Orthodox and White?

Inga Leonova

On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant, in the trial (though at Roof’s behest, a self-proclaimed white supremacist he ultimately did not testify).1 This is from Australia, shot up two mosques not to impute Roof’s extreme racist in Christchurch, New Zealand, kill- views to Father Parker—who publicly ing fifty men, women, and children denounced the shooting—but rather at prayer. The 76-page manifesto he to point out how attractive Orthodox published online prior to the attack Christianity often seems to national- contains some of the predictable code ists and white supremacists, including terms that litter white supremacist Parker’s own spiritual ward. 1 Tim Smith, and nationalist literature, websites, “Community Reacts and social media threads everywhere, This episode is but the latest in a se- to Roof Death such as “the complete racial and cul- ries of news stories, blogs, and social Sentence,” Greenville tural replacement of the European media trails that point to the grow- News, January 10, people” and “mass invasion.” Signif- ing white supremacist cancer within 2017, https://www. greenvilleonline. icant for Orthodox Christians, how- Orthodoxy. The “Orthodox story” of com/story/ ever, were the mention of Chetniks the leaders of the American white su- news/2017/01/10/ on his gun cartridges and a reference premacist group Traditionalist Work- community- to the American white supremacist er Party, Matt Parrott and Matthew reacts-roof-death- Dylann Roof in the manifesto. The Heimbach, has been told many times. sentence/96385008/. Chetniks was a Serbian guerrilla na- In spite of being excommunicated by 2 While the identity tionalist group that first resisted the their Antiochian Orthodox priest in and jurisdiction Ottomans and later the Axis powers, the wake of a media outcry, both men of these parishes and was reestablished during the Yu- continue to identify as Orthodox, and cannot be confirmed, goslav Wars of the 1990s. The Chet- appear to have found spiritual shel- Parrott, Heimbach, niks were especially famous for their ters in Orthodox parishes.2 But while and their allies insist that they ideology of “cleansing” the Serbian Heimbach has enjoyed considerable have been accepted land of non-Serbs, for the practice of media coverage, his association with as communicants genocidal violence, and for strong Orthodoxy is by no means exception- in the ROCOR. connections to the Serbian Orthodox al. On the contrary, on social media, See, for example, Church. Dylann Roof, who killed nine especially in the recent years of em- Ryan Hunter, “My Interview people in the 2015 shooting at Charles- boldened xenophobia and white na- with Matthew ton’s Emanuel African Methodist tionalism, one finds these sentiments Heimbach,” Orthodox Episcopal Church, had connections to widely shared in self-styled “tradi- in the District, June a local Orthodox priest. Father John tionalist” Orthodox circles. From the 26, 2015, https:// Parker—now the dean of St. Tikhon’s ambo and on social media, clergy ryanphunter. wordpress. Seminary—was identified by Roof’s make xenophobic remarks that go un- com/2015/06/26/ defense team as his “spiritual advi- challenged. And there is a fad among my-interview-with- sor” and named as a defense witness Orthodox clergy and laity of posting matthew-heimbach/.

The Wheel 17/18 | Spring/Summer 2019 27 Members of Русское национальное единство (Russian National Unity), a neo-Nazi paramil- itary organization that continues the legacy of the Black Hundreds movement, pose in front of a monastery in Diveyevo, Russia, c. 2002.

Confederate flags superimposed with “IC XC NIKA” as Facebook profile group of people, whether Jews, “cul- pictures. tural Marxists,” the LGBT community, Muslims, immigrants, or oth- Furthermore, among the examples er perceived enemies of the (white, that go beyond casual comments straight, male) body politic. Those is a lecture course by a notorious enemies are said to bring about deg- culture warrior, Father Josiah Tr- radation as part of a broader, gener- enham of anti-LGBTQ fame. Tren- ally clandestine assault on the dom- ham’s course, titled “Patriotism: The inant culture. Duty of a Christian to His Nation,” is meant “to ignite the waning fires In his well-researched article “East of patriotic love in the hearts of be- of Eden,” Jon Phillips examines the lievers,” according to the website attraction of white nationalists to 4 4 Patristic Nectar that distributes it. Especially nota- Orthodox Christianity. The article Publications, https:// ble is the title of the fourth lecture, presents an uncomfortable but hon- patristicnectar.org/ “American Degradation,” a phrase est picture of the Orthodox Church’s bookstore_181018_2. that clearly resonates with alt-right uneasy relationship with national- html. and white supremacist panic around ist ideologies, with antisemitism, “degeneracy.” The idea behind this and with traditionally conservative term is that America has become a views on social justice and human degenerate nation because of the rights issues. Phillips writes: growth of LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, the ending of interracial mar- The resurgence of fascist groups riage prohibitions, and so forth. By in largely Orthodox countries invoking “American degradation,” across Eastern Europe, from po- Trenham is situating himself with- litical parties like Greece’s Golden in a very long rhetorical tradition of Dawn and Ukraine’s Svoboda to the far right, which presents itself in Orthodox ultranationalist groups opposition to an existential threat to like Russia’s Narodny Sobor and the nation, culture, race, or Volk. The Romania’s Noua Dreapta, have threat is never the degradation or reinforced the perception among degeneration itself, but a particular white nationalists that the Church

