Two of the four largest Orthodox jurisdictions in the U.S. now have ecclesial cultures which are predominantly convert oriented. And those culture are very much of the making “the entire religion about satisfying their hang-ups in the sense of selling Orthodoxy as the only alternative to all of the mainstream Protestant sects…” variety.

The Antiochian Archdiocese is the Republican Party at Byzantine prayer.

James Dobson moralism is brought in from Evangelicalism and part and parcel with the faith itself in these quarters.

I very much wish that someone would write a full-scale study of the place in American society that the Orthodox “convert boomlet” fits into. The idea of the “Ancient Faith” is appropriated in an ideological manner, which these folks actually believing that they have simply and securely adopted the faith and even religious experience of a John Chrysostom or a Maximus or a Gregory Palamas. There is no consideration of the fact that from prior to the Revolution in this country there has been a hunger by Prots to discover or rediscover the true, authentic New Testament Church, and that this desire has expressed itself in a myriad of ways, including the adoption of praxis considered to be ancient. There has also been, from the beginning of America, the rhetorical use of the “pure NT forms” to defend political and economic beliefs in a horridly anachronistic and ass backwards manner (slavery in the NT used to defend Southern slavery, etc. – though even many of the Southern divines knew that the NT slavery was not necessarily anything like as brutal as slavery in the South, and no justification for it). We have Orthodox apologists today who argue that the Byzantine state was proto-capitalist, and the free market capitalism is the economic form most in keeping with patristic thought. I wish that these folks could be shown that as a religious phenomenon, they are far more American than they are ancient, and that they have far more in common with conservative converts to RCism and to the niche church magisterial Prots (like the Orthodox Presbyterians and those tiny Anglo-Catholic groups, etc.) than they do with Orthodoxy as it has historically been experienced.

What you write about visiting the sacred centers reminds me of some friends of mine. For quite a few years a common topic at Orthodox coffee hours was Kosovo and the destruction of Serbian Church property. I have some friends who lived in Kosovo as Prot missionaries, during the most difficult period of post-Nato intervention problems. They described to me the typical differences between the Muslim areas and the Orthodox areas. The Muslim areas were clean, families coherent and intact, farms and shops kept quite nicely. The Orthodox areas were filthy, full of drunks, porn was sold at every little stand in the street (they often sold icons as well), things were not well kept, family life was more strained. Imagine the irony of a Focus on the Family convert arguing a Serbian nationalist line right after signing a petition to outlaw porn at local gas stations. I think that the manner in which piety is commonly expressed in Serbia or Russia or the Georgian Republic would horrify more than a few here.

I think the situation with American Orthodoxy is more dangerous than what you suggest of American Catholicism, with regard to the group in question. You have Latinos and still a few poor whites around, and you have a culture that was formed in decidedly working class environs, even if that only remains in some places in skeletal form. We don’t. The Arabs and Greeks came here wealthy, and wealth has been a part of their experience since the get go. The Slavs had working classes, but those churches built by pipefitters are increasingly empty, and both the OCA and the Antiochians have bet on the middle class, former Prot, convert boomlet as the direction to go. There is no longer the considerable immigration from Orthodox countries that there once was. It is conceivable that in American Orthodoxy within a generation or two, “First Things/Touchstone/Republican Party” Orthodoxy will be the dominant ecclesial form, and have a stranglehold on most media and the politics of mainstream Orthodoxy. If that happens, I think it will be the death of American Orthodoxy. It is not catholic, it is not culturally “natural” and it will guarantee an even smaller boutique faith for those select few white middle class people who “really get it.”

I think what I find bothersome about these people is that while in the past the Episcopal Church was judged to be the “Republican Party in prayer”, the Episcopalians have gone so crazy that those “high culture” conservative Protestants have nowhere else to go other than to convert to Rome. That is the strange irony of history, since, as many fashionable scholars of race have pointed out, even the Irish were not considered “white” at first precisely because they were “Papists”. And don’t even get started with the Italians, Poles, etc.

There are of course sectors of the Church (Opus Dei, the “dollarization of Catholicism”) that would welcome them with open arms, trying to portray being Catholic as the new badge of honor of the white middle class conservative sensibility. Such a marketing ploy is far from successful since many of our bishops and clergy are still enamoured with the “social Gospel” and realize that most of the people who are starting to fill their pews are not white and middle class, but brown and working class. “First Things” Catholicism only speaks to a small, if very wealthy and powerful, few. These few just happen to be in control of various websites, magazines, and other forms of mass media to make them seem bigger than they are.

(I guess I shouldn’t complain that much, since they publish my stuff, but oh well.)

They really start getting annoying when they make the entire religion about satisfying their hang-ups in the sense of selling Catholicism as the only alternative to all of the mainstream Protestant sects that have “gone soft” and veered too far to “the Left”. Their ideas about what is important are different from our ideas, their way of doing things are always different from our ways. We Catholics have never and never will be obsessed with protecting the principles of free market capitalism as a comprehensive system. While Catholics in other countries may be chavinistic and patriotic, they are never as delusional to think that, “America works. Most of the rest of the world doesn’t.” Nor will they feel that the constitution of their country is the Fifth Gospel, etc. etc.

