When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, I tried to tune out the endless vigiling. No, not because Charlie doesn’t deserve it, because as the most notable Christian martyr killed on American soil in our Republic’s long history, the vigiling is due him. I just tried to tune it out because it’s too much to bear. I knew that Tucker would get around to discussing it, and planned to tune in then. He did, and I came to regret listening.
Tucker knew the country needed a moment, a kind of webcast vigil to make sense of grief. And so, among other guests (I was particularly impressed with Cenk Unger’s contribution), Tucker brought on a priest to say a few words of comfort to a mourning nation. Only there was just one problem. The priest was Eastern Orthodox, and instead of offering hope, he looked straight into the camera and told America that Charlie Kirk is not in Heaven. Not yet. According to Orthodoxy, the point of a funeral is not to rejoice that a man is with Christ, but to pray for him, to plead that maybe God will eventually let him in. In other words, the very moment when the Gospel should have been preached as balm to the soul was hijacked into a theology lesson on why you shouldn’t be too confident about eternal life.
For many, the clip was confusing, sort of a “What the #$# did I just watch?” sort of thing. For others (like actual Christians) it was scandalous. Tucker, whether he knew it or not, had put on screen a perfect picture of why so many in the Great Populist Social Revival are stumbling into the Eastern Church: the priest minced no words about the immorality of our culture and darkness of leftism, looked tough, and it gave off the whiff of ancient masculinity. Never mind that the priest had just said the most un-helpful and un-truthful thing you can say about a dead Christian. The fact that it was blunt, austere, and different from squishy evangelicals or rainbow-soaked Catholics made it look based.
That is the bait. It looks like iron, but it is tinfoil sprayed black.
The Scripture gives us no equivocation or uncertainty about the state of a man, now dead in Christ. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. We have assurance of salvation through Christ, and Orthodoxy has given us lifelong anxiety attack that maybe, just maybe, if enough prayers are said, God might just let you in eventually. And that’s the irony about Orthodoxy; it denies that Jesus paid for your sins (they deny Penal Substition, meaning it’s even further from real orthodoxy than Roman Catholicism), and so salvation isn’t a matter of wrath being satisfied, but by some ill-defined subjectiveness on the part of God, based upon what, God only knows. A Protestant funeral is a proclamation of resurrection hope. An Orthodox funeral is an open question with incense.
And yet, thousands of disenchanted men in America are falling for it. Why? Because the East has good aesthetics. That’s it. Beards, candles, chanting, robes that look like they came from a fantasy novel. Orthodoxy feels exotic and demanding, and compared to James Martin smiling at drag queens or Tim Keller trying to be respectable at a cocktail party, it seems like raw authenticity. But that does not mean it is aligned with the values of the West. In fact, it never has been.
Here is where the education begins. The West gave us liberty of conscience. Orthodoxy gave us caesars who treated the church like their personal chaplaincy. The West gave us reasoned theology and law courts. Orthodoxy gave us mystical slogans about how God is unknowable and rulers are untouchable. The West gave us Reformation and reform. Orthodoxy crushed every attempt at it and sank into centuries of stagnation. The West gave us societies where ordinary men could rise, invent, preach, build, and govern. Orthodoxy gave us empires where peasants lit candles in fear while tsars and sultans ran the show.
That is not a footnote. That is the record. And yet somehow in 2025, the cool kids online think Orthodoxy is the masculine choice.
WHAT IS EASTERN ORTHODOXY?
Eastern Orthodoxy is one of the three main branches of (professing) Christianity, alongside Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. It traces its institutional life back to the eastern half of the Roman Empire, where the city of Constantinople became the political and religious center after the fall of Rome in the West. The Orthodox Church emphasizes continuity with the early church, venerating the writings of the Church Fathers, the decisions of the first seven ecumenical councils, and the use of liturgy, icons, and sacraments as central to Christian life.
Historically, Orthodoxy developed under a very different set of conditions than Western Christianity. In the Byzantine Empire, the church existed in close partnership with the emperor. This relationship was described by the term symphonia, meaning a harmony of church and state, though in practice it often meant that the state exercised significant control over the church. The Patriarch of Constantinople held high religious authority, but emperors routinely intervened in doctrinal disputes, appointed or deposed bishops, and used the church to reinforce imperial unity.
When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, Orthodoxy entered another long phase of development under Islamic rule. The Ottoman system organized subjects by religious communities, or millets, and the Orthodox Patriarch became both a spiritual leader and an administrative intermediary between Orthodox Christians and the sultan. This fostered a model of survival through accommodation, rather than reform or independence.