28 might be an ally in their war The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is only © 2019 The Wheel. against Judaism, homosexuality, one of the many texts that the Ortho- May be distributed for noncommercial use. multiculturalism, feminism and dox Church is unable or unwilling to www.wheeljournal.com the other forces of “cultural Marx- reckon with, thereby providing fodder ism.” Even non-Christians in these for extremist nationalist ideologies. communities seem to think that Adversus Judaeos, the infamous corpus Orthodox Christianity is special, of sermons by John Chrysostom—one leaving comments like this state- of the greatest saints and liturgists of ment from a self-professed athe- the Church—is widely quoted in Or- ist on VNN [the Vanguard News thodox antisemitic writings and in Network]: “At the end of the day, sermons, the latter especially during the countries who have Orthodox Holy Week, to complement the an- populations have remained more ti-Jewish texts of liturgical services racially and culturally sound than in which the Jews are emphatically the nations with no religion or identified as the killers of Christ, who worse, Protestantism. The Ortho- are ultimately to be destroyed by the dox base is a major reason why power of the cross.7 The hymnody of Greeks, Russians and Serbs un- the Sunday of the Cross in Great Lent derstand the Jewish question far mentions how, by the power of the better than any member of your cross, “our faithful kings laid low . . college Atheists club.”5 . the people of Ishmael,” that is, the 5 Jon Phillips, “East Arab Muslims. And these are only the of Eden,” Southern The most notorious antisemitic text best-known examples. While every Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report, of modern history, The Protocols of one of these more ancient texts has Winter 2014, https:// the Elders of Zion, originated in 1902 to be viewed in its own historical and www.splcenter. in Russia, and was published in 1905 cultural context, the fact remains that org/fighting-hate/ and widely disseminated by the collectively they constitute an element intelligence- Orthodox missionary writer Sergei of Orthodox tradition that is uncrit- report/2014/east- eden. Nilus. While the Protocols are today ically accepted and even embraced, recognized as a libelous forgery and despite a centuries-long history of 6 Ivan Kontsevich. have been banned in various coun- Christians’ persecution of religious Пламенная любовью tries—including Russia, where they minorities and despite the atrocities of Памяти С. А. are now counted as extremist litera- the two world wars. Нилуса (New York, ture—they have never been official- NY, 1937), 6. See Bernice Glatzer ly declared a forgery by the Russian Furthermore, unlike most Western Rosenthal, The Occult Church or any of the other Orthodox churches, which continue to process in Russian and Soviet churches. Worse, the original pub- the troubling legacy of Christian xe- Culture (Ithaca, NY: lication of the Protocols was blessed nophobia, the Orthodox Church re- Cornell University by Saint John of Kronstadt, himself sists acknowledging it as an internal Press, 1997), 396. well known for his support of the problem. If one studies official church 7 “For by your lifting ultra-nationalistic and antisemitic documents, it becomes apparent that up today the Hebrew Russian militia the Black Hundreds.6 denunciations of racism, xenopho- race perished.” The status of the Protocols has been bia, and similar issues almost always Stikhera on the “sanctified” by other famous figures point outward. When pressed on the Praises, Matins of of the Russian Church, such as the matter, Orthodox hierarchs staunchly Holy Friday. new martyr Metropolitan Vladimir refuse to accept the systemic nature of of Moscow (subsequently Kiev), the the problem, at best distancing them- elders of Optina Varsonuphiy and selves from particularly egregious ex- Nektariy, and Metropolitan Antho- amples of xenophobic behavior, such ny Khrapovitsky. as in the cases of the late Metropoli-

