In recent months, several news items and commentaries have been drawing our attention to a strange phenomenon that occurs in North America about conversions to Orthodox Christianity. In short, and without euphemisms, inspired by authoritarian political figures from Slavic Eastern Europe, certain North American “Eastern” Orthodox priests (in both Canada and the United States of America) preach a macho “gospel,” claiming that Orthodox Christianity aims to restore the lost manhood of males. What I set out to do, in what follows, is denounce this new pseudomorphosis as completely antagonistic to Christ’s Gospel as preached by Orthodox Christianity.
Before considering the matter at hand, a sketch of the context is in order. It all harks back to the rise of politicised Orthodox Christianity, in the nineteenth century. That was a turning point for the Orthodox Churches of Byzantine tradition, from Greece in the South to Russia in the North, when nationalism took over and the importance of spiritual criteria began to be marginalised. The said criteria resurfaced merely decades earlier, in the eighteenth century, with the “hesychast” revival related to the “philokalic” initiatives, the Greek one of Saints Makarios of Corinth and Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, and the Romanian-Slavic one of Saints Basil of Poiana Mărului and Paisij Velichkovsky. Both teams worked hard to remind the Orthodox Christians of Eastern Europe that the Gospel invites inner change—and that the virtuous, holy life aims to make people Christlike.
Of course, the “philokalic” message was completely at odds with the political turn of revolutionary Orthodox Christianity, which was fully committed to the affirmation of nations, in the nineteenth century. The new political stance of the Churches, of which many came to be proclaimed “National,” pushed aside the “philokalic” manifesto and the prospect of reformation of Orthodox Christianity on spiritual, not worldly, grounds. This process was made possible by the theological inanity of most hierarchs at the time, who, severed from the letter and the spirit of the patristic tradition, subscribed to foreign ways of thinking—which Georges Florovsky called pseudomorphoses, leading to what the same Florovsky called the “Babylonian captivity” of Orthodox theology.
It is against this backdrop that, alienated from the tradition and finding repulsive the spiritual manifesto of the “philokalic” movement, political Orthodoxy was left unchecked, ending up a slave to worldly powers, namely, the modern national states, which in time managed to impose on the Churches their own criteria. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that the nationalism of modern Orthodox Churches led to new forms of idolatry, from the cult of “national (war) heroes” to outright heretical celebrations of Sundays of “national saints” to indifference towards one another to the latest pseudomorphosis, that is, the proclamation of virility, or manhood, as a Christian virtue. Of course, the latter sin, of immediate interest here, has historical antecedents in the Roman imperial patriarchalism that the Churches, East and West, adopted quite early, in order to fit in. Like nationalism, patriarchalism holds nothing in common with Christ’s Gospel, which from the outset praises the saintly efforts of both men and women, while it points to a spiritual identity of all believers, which transcends “whatness.” For, indeed, the Gospel takes you from what you are—man or woman, Jew or Greek, free or slave, rich or poor etc.—and leads you to who you are in Christ, the “new creation.” And so, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
Christ’s Gospel as preached by Orthodox Christianity does not worship the golden calf of “Orthodox” dictators. It does not proclaim virility as a value. It preaches virtue, which is a transformative experience that has as a goal to make people—regardless of their “what”—more and more Christlike. It is a phenomenon that Peter Brown considered characteristic of the early Christian experience of holiness, a quest that resulted in the likeness of the saints to one another insofar as all became increasingly Christlike. It is this reality that the best of traditional Orthodox Christian iconography brings to light, by rendering certain physical traits alike, such as the large foreheads and eyes, and the thin bodies of the depicted saints. It is this reality that found its best expressions in the Lord’s point about resurrected people not marrying, which can be a reference to the final, eschatological change, as well as to the fact of not prioritising matters of maleness and femaleness in this life; in the spiritual trajectory of humankind in Genesis, from male and female to becoming men and women; and in Amma Sarah’s statement that while “according to nature” she was a woman, that was not so according to her way of thinking.
So, Orthodox Christianity is not about retrieving and affirming maleness. Early Christian patriarchalism was a cultural adjustment to Roman customs; the male war hero was a modern nationalist psesudomorphosis; the current quest for virility is inspired by authoritarian political leaders, not by Christ’s Gospel. Orthodox Christianity is not a context for either retrieving or idolising manhood. It is a framework where worldly concerns are challenged and the “new creation”—“neither male nor female”—can pursue the quest for virtue leading to Christlikeness. “Orthodox” propagandists of other “values” should desist from perverting the message—and converts should seek Christ’s Gospel as preached by Orthodox Christianity, not to retrieve their virility in an androcentric and misogynist context typical for a violent religion.
7 July 2025 © AIOCS
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