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So, there's a recurring criticism I see in many spaces regarding various right-wing projects in building parallel institutions, alternative ideological frames to that of the left, cultural resilience, and so on (ranging from critics of "Benedict Option" strategies, to Neema Parvini when talking about why "American nationalism" does not and cannot exist), which is that the thing in question is "a LARP," or "LARP-y," or something similar. Which is to say that it is "performative," that the actions aren't backed by some sort of deep-down "genuine" belief.
To which I say: so what?
First, whence this idea that the "deep-down" internal mindset of a person is more important than the actions themselves? Do a person's deeds carry so little weight, compared to their mental state when doing them?
But more importantly, isn't this how anyone gets started with something? I mean, a lot of the examples that come to my mind are things that I'm only familiar with second-hand, but I'll try to explain.
I'm old enough that back in the first few grades of elementary school, they made us stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day. I think back on us as first graders, doing that. Were we actually earnestly pledging our undying allegiance to the Republic and its flag? We didn't even understand all the words we were saying. We were just reciting what we were told to recite, the way we were taught to recite it, because we didn't want to get in trouble. It was all fake, all performative, all "a LARP."
Those of you who grew up religious, did you really understand every hymn you sang, every element of each ritual you participated in, from the very first time you did it? Or was there at least some "going through the motions" and mimicking your elders, with true understanding coming later?
In one of the replies to that Twitter post on the "homeschool prom" linked late last thread, someone described school dances as "a LARP" of the actual 'courtship' scene/process. Well, how else do people learn?
One common criticism of Pascal's Wager is that, even if you buy the argument, it only serves to persuade you that you should believe God exists, and there's a clear gap between thinking "I should believe God exists" and thinking "God exists." I mention it, because Pascal himself addressed this point shortly after introducing the Wager. And his answer is LARPing. Once you're convinced you should believe in God, then start acting as if He exists. "LARP" as a person who believes in God. If you do it thoroughly enough for long enough, Pascal argues, you'll start to actually believe it.
I've seen similar arguments in everything from job interview advice to dating advice — picture the person you want to be, and then act as they would, even if it's "all pretend."
It all comes down to the same classic piece of advice: "fake it till you make it." And what is the "fake it" stage, if not "LARP-y"? If not "performative" and, well, fake?
The reason given for this strategy is that it rarely stays fake forever. Maintaining a performative pretense, saying and doing one thing all while constantly going "this is silly, this is stupid, this is fake, this isn't me, I don't believe any of this" in your head is hard (at least for non-sociopaths). It's why governments have made citizens recite propaganda slogans over and over, why they made us say the Pledge of Allegiance over and over — because many times, it doesn't stay fake, doesn't stay merely performative. Again, it's fake it till you make it.
And even if an individual never "makes it," never achieves real belief no matter how long they perfectly maintain "the LARP"? Well, when we're talking about a long-term project involving a significant number of people, you have to consider future generations. Which gets to a concept mentioned here on the Motte before: generational loss of hypocrisy. Even if the first generation never get rid of their inner "this is so fake" thoughts… well, the next generations — whether that's new recruits, or their literal children — can't see those inner thoughts, only the outer "act." The LARP will not be multi-generational. To quote @WhiningCoil again:
So, to sum up, the accusation that a project of this sort is "LARP-y" is kind of irrelevant. Yes, it'll be LARP-y to start with; it kind of has to be. That's how things work. It's a phase — a necessary phase in the process of becoming something more, and if the people involved stay determined enough, and keep it up long enough, that phase will pass, and it will become something more.
Fake it till you make it.
(I'm hoping this isn't too incoherent, and isn't too low effort for a top-level post.)
Hmm, there are lot's of possible criticisms, some less valid than others, and if you are encounting folks calling it a LARP soley on some un-earnest enough mindreading, then your counter is fine. But I think the more germane LARP criticism is not about 'intention', but the fact that a LARP is by definition, not real, superficial, and thus unsustainable.