The Wheel 17/18 | Spring/Summer 2019 29 Frontispiece of a tan John (Snychev) of Ladoga (an in- 1912 edition of The famous ultraconservative monarchist Protocols of the Elders and public antisemite, associated with of Zion in a book by Sergei Nilus. the groups who advocated for the The caption above glorification of Grigory Rasputin and the Orthodox cross Ivan IV), Heimbach, and two other reads “Thus we shall famous actors of the American Or- win.” thodox ultra-nationalist blogosphere: Brother Nathaniel Kapner (a self-proclaimed “monastic of Russian Ortho- dox Church Outside of Russia” and a notorious antisemitic agitator) and “Father” Matthew Raphael Johnson (a deposed priest of a schismatic Old Calendarist Greek Orthodox church and a member of Heimbach’s Tradi- tionalist Worker Party). In the meantime, even in the wake of World War II, nationalist and antisemitic views have not been viewed as an impediment to the glorification of new saints such as John of Kronstadt, Nicholas of Zhicha, and, most recently, Seraphim Sobolev. In the Orthodox countries of the for- mer Eastern bloc, the antisemitic and islamophobic pronouncements and “prophesies” of various Athonite and eny Golubinsky, Gabriel was never Pochaev elders are widely sold in par- actually canonized. Metropolitan ish bookstores and published on Or- Philaret especially wrote against the thodox websites. veneration of this apocryphal charac- ter. In spite of his warning, the cult Even more scandalously, in 2012, Pa- continued to smolder locally, and triarch Kirill of Moscow visited and was then widely elevated at the end venerated the relics of an apocryphal of the nineteenth century on a wave “child martyr,” Gabriel of Białystok, of anti-Jewish sentiment in the west- the hero of an infamous eighteenth ern provinces of the Russian Empire. century blood libel story held sacred The cult eventually fell back into in Poland and Belarus. “The Life of near-oblivion, but was resurrected the Holy Child-Martyr Gabriel” tells by the Nazi occupiers in Belarus and of a six-year-old Christian boy pur- again in the 1990s on the national- ported to have been kidnapped, tor- istic crest of the “Russian Religious tured and ritually murdered (cruci- Renewal.” Veneration of Gabriel has fied and exsanguinated) by Jews as perennially focused on the image of a part of the Passover revelries. The Christ-like victim of the Jews, always local cult of Gabriel dates back to identified as the “Christ-killers.” It the mid-eighteenth century, but ac- is worth noting that this fake “child cording to evidence presented in the martyr” has made his way into the nineteenth century by Metropolitan rubrics of Orthodox Church in Amer- Philaret of Moscow and the preemi- ica and into the reliquary of at least nent Russian church historian Yevg- one of its Midwestern parishes.

30 White supremacists mining the Or- and likeness of God,” but solely a ra- © 2019 The Wheel. thodox tradition for reinforcement of cial criterion. This it has never done, May be distributed for noncommercial use. their racist ideologies have been find- nor can it do so and remain faithful www.wheeljournal.com ing nourishment not only in historical to its teachings. If by the idea that and “Old World” sources, but also in “God does not smile on such mar- popular American Orthodox resourc- riages,” you are saying that God ab- es. Consider this excerpt from a famil- solutely prohibits these marriages, iar and widely published catechetical then, I believe the burden of proof book by the eminent Orthodox ethicist is on you—since we have no New and theologian Father Stanley Harak- Testament teaching, nor canonical as, The Orthodox Church: 455 Questions directives, nor Church practice to and Answers: that effect.8

