christ who ‘unites things in heaven and things on earth.’”

Another priest comments that, if one spouse is originally more insistent about the family converting to Orthodoxy than the other,

“when both spouses are making confessions, over time they both become deepened and neither one is as dominant in the spiritual relationship.”

Men in Leadership. Like it or not, men simply prefer to be led by men. In Orthodoxy, lay women do everything lay men do, including preach, teach, and chair the parish council. But behind the iconostasis, around the altar, it’s all men. One respondent summarized what men like in Orthodoxy this way:

“Beards!”

“It’s the last place in the world men aren’t told they’re evil simply for being men.”

Instead of negativity, they are constantly surrounded by positive role models in the saints, in icons and in the daily round of hymns and stories about saints’ lives. This is another concrete element that men appreciate — there are other real human beings to look to, rather than a blur of ethereal terms.

“The glory of God is a man fully alive,”

said St. Irenaeus.

One writer adds that

“The best way to attract a man to the Orthodox Church is to show him an Orthodox man.”

But no secondary thing, no matter how good, can supplant first place.

“A dangerous life is not the goal. Christ is the goal. A free spirit is not the goal. Christ is the goal. He is the towering figure of history around whom all men and women will eventually gather, to whom every knee will bow, and whom every tongue will confess.”

HT: St. George Church of Prescott

Source: December 2007 issue of The Word magazine

http://journeytoorthodoxy.com/2010/10/28/why-orthodox-men-love-church/

By comparative standards, the rule of Holy Royal Martyr Nicholas II was no different than in any other part of Europe in terms of wealth disparity, except for the fact that during his reign, numerous initiatives were undertaken to better the lot of the common people. St. Nicholas II was a good man, but a weak ruler. However, had the February Revolution not have occurred, by June of 1917, WWI would have been over and history would have remembered him as one of the greatest Tsars in Russian history.

It is not without reason that in 1900, the economic policy of Tsarist Russia saw it becoming the world’s first economic and military superpower by the year 1960.

As far as the history of the pogroms, they were a sorry chapter in the history of old Russia. That being said, they were usually autonomous phenomena and didn’t have any sort of coordination from the Imperial government. But, yes, the government should have done more to prevent their occurrence and punished the bureacrats and rogue police and military officers who inspired them. This is a sin of all of Russia, and one I am heartfully sorry for.

BTW, many of these rogue leaders later joined the ranks of the Democrats, the Socialists, the Nationalists and all other manner of secular Revolutionaries and “LEFTIST workers of the peoples will”. You fail to mention that the worst pogroms actually occurred AFTER the fall of the monarchy, during the civil war, by people usually espousing some notion of “secular liberal democracy”.

I find it almost distasteful that one would bate tsarism while failing to see that the system one is espousing places the blood of the millions murdered by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot on ones hands.

Whatever the failings of the Tsarist bureaucracy and its corruption, and many could be named, the Far Left atheist Bolshevik gangster regime took that corruption and the violence of the pogroms to a new diabolical level -into an atheist infrastructure of dungeons, prisons, inquistions and mass graves: it made nations into cemeteries- from orphanages which euthanized children to revolutionary “chrezvychajky” kangaroo courts which engaged in grizzly and ritual political murders of political opponents to carnage of villages and monasteries, millions murdered in purges, in artificial famines, worked to death as slave labor in gulags… Indeed, the Bolshevik pogrom was the greatest pogrom perpetrated upon Russia …

AND UPON ALL OF MANKIND.

The Far Left with its “enlightened atheism” murdered more people in the name of “progress, modernity, enlightenment, political correctness, social justice, fairness and wealth redistribution, democracy and the revolution” in the twentieth century than any Tsar, any war, any Hitler ever did. So let’s keep context.

This pogrom the Far Left with its atheism and catcalls for “wealth distribution” bears on its shoulders.