Like if someone 'LARPed' the middle ages by conquering and setting up an actual feudal state and ran it thus, but on their death bed they left a note saying 'tee hee, twas a LARP', it falls kind of flat. But this is quite different than actual LARPing, which involves temporary, superficial escapism, that's fundamentally facilitated by the non-LARP. Armor that looks cool, but can't stand up in real combat, forts and 'castles' that you couldn't actually maintain, all funded by an email job.
To this point, accusastions of LARPing, rather than mindset, should be accusations against rigor and of fragility, and serve as predictions about sustainability.
I think bringing up the Benedict Option is a bad counter-example, since the trope-maker, Rod Dreher is a pretty damning case study of all this. There's nobody who publically committed themselves harder to this idea, yet he failed to even superficially create even sustainable parts of this project in his own life. The book he wrote, was a cherry picked set of anecdotes, cobbled artificially into a picture he wanted to paint, not an examination of the concept in earnest.
How do you mean regarding Rod?
are you familiar at all with Rods life trajectory and current state?
I have not. What's happened?
The short story is that his life since writing the Benedict Option has turned out exactly the way the BO is meant to avoid. I don't mean that he's turned away from his positions or been hypocritical or anything. (I'm not trying to calumny his character). Just that literally the trajectory of his circumstances, undermines the credibility of the book as an efficacious endeavor, rather than an intellectual LARP.
Rod is currently an expat divorcee, rootlessly gliding around Europe without any 'home' left in America, somewhat disconnected from his family. Whether begrudgingly or not, he's living an almost cartoonishly rootless cosmopolitan lifestyle, pretty much only possible in the world of liquid modernity, the BO has rejected.
Even if you want to argue that Rod didn't Ben-Op hard enough or something, it just strengthes the LARP point, when if the trope-namer himself couldn't implement it effectively.
And again, I don't know all the ins and outs of how Rod got here, or whatever, this is not a character-attack in the slightest. It is just an observation about the BO and the topic of whether it's serious or a LARP for a certain class of people.
Relatedly, I have general issue with Rod's 'research' approach, and question the kind of 'study' made up of carefully curated vignettes of the point you're pushing, rather than a more rigorous approach to forwarding such a social theory.
That's interesting. I read a lot of Rod probably eight years ago, though even then he was a bit inconsistent, and wrote way too much chaff, making it hard to find the wheat. I would go to his AC blog on my lunch break, and there would be a half dozen new posts, five of which were just blatant culture warring, but it wasn't instantly clear which ones. So I gave up reading him, especially when he moved to Substack, and I didn't care to subscribe. But I was still very much in the bubble that was interested in his work, and my church did a book study about The Benedict Option. I tried looking up what happened, but he's very vague about the whole thing, and seems to be almost entirely paywalled now.
Dreher has always struck me as the kind of guy who desperately needs to stop reading the news, but can't help himself. There's something very tragic about a guy who wrote a book about setting up islands of peace away from the mess of the world, but whose output is mostly hot takes on current events.
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I haven't kept up with him too much lately, I last heard of him when he announced he was getting a divorce which has gotta be two years ago now.
In general I remember liking Rod when he was one of the first Hipster Orthodox right wing writers I knew in his TAC days, just before the Benedict Option came out.
I also heard he seems to have noped off to Hungary, but yeah, last time I checked in with him he said he was getting a divorce. I believe there was an argument about "whether the cross can be co-opted." But that's the last I heard of him.
While I really respect his struggles with Catholicism, and I know they were very personal for him (he said that a priest he was personally close with was credibly accused of sex abuse, which broke his trust in the whole institution), I also get the sense that they went full-steam-ahead into Orthodoxy as kind of a second option, the second-most attractive girl at the
baraltar rail, and so there's a lot of trauma, conversion, and ideological flip-flopping involved in his personal journey, which reads to me more like desperation than divine ascent. I wonder if that just got to be too much for his wife, especially considering how famously repulsive Orthodoxy is to non-Orthodox women, something I've observed personally. He also just strikes me as quite a depressive, just a very moody and somber person whose view of life and the future is almost perfectly apocalyptic, and I can't imagine that makes a marriage easy to manage. When I think about Dreher, the overwhelming feeling is "sad." He doesn't feel like he's chasing the divine, he feels like he's running away from brokenness. Which is not a bad starting point, but far from anything that measures up to holy Benedict.I have not observed this personally. Do you mind giving us some examples? I'm struggling to envision how orthodox christianity would be particularly repulsive to secular women, compared to any other conservative religious belief, such as islam.