[Question:] No matter what Holly- The endurance of this passage wood and the Church say, I can’t through several reprints of what has believe God smiles on such [interra- been considered a staple catechetical cial] marriages. . . . book since its first publication in 1987 is significant. This is not a blog post [Answer:] I wish to respond to the by an obscure author, but a treatise by brief comment on several levels. one of the preeminent American Or- On the level of the issue itself, the thodox theological educators, many expression “God smiles on such of whose texts elucidating the Ortho- marriages” can be understood in a dox position on contemporary social number of ways. If by it, you mean issues reside on the website of the that you believe that God does not Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North encourage racially mixed mar- America. Father Harakas’s response riages, then, I believe we are not originally appeared in The Hellenic in disagreement. I feel that I made Chronicle, a conservative Greek-Amer- it very clear that the Church does ican newspaper associated with re- not feel that such marriages are sistance to Greek immigrants’ assim- desirable, for many different rea- ilation into American society and to sons, many of which are practical intermarriage with non-Greeks. But if and have to do with the chance of the context of his remarks is different success for such marriages. In ad- from that of Slavic antisemitism, the dition, we should also add that the upshot is the same. Sentiments like Church holds that the races and na- this stand in direct opposition to Saint tions were created by God. Conse- Paul’s declaration that in Christ “there quently, total racial intermarriage is neither Jew nor Greek” (Gal 3:28). would destroy the races which God created. The Church has never Moreover, while today many Ameri- advocated or encouraged racially can Orthodox Christians like to point mixed marriages. out that, in 1965, Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese Nevertheless, to assume a stance marched with Martin Luther King, that would completely prohibit Jr. in Selma, Alabama, they often 8 Stanley Harakas. such marriages, would mean that forget to mention two significant de- The Orthodox Church: the Church was racist, in that the tails. First, this episode remains one 455 Questions and Answers. criterion which it used was not one isolated example of an Orthodox hi- (Minneapolis: Light of faith, or belief, or the equal digni- erarch joining the fight for civil lib- & Life Publishing ty of all human beings as the “image erties. Second and no less important Company, 1987), 137.

The Wheel 17/18 | Spring/Summer 2019 31 Image used as profile is the treatment Archbishop Iakovos picture and shared suffered afterwards at the hands of on Facebook and Twitter by numerous his own spiritual flock, ranging from Orthodox clergy being disinvited from his continued and laity, especially pastoral visits to Southern parishes to in the wake of the hate mail to death threats.9 Confederate statues removal controversy. What recourse do the Orthodox have as racists and xenophobes seek and find validation of their worldview 9 Michael N. Varlamos, in the Church that claims to hold the “His Eminence fullness of truth? Orthodox Church Archbishop Iakovos officials continue to insist that- “iso & The Civil Rights lated cases” of prejudice are not con- Movement: Selma, nected to the fabric of the Orthodox 1965,” March on Selma: Orthodoxy mentality, in spite of all evidence and the Civil to the contrary. All attempts to - ad tion of True Manhood,” a blog post Rights Movement, vance the discussion about revising by Father Lawrence Farley, or under Greek Orthodox liturgical texts remain in the realm the many reposts of the essay “Why Archdiocese of of academic essays and blog posts, North America, Orthodox Men Love Church,” by https://civilrights. with no hierarchical support or even Frederica Mathewes-Greene, in which goarch.org/ acknowledgment. In the meantime, she praises the “robust” masculinity introduction. narratives of Orthodox nationalism of the Orthodox tradition, and cites are flourishing in every national such statements as “It’s the last place 10 Lawrence Farley, church and in every ethnic jurisdic- in the world men aren’t told they’re “Gender Confusion tion, alongside the accompanying 10 and the Extinction evil simply for being men.” Yet this of True Manhood,” narrative of contemporary culture conflation of the ideological -narra No Other Foundation, wars. The language of a “feminist tives of “conservative” Orthodoxy, February 15, 2009, takeover,” an “emasculation of West- the alt-right, and the white national- https://blogs. ern civilization”, a “homosexualiza- ists does not appear to be cause for ancientfaith.com/ tion of the culture,” and the like is nootherfoundation/ concern among many in the Orthodox gender-confusion- mainstream in contemporary Ortho- clergy and hierarchy. On the contrary, and-the-extinction- dox discourse. most of our priests and bishops see no of-true-manhood/. contradiction in condoning the pro- Frederica Mathewes- Such rhetoric allows white extremists liferation of xenophobic views in the Green, “Why to claim their spiritual home in the Or- Orthodox Men Love Church even as they denounce public Church,” Orthodox thodox tradition, which they do with embarrassments such as the antics of Christianity, October great conviction. It is not surprising Matthew Heimbach. These denunci- 20, 2010, http:// to find supportive comments by trav- ations ring hollow in the face of our orthochristian. elers in white nationalist social media corporate failing to address the root com/42390.html, circles posted under such articles as originally published causes of the attraction that Ortho- in The Word, “Gender Confusion and the Extinc- doxy holds for xenophobes. December 2007.

Inga Leonova is a practicing architect and educator. She teach- es a course on Monotheism, Culture, and Sacred Space at the Boston Architectural College and serves as a thesis advisor at the New England School of Art and Design. She is the author of several publications on Orthodoxy and cultural issues, including liturgical architecture and ecology.