In Russia, which came to see itself as the “Third Rome” after the fall of Constantinople, Orthodoxy became deeply entwined with czarist power. The Russian church was eventually placed under direct state supervision by Peter the Great in the eighteenth century, a pattern that lasted in various forms into the modern era. Today, Orthodoxy is characterized by national churches (Greek, Russian, Serbian, Romanian, and others) united in theology and liturgy but administratively independent.
You might have noticed in the last six weeks the annual subscription discount has gone from 40% to 35% to 30% to 25% in week or two-week increments. Well, the 25% discount is going away, too and by the end of the year, there will be no discount. Subscribe now to lock in your rate.
THE FOUNDATION OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
But here is the thing nobody tells these young men falling into Eastern Orthodoxy: Western civilization was built precisely because Protestants refused to live like Eastern Orthodox believers. Assurance of salvation through Sola Christus (Christ Alone) produced assurance in every other realm. If the king does not hold the keys to your eternity, he should not hold the keys to your conscience, your property, or your future either. That logic birthed nations of free men. Orthodoxy never produced it, never wanted it, and still does not believe it.
What we are watching right now is a fad. The aesthetics of Orthodoxy have been mistaken for substance. It is not surprising. A generation raised on Marvel movies and porn is now craving liturgy and discipline. But craving is not the same as curing. Orthodoxy is not the cure for effeminate evangelicalism. It is just another trap, one older and in many ways worse.
If you want incense and beards, go buy a candle and grow one. That is not what saves nations. What saves nations is truth, the kind of truth that shakes tyrants and sets people free. Protestantism gave us that because it believed the Gospel gave men the right to stand before God without intermediaries, without rituals, and without emperors pretending to be bishops. Orthodoxy never did.
So when Tucker put that priest on the air, he gave America a gift without realizing it. He showed us in real time why Orthodoxy is not the answer. In the moment we most needed Christian hope, Orthodoxy offered nothing but doubt. And that is exactly what it has always offered. Doubt in salvation, doubt in liberty, doubt in the ability of ordinary men to govern themselves under God.
WESTERN VALUES VS EASTERN ORTHODOXY
The selling point of Orthodoxy in the online populist scene is that it looks like a fortress of tradition. Men see the beards, the chanting, the gold-plated vestments and think: “finally, a faith that hasn’t gone soft.” The problem is that while it may look like granite, the historical record shows it’s closer to papier-mâché. Orthodoxy has never produced the Western values these men say they want to defend. In fact, in case after case, it has smothered them. Let’s run the receipts.
A core Western value is the freedom of conscience, and Orthodoxy gave us caesaropapism. That’s the ten-dollar word historians use to describe what happened in Byzantium: the emperor functioned as head of state and, in practice, head of the church. Given this fact, at least turning their heads to Orthodoxy makes sense for those who discovered Christian Nationalism last week. Seems like a natural fit, right? In Eastern Orthodoxy, emperors presided over councils, appointed bishops, and exiled dissenters. The Patriarch of Constantinople was theoretically independent but in reality lived on imperial favor. Protestants fought and died for the idea that Christ alone rules the conscience, but Orthodoxy taught generations of Christians to bow to the throne and the altar at once, with the throne always in the lead.
Let me summarize that mess of a paragraph: Christian Nationalism wants nations to be Christian, with varying perspectives on a spectrum from unenforceable declarations to full-on Theocracy (and everything in between). In that sense, the nation would to some degree enforce religious values. But Eastern Orthodoxy is a far different beast. Traditionally, Eastern Orthodoxy has not led to the church controlling the State, but to the State controlling the church. In that sense, it’s almost the precise opposite of what Christian Nationalists are striving for. So when you see the dark-clad Orthodox priests preaching seeker-insensitive, based directives to the society at large like pitbulls it looks great. That is, until the pitbulls roll over to their master - the government - for some boot-licking belly rubs.
Another Western value is reason and ordered law, and Orthodoxy has historically leaned on mysticism and “unknowing.” The West produced Aquinas, natural law, and eventually the scientific revolution. The East gave us apophatic theology: God is beyond knowing, so the less you say the better. That sounds pious, but in practice it meant a suspicion of systematizing, an allergy to philosophy, and a preference for endless repetition of liturgy over debate and discovery. Western universities trained lawyers, scientists, reformers, and theologians. Eastern monasteries produced mystics repeating the Jesus Prayer while the state kept the masses illiterate.