Let’s be forthright in speaking of bloody rulers. The Tsar’ Martyr’s reign and its mistakes were sorry circumstances, but the rivers of blood and mass graves of the Left which followed his martyrdom were horrors and crimes against humanity never known in the history of mankind. It is in consideration of this carnage and barbarism of immoral atheism and its “modernity” and “enlightenment” where the Left is indicted and the tsarist system is redeemed.

One of the sorry things few people don’t mention is that Hitler used the atrocities in Russia perpetrated by the Bolsheviks to implement his own crazed genocidal policies, murdering so many innocents, over 6 million Jews. One of his primary points of propaganda was chronicling the atrocities in post Tsarist Russia and slandering the Jews with the acts of the atheist Leftist “democratic” Bolsheviks. When he invaded Russia, he styled it as “humanitarian intervention, to liberate the oppressed masses of the East”. Yes, the atheist “liberal democrat” Left stoked the fire of evil and genocide both within Russia and outside of it and murdered over a hundred million (over 6 million Jews) by the end of the twentieth century, filling mass graves all over the earth.

For all its inequities, even sorry injustices, the Christian Tsarist state, was shown to be far superior to the modern secular Leftist atheist “workers’ paradise” and not even fractionally as bloody or inequitable in its lack of wealth restribution: the atheist Left enslaved great peoples and murdered them on a whim.

So, no, there is no perfect system or state, but in the consideration of these things, the Leftist secular atheist liberal democratic state is not at all a paragon to emulate or even speak of in any sentence which includes the word “superior”.

“Rule by the Philosopher King was the ideal”…

Who did you have in mind?

Under Nicholas II, Jews in Russia were met with some degree of persecution, including during the Kishinev pogrom which left dozens killed, thousands wounded and a multitude homeless and destitute. The personal wealth he amassed was astronomical. There are other accounts of him (as well as those of his predecessor, Nicholas I) but I’ll leave you to dig them up if you aren’t aware of them already.

As they say, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

Yes, I’d agree our current system isn’t perfect, but its system of checks and balances seem to help at least avoid the sort of violent persecution that go hand in hand with this type of political regime.

The prohibition of all extramarital sexual relations—including homosexuality—
is found in the earliest non-canonical Christian writings. Both the Didache and the
Epistle of Barnabas, dating from the second century, include homosexuality among a list
of sexual sins.15 One of the first Christian theologians, Clement of Alexandria (died
220), wrote that the Sodomites had “through much luxury fallen into uncleanness,
practicing adultery shamelessly, and burning with insane love for boys.”16 St. John
Chrysostum (died 407) strongly opposed the practice of homosexuality in his day,
which he viewed as contrary to nature:
Blurring the natural order, men play the part of women, and women
play the part of men, contrary to nature. . . . No passage is closed against
evil lusts; and their sexuality is a public institution—they are roommates
with indulgence.
As a result of their sin, writes Clement, “so did God did [sic] bring upon them
such a punishment as made the womb of the land forever barren and destitute of
all fruits.”17
St. Basil, a contemporary of Chrysostum, counseled young men to flee “intimate
association,” reminding such that “the enemy has indeed set many aflame through
such means.”18 Basil recommended the same punishment for homosexual offenses as
for adultery, which was exclusion from the sacraments for fifteen years. St. Gregory
of Nyssa (died 398) also recommended this punishment and viewed homosexuality
as unlawful pleasure.19 The conviction that homosexual acts are objectively wrong is
continued by St. Augustine (died 430), who wrote that “those crimes which are against
nature must everywhere and always be detested and punished. The crimes of the men
of Sodom are of this kind.”
By formulating laws prohibiting homosexuality, the early Western law codes
unequivocally affirmed that such behavior was contrary to nature. In the fourth
century, the Theodosian Code mandated “exquisite punishment” for those who would
enter into homosexual marriages, and by 390 the Code states that those who practice
the “shameful custom of condemning a man’s body, acting the part of a woman’s” are to be burned at the stake.21 The Emperor Justinian strengthened this legal
tradition in the sixth century in the Corpus Juris Civilis, which became the foundation
for Byzantine and later Western law regulating sexual behavior. In the Institutes of
the Corpus, homosexuality is classed with adultery as punishable by death.22 Justinian
also issued two edicts that condemn such practices as “diabolical” and “the most
disgraceful lusts.”23 From this time on the prohibition of homosexual behavior became fixed in the Western legal tradition.