When reading these people, one gets the feeling that if you are not speaking to their agenda, they really don’t find Catholicism itself all that interesting. Maybe it goes the same for Orthodoxy as well. They have the things that they feel are important, the reasons they converted, etc. But how many would say they converted because they came to the conclusion that they would go to Hell if they didn’t? How many converted because they were drawn to how Catholicism looked, felt, tasted, and smelled? How many actually care what real, living Catholic societies actually look and think like, instead of lamenting that real Catholic culture died shortly after the Counter-Reformation? Indeed, it is not unusual for an Orthodox convert in this country to visit Valaam, Athos, or some other Orthodox site to enforce their Faith. A Catholic convert may go to Rome to see the impressive show of ecclesiastical splendor or power, but how many will leap across the border to go to the shrine of the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos, or even to a church in the middle of rural Louisiana, to see what Catholicism looks like in a society that has always been Catholic? Not many. (“Oh, but Rome is our patrimony. Mexico isn’t.” Yeah right. How much Italian blood do YOU have in you?)

On my worst days, I feel that they just don’t care, so if they don’t, then why should I care what they think? I am not going to some super-convert, Opus Dei automaton to find out what it means to be Catholic. I already know, thank you very much. And if you read my blog, I am going to dish out some stuff to you that you are not going to see elsewhere, because I don’t spin it, I don’t read C.S. Lewis, and I don’t subscribe to First Things. I call it as I see it.

I also wonder about some of the novelties of post Vat-II Catholicism. I have read no formal study of this matter, so what I posit is merely my gut feeling – but did post Vat-II folk masses with acoustic guitars and folk songs originate elsewhere, did they not start here in America? The phenomenon has an Anglo quality to it, or so it seems to me. And the big box church phenomenon we see, of these large, suburban megaparishes filled with beautiful people living the middle class dream has an Anglo quality as well. Somehow the ethos of German Catholicism and Polish Catholicism and Italian Catholicism got squashed. We no longer see the grand melancholy and grandmotherly resignation found in those cultural expressions of Catholicism. Of course, we don’t see that in Germany anymore either. And folk masses quickly spread over most of Europe.

In Britain there was this felt need to show that one could be Catholic and still be a decent, contributing member of the UK. The United States provided a similar milieu for white Catholics – a need to ‘prove’ their Americanness and useful place in society. The Germans and Poles and Italians, I suppose, more or less adopted the Anglo model of this sort of cultural approach to Catholicism.

Anch’io! That’s Italian for: “What he said!”

I don’t know that this applies to all Protestants, but CALVINISM certainly tends to inspire this sort of thing (and unfortunately, the roots of Calvinism, in the form of Augustinianism and the teaching of Anselm on the atonement, are also present in the Roman Church).

The Protestant is the teacher’s pet of the celestial classroom, resented by all right-minded classmates and only reluctantly tolerated by Teacher himself.

I think I see problems with both approaches, but they are difficult to pin down, and I think they are rooted in aesthetics and even mere preference to a large degree. Culbreath, and many others (including me some days) don’t want to lose the good things that are part of “American culture.” Things like good old-fashioned music, picnics, Fourth of July celebrations, the whole “apple pie” Americana is attractive, particularly to fully assimilated Americans without a competing set of cultural traditions. Unfortunately, these American traditions are tainted with both Protestantism and consumerism: they come from old Protestant America, and were perpetuated and perhaps altered beyond recognition by the consumerist culture. “Catholicizing” them might be even more difficult than converting the Celts or the Aztecs (in their respective times) was: the Celts and the Aztecs, for all their faults, had not heard of the Church and were thus not immunized against it. That old-fashioned American culture has the twin disadvantages of having grown up in an anti-Catholic environment that KNEW what the Church was and rejected it, and of being largely extinct or co-opted by people who want to make money off of it.

However, to Mr. Vasquez I have to say that we are not all lucky enough to have a tie to Catholic tradition in our own families. Some people convert out of a real desire to become Catholic and receive the Sacraments, but have no where to go for culture. I read somewhere that Senator John Kerry’s grandfather, a Polish Jew, converted under such circumstances. His answer was to “turn Irish” by adopting an Irish name and trying to blend in with the largely Irish Catholic community. Now, perhaps this was easier for him than trying to create some kind of “Jewish Catholic” culture that has never actually existed (a project that, while interesting, would be fraught with danger). However, it seems odd for a man to give up his own traditions so thoroughly, along with his old religion. I know for one that I, a white Catholic convert living in California’s Central Valley, would be laughed at by everyone if I tried to “turn Mexican.” Thankfully for me I have a connection, more tenuous I suppose than Mr. Vasquez’s but more real than a typical convert, to real Catholic culture: my mother was the “broken link” in the Catholic chain, and so I have grandparents from the “Catholic ghetto,” as well as family that still remembers the “old days” of Irish American Catholicism.

However, many American converts don’t have even that. They have nowhere to go but the hard road that Jeff Culbreath proposes. As much as they might like to lay claim to the sorrows and glories and agonies and joys of Mexican, or Portuguese, or Irish, or Filipino, etc., Catholicism, they simply don’t have access to it. If they try to make their Anglo culture “Catholic” they are pretending and making something up that never was. But if they try to join some other culture, they are pretending to belong to something that really doesn’t include them. I know that Mr. Vasquez doesn’t have the answers, and neither do I, but it is a very real and pressing problem for converts.