Orthodox Christianity: Unhappy News

I now get news updates from NPR. Which is how I found RELIGION Orthodox Christian churches are drawing in far-right American converts.

The problems begin with the headline, only partially corrected by the text:

Riccardi-Swartz's study focused on a community of mostly former evangelical Christians and Catholics who had joined the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). The West Virginia location, in addition to having a church parish, was also home to the largest English-speaking Russian Orthodox monastery in the world.

So, not all Orthodox churches but only those under those under the Russian patriarch. The following points this out without really explaining how the Orthodox church is organized:

Perhaps the most well known among Orthodox converts who worked within alt-right circles was Matthew Heimbach. He had established the Traditionalist Worker Party, which helped organize a deadly gathering of neo-Nazis and white nationalists at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. But years before that, Heimbach's activities had already created waves within some Orthodox circles.

In 2014, he was excommunicated from the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America shortly after he had been accepted into it. During his brief time there, Heimbach's activities with other Orthodox converts on a college campus in Indiana drew scrutiny. In explaining the decision to cut Heimbach off from the church, the priest who had brought him into the church explained, "I did not understand at that time that he held nationalistic, segregationist views." Heimbach went on to join another branch of Orthodoxy.

NPR quotes George Demacopoulos who wrote Orthodox Christianity, Systemic Racism, and the Wrong Side of History. That article addresses why Orthodoxy has a duty to support Black Lives Matter.

From 2017 WHITE SUPREMACY AND ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY: A DANGEROUS CONNECTION REARS ITS HEAD IN CHARLOTTESVILLE explains with more detail how the other Orthodox traditions have dealt with white nationalists.

There is no evidence that the institutional Orthodox churches in America, its clergy, and the vast majority of its laity has anything but disdain for these extremists co-opting Eastern Christianity. The episcopal hierarchy of American Orthodoxy has been slow to respond to the events in Charlottesville but there has, a week later, finally come a statement from the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America—a response that while delayed was unusually strongly worded for the Assembly.

 Before this, only one major jurisdiction released a statement: The Orthodox Church in America. It is worth noting that this statement makes, if not explicit, clear reference to those within the white supremacist movement who have attached themselves to Orthodoxy. The statement reads, in part:

 At the same time, we exhort our clergy and faithful to reject any attempts by individuals or groups to claim for themselves the name of “Orthodox Christian” in order to promote racism, hatred, white supremacy, white nationalism or neo-Nazism.

The Bulgarians are also Orthodox, check out  The Bulgarian Orthodox Church Against Racism and Anti-Semitism in the Eve and During World War Two

 ...The Bulgarian Orthodox Church did not interfere formally or with representatives of its own in the polemics but Christian anthropology totally denies any racial or ethnic inequality. Christian pacifism and solidarity together with the incompatibility of religion and church with the political theories and practices of Fascism, Communism and Bolshevism were the solid foundation of the opposition of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to the anti-Jewish laws in Bulgaria and the Law for the Defense of Nation (1940) in particular...

 And this Reddit thread covers a lot of territory. It describes the Orthodoxy I know.

The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America has a Resource Center On Racial Reconciliation.

Like Orthodoxy, I suppose the issue is complicated but the first is not to say Orthodoxy as if it is an all encompassing umbrella term.

sch 5/12/22