Why is a “modern democratic state” necessarily the ideal? According to Plato, rule by the Philosopher King was the ideal and when that could not arise, rule by a Republic of the virtuous and wise and well read. That is what ancient Rome and Byzantium attempted to accomplish.

When confronted with insistence on “liberal democracy”, I always take pause to reflect on the line from the Shakespherean play Cariolinus, where the general says something to the effect, “I will not surrender Rome to hungry rabble, to dark ignorance, and a mob of thieves”. “Democracy” can be an ugly standard indeed if it is not upheld to the glory of GOD.

When we look at our nation today, it seems that it has been surrendered to a usurper government and an unscrupulous people, an oligarchy of secular cultural decomposition, who seek to degenerate and divide the people and force a crude neo-pagan, depraved, semiliterate, statist Far Left agenda not only on us but on the entire world. Rather than uplift the people in faith, in virtue, in letters, in wisdom, in patriotism, this Far Left usurper cabal has plunged the nation into social decay, base ignorance, moral indifference and godlessness, libertine depravity and national apathy. Madison, Jefferson, Washington, Adams would denounce this travesty that has been made of our government and march on it.

So our government is far from perfect, but it is ours, and it is our responsibility as a people to wisely use this government we possess to the greater glory of GOD. (Thus, it is our Orthodox Christian obligation to work as wise stewards and to change it.) Likewise, any government of any given people if it meets that muster, it has achieved its purpose and should be respected.

The Pax Romana of Augustus was a period of approximately 200 years of cultural achievements, peace and progress and was the seedbed for the rise of Christianity.

The secular Left is using abortion and the gay agenda to war against the Church and any people of faith. You can’t avoid a war they have declared on you and what you believe. It is upon you. Either you witness your Faith or you will witness its demise at their hands.

This is how the other side thinks on the issue form this letter I found.

Yeah, Prof. Yannaras would call it that.

Actually, you did “make a mistake conspicuously twice” so as to be noticeable. Especially since it had been brought up as an issue, an issue your alter ego found all too expedient to attempt to exploit. Seems it backfired. There is no excuse for being so petty you insult people by misspelling their names. That is simply offensive. But I believe that is your point.

The fact you still presume to lecture people on an Orthodoxy you don’t evidence and a Christianity whose repression you advocate is just another moment in the ironic satire of Leftists masking their disdain for religion. Hypocrisy could be a word used if there were an eye to read it.

I am not a Neo Conservative. Something you seem to still be clinging to from your Occupy Orthodox Net talking points. I am a Traditionalist Libertarian.

As far as why the Right represents best the views of the Church is precisely because it preserves religious liberty and promotes traditional morality while the Left is actively persecuting it and seeking to supplant it. Your contribution here consistently affirms that.

As a Libertarian, I do advance people and communities being free to choose their way, but with the understanding that all points of view are represented and that religious persecution is not a reason why they do not choose a certain path. In a community and nation in which I live I promote traditional American culture and values while as an Orthodox Christian I try to live up to the adventure in freedom Christian morality constitutes in reestablishing the personhood of believers in CHRIST JESUS, for true existence is in living a Christocentric and Christological life rejecting dehumanization and dissolution, life commited to sin and depersonalization, while affirming Orthodox life as reintegration and fulfillment in the Person of CHRIST in HIS BODY and BLOOD. Such a life of witness is precisely a moral and public Life in HIM.

Orthodoxy simply is not witnessed unless people live it and in their lives witness it offering creation, which includes their families, their communities, their culture, their state, a synaxis – a theanthropic assembly: a Eucharistic assembly of praise and transfiguration in the Uncreated Energies of CHRIST JESUS, becoming the BODY and BLOOD of CHRIST, trampling down death by death, partaking of the Divine Nature. Thereby hallowing the times and sanctifying creation, matter in the love of CHRIST the GOD man. That means the moral reintegration and witness of personhood to all, including a Far Left Neo Pagan usurper regime.