Women like Byzantine Catholicism about as much as they do any other kind of Catholicism, so it isn’t the rite.
It’s probably the anti-westernism over the dumbest things, a Canadian antiAmericanism-like reflexive anticatholism that narcissizes small differences WRT pews and mariology instead of just going hur dur papists, and let’s not leave out beards. Not that women hate beards per se, but the giant beards that need a trim, and often enough also a combing, are not going to be popular. Add that it’s attached to conservative religion and there’s echoes of Islamic misogyny. It just comes off as a bunch of badly groomed autistic weirdos with mommy issues half the time.
Obviously not all orthodox but it’s enough to poison the well.
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It's less about Eastern Orthodoxy as a set of beliefs, and more about the practices and people of Eastern Orthodoxy. And we're not talking about secular women here, I suppose they'd just go running in the opposite direction for reasons that you well understand, but conservative-to-moderate, vaguely religious women, in the United States. And it isn't an active hate, it's not that these ladies are obsessed with Orthodoxy and want to cast hexes at it or something, they just have no interest in it and find it a little odd that anyone would.
As I understand it, the median Orthodox convert in the United States is an intellectual, introverted, evangelical, college-educated man, who discovered Orthodoxy through the mysterious workings of the Holy Spirit, also known as Wikipedia. From what I've heard, and seen, the women in this man's life get dragged to the divine liturgy ("St. Nathaniel says 'come and see!'"), and most often do not hear the angels singing the way the man did the first time he witnessed the liturgy.
At my local Orthodox parish, there was a young guy who dragged his entire family to Orthodoxy, and while his parents and siblings were committed, it's obvious he was the one who orchestrated the whole thing. They'd never have stepped foot in an Orthodox church if he hadn't pushed them.
Frederica Mathewes-Green, who as I understand it is kind of the "influencer mom" of American Orthodoxy, said in one of her videos that she just didn't like the divine liturgy the first time she went to an Orthodox church. She grew to like it, but that initial revulsion, or indifference, is what I've generally seen and heard from women who've had experience with Orthodoxy.
Participating in the honored tradition, I dragged both my mother and my girlfriend to liturgy a few times -- neither liked it. Both of them liked going to mass, though. (Definitely not the latin mass -- they can't understand what anyone's saying.)
I think a lot of it has to do with the people. Your framing says a lot, actually -- the intellectual content of faith is the thing that brings our evangelical man to become interested in Orthodoxy, but the women he drags don't know or care about any of that. She's interested in what's actually going on around her: what songs are they singing? What is this strange artwork on the walls? What's the content of the sermon? What do the candles mean? What are the people like? Are they
a bearnormal, or strange? Are people happy here? Does this seem like a community where I fit in?And if we're talking about somewhat conservative American women, the sort of women who might be interested in a conservative religious tradition, we're talking about women who are generally very interested in social convention, unobtrusiveness, familiarity. They're very socially-oriented, they want a community that feels familiar, friendly, and safe, not strange, alienating, and unpredictable.
As our female draggee looks around, she sees these weird Byzantine paintings on the walls where people look odd, with strange proportions and almost alien-like ridges and folds in the depictions of their skin (in some icons, St. Paul genuinely just looks like a space alien to me with his giant head). The church bells ring out, and instead of the sweet ding donging of Western church bells, she hears them clanging like a hailstorm. ("Was that an accident?") She hears odd music she's never heard before, no familiar hymns, no familiar cadence -- if the chant is Byzantine-style, it genuinely sounds, to Western ears, like something from the Muslim and not the Christian world -- and she smells weird smells of strange incense, as some guy in an elaborate robe starts swinging it at her. And the worst part? She's not supposed to sit down! "It's for the old ladies," our evangelical man helpfully told her. Well, she's not an old lady, but this just doesn't seem right. She feels like she's put on the spot and has to stand where everyone can watch her, in a situation where she already feels out of place. And now she can't even get comfortable by sitting down and just watching!