Another timeless Western value is a heart for consistent reform (both in the government and in religion), but Orthodoxy might just be the most reform-allergic religion on Earth. For the Orthodox, it’s not that they hold tradition on level with Scripture, as the Papists do, it’s that tradition is the religion itself. Another way of expressing it is that Protestants use tradition to inform our worship, Papists use tradition for their worship, and the Eastern Orthodox use tradition as their object of worship. Any time you think nothing on Earth could be as terrible as Roman Catholicism, meditate upon Eastern Orthodoxy, and you’ll start to look at the Catholics as not that bad after all.
The medieval West was full of ferment: from Cluniac reform to the Renaissance to Luther nailing his theses, institutions were constantly challenged and reshaped. The East had no such tradition. Reformers who rose up in Orthodox lands (Bogomils, Old Believers, anyone who questioned liturgical or moral corruption) were hounded into exile or burned out. Instead of renewal, Orthodoxy enshrined sameness as a virtue. That is why there was no Orthodox Reformation, no Orthodox Enlightenment, no Orthodox counterpart to the revolutions that birthed modern liberty.
Another Western value is ordered liberty, and Orthodoxy has again and again delivered authoritarian regimes. Look at the societies where Orthodoxy dominated. Byzantium was an absolute monarchy where dissent was heresy against both emperor and God. Under the Ottomans, the church acted as the sultan’s middle-manager, collecting taxes and discouraging rebellion. In Russia, Orthodoxy was the handmaid of czars, enforcing submission and blessing wars of expansion. Wherever Orthodoxy ruled, liberty withered. There were no Magna Cartas, no Bills of Rights, no experiments in representative self-government. When the West was experimenting with parliaments, Orthodox nations were cementing the idea that the only check on rulers was death by palace intrigue.
And here is the shocker: this isn’t just a medieval quirk. The same pattern continues into modern times. In the nineteenth century, Orthodox intellectuals weren’t pushing for freedom of speech or conscience. They were exalting Holy Russia as the savior of civilization, peddling messianic nationalism centuries before Putin. The Russian church didn’t lead the people to freedom. It stood by while czars crushed reformers, then submitted to Soviet control when the communists took over.
All of this makes the idea that Orthodoxy is the secret to rebuilding the West laughable. The record is brutally consistent. Protestants produced literacy drives, republics, abolition movements, and free enterprise. Orthodoxy produced incense and icons while clinging to the skirts of emperors and dictators.
Take literacy alone. Protestant countries led the world in teaching common people to read the Bible for themselves. That gave rise to newspapers, pamphlets, scientific publishing, and eventually a democratic Republic. In Orthodox lands, literacy lagged by centuries. When Peter the Great wanted Russia to compete with the West, he had to import German scholars, Dutch engineers, and Scottish shipbuilders because his own culture had produced so few. The Orthodox contribution was to bless his crown and tell the peasants their misery was holy.
DANG ORTHOBROS
It’s worth underlining this because it is the opposite of what the online “Orthobros” sell. They promise men that Orthodoxy is a manlier Christianity, a bulwark against liberalism. But the historical record shows Orthodoxy was never the bulwark. It was the chaplain to power. When czars and sultans needed their subjects docile, the bishops told the faithful to obey. When emperors wanted theological disputes settled, they convened a council and demanded signatures. When reformers cried for freedom, they were silenced, not celebrated.
Sunday’s Smite Club article (see below) was about Ivan Prochavon, the Reformed pastor around the turn of the 20th Century in Russia who had endless escapades challenging and evading the Orthodox Quislings of the Russian Empire who served as a Brown-Nose Batallion and Grovel-Gremlins for the Tsar.
The primary job of the Eastern Orthodox in every nation they have a majority presence is essentially that of State religion, and not the kind in which the church runs the State, but the kind in which the State runs the church.
In short, Orthodoxy has always been the religious version of a rubber stamp. And now it is being marketed to young men as if it were the lost wellspring of Western strength. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This is why the whole “Orthodoxy is based” fad is a kind of historical comedy sketch. Imagine watching the decline of Western civilization and deciding the cure is the very tradition that never once produced Western liberty. It’s like trying to cure anemia by drinking bleach. It might look potent, but it will kill you.
Orthodoxy looks exotic, and in the West we confuse “different” with “strong.” But different does not mean strong. In this case, it means a thousand years of submission to emperors, fear of reason, and hostility to reform. The Western world our ancestors built was not built by men swinging incense. It was built by men who believed God spoke clearly, that truth could be known, and that conscience could not be chained.
So when someone tells you Orthodoxy is the manly choice, ask them which Orthodox society ever produced liberty, reform, and prosperity. Then hand them the answer: none.
If you appreciate my work, grab a paid subscription to access exclusive content. This is one of the things I do to provide for my small farm and big family, so I sure appreciate it. Act now, and get a 25% discount while it lasts.