As an Orthodox Christian, I don’t check peoples’ party passports at the door of the Church, but by the same token, I profess the need for the Church’s message to be free, unadulterated, active, witnessing the Truth of CHRIST to the world and to its political regimes. That is the Apostolic Commission to which the Church is called. When people contradict that Evangelical imperative and promote, as Fr. Schmemann denounced, a “schizophrenia”, a nominalism in their piety and observance, an ideologically motivated escapism constituting advocacy for the heresy of secularism with a clearly Far Left Neo Sergianist baggage, then that rises to assault upon the Holy Faith and is something I resist with every fiber of my being.

In other words, the reason why the RIGHT is the de facto choice for Orthodox Christians is because it preserves their religious liberty while defending and promoting traditional values in the face of committed atheist/secularist MSNBC G-I-G-O – Obamunist assault. The Church is being repressed in its witness of Christian morality by people like yourself. That constitutes persecution. The political motive behind it is state sponsorship of homosexuality, abortion, promiscuity, every manner of immorality thrust on the scene with a very real atheist secularist programme. That is the Left YOU represent in your proposed repression of religious liberty. It is irreconcileable with Orthodox Christianity.

Your ideological position advances the murder of infants, state sponsorship of sodomy, gay marriage, assault on religion, promiscuity and a culture of thoughtless fornication, drug use, atheism, warring against Christmas, etc. It is not rocket science for a serious Orthodox Christian to be able to say that your Far Left position stands against everything Orthodoxy stands for, constituting persecution of Christianity, religion in general. While “Centrists” seem to think that there should be some middle ground for views like this and that there is something positive to be achieved in allowing some of the cultural poison you advocate to be shot into the veins of society. Thus, the Right alone offers the only appropriate political posture for Orthodox Christians, for programmes of the Right solely allow one to live ones Faith in integrity, without compromise, in full fidelity and liberty.

YES, Orthodox Christians can be good Orthodox Christians and good Americans. They don’t have to shut up and lock their Faith and morals in their churches on sundays and Christmas and Easter! We are on a missionary territory and our Holy Faith is part of this culture. We are called to share it. No, we are not called to silence and inaction in the face of the moral decline of our nation and looming anti Christian persecution on the part of your Far Left ideological fellow travelers. We will not drink the koolaid. We will not support Obamunism as faith communities in new iterations of sergianist cowardice. We will speak up and we will witness Orthodoxy to the culture with its moral, transformative message. With unadulterated fidelity to its teachings.

Since the entire swath of issues you bring up has been answered and shown to be both disingenuous and inaccurate and your presentation offensive and disruptive, there is no further point in continuing this. You aren’t reading the answers given to you and you are entrenched in your Far Left views and advocacy for secularism and repression of religious liberty in America. That is a position serious Orthodox Christians reject. You aren’t offering dialogue and you certainly have no interest in Orthodox points of view. Thus, furthering this exchange is both pointless and futile. Be well. Our conversation is over.

The misspelling was merely accidental. Making something of it is childish.

It is pretty clear that you hold being a neo-conservative American much higher in your estimation than being an Orthodox Christian. Good. Go worship in the temple of politics and quit dragging the Church into a local and temporary debate that will only enrage non-Christians. You can’t force people to be Christian at gunpoint and that is what the force of law essentially is. Far better for Christians to have the gun pointed at then so they can openly defy the law than to have non-Christians feeling like the Church is exercising worldly power over them. You can’t make a culture Christian by law. The world will not be saved at the voting booth. Most Americans don’t give a damn about God or religion and sure as hell don’t want people who do telling them what to do. So leave them to their own devices and quit trying to steer them from the cliff of their own destruction. The sooner the majority achieves its vision the sooner their failure will become apparent. Meanwhile, if Christians can stand out then people might have something truly different to look to.