The service ends, and, though she's shy, evangelical man starts dragging her around to talk to people, and she can't help but feel like they're just... a little off. There's the man who's wearing a kilt as his Sunday best in the middle of Kansas. There's the guy who wears a bowtie. There's the dude who seems prone to leering, like he's been on a naval vessel for six months and hasn't seen the sight of a woman in that time. There's the guy she can overhear talking about the upcoming Holy Friday service, who's telling his friends, "I just can't wait to stick it to those Jews." (A real anecdote I heard from an Orthodox friend of mine about someone he knew.) And a bunch of the men, including the priest, have a thick, untrimmed beard -- can't they trim them?
Half the people in the church are speaking in foreign languages she can't understand, and are sticking to themselves, avoiding eye contact. She feels like a foreigner in her own country. People are talking about the lenten fast, and are speaking about cheese like they've been on the naval vessel with the leerer with only bread and water -- wait, these people can't eat cheese for months out of the year? The priest is friendly, but seems strange, overly intellectual, and his beard looks greasy. She strikes up a conversation with another convert's wife, and she tells her, "yeah, I didn't like the orthodox church either at first -- it grows on you."
And the overwhelming feeling our dragged-along woman feels to all this is an unadulterated, grade A:
ICK!
My mom told me once, after I'd stopped exploring Orthodoxy, that the Orthodox parishioners "seemed like hippies." My girlfriend was less expressive, but said she thought they "felt like strange people." Neither would have attended the divine liturgy if I hadn't dragged them, and neither had any interest in continuing to attend after I stopped being interested. They just found it overwhelmingly weird.
This obviously doesn't apply to cradle Orthodox -- it is their tradition and they're quite familiar with it. It's western Christianity that seems weird to them. And there are, of course, women who choose to convert to Orthodoxy on their own, but I've never talked to any of them so I can't offer a take.
Sometimes I share my views on Eastern Orthodoxy and people seem surprised by them -- I don't know, maybe I've just seen a tiny sliver of what Orthodoxy in America looks like and it's different elsewhere. I owe a lot to my time exploring Orthodoxy, including a strengthening of my love for the Mother of God, an appreciation for the iconographic tradition (looks over at my icon of Christ Pantokrator), a more reserved approach to the procession of the Holy Spirit, a grounding and softening of my Western 'hard edges' -- without abandoning the juridical lens on Christianity as some Orthodox seem to call for -- and even a belief in the essence-energies distinction, which, interestingly, resolved a struggle I'd had with Western Mariology. And I sincerely and deeply respect the Orthodox tradition as a pathway to communion with God.
But despite all that, my own feeling after sincerely exploring Orthodoxy is that, for all the missionary zeal it's developed in America through conversion, it still feels like it's someone else's church, and I'm just living in
barbarian landsan ethnic diaspora of ethnicities I simply am not a part of. And where even the native converts are, respectfully, not always the most 'normal' or conventional people, even if I bear no ill will towards them.I had a convert friend in the Orthodox church who was quite interesting, obviously very intelligent. But he also had a passion for Orthodoxy and Eastern Europe that bordered on obsessive; he would talk about and cook Russian cuisine for people, despite being as English-German as the rest of us American white people. He had a two-bedroom condo, and one entire bedroom had been converted into what can only be described as a chapel, with icons covering every wall and liturgical books overflowing bookcases. He wanted to be a priest, but had no interest in marriage (which would make him the perfect Catholic seminarian, but obviously led to some stern pastoral advice from his spiritual father). He honestly struck me as the kind of guy who just needed to get laid.
While I respect other cultures and I'm even open to trying their cuisine, I simply have no interest in becoming Greek or Bulgarian or Russian. At times, it felt to me like fitting in the Orthodox church required a cultural self-emptying, not merely a spiritual one. As though to become Orthodox I had to renounce the profound insights of the Western philosophical tradition or the honor due to my ancestors and embrace a worldview that sees them as something between "deeply mistaken" and "the Great Satan of the whole world." I get enough hatred of the West from the secular world, and I just don't care to receive it from my fellow Christians.
And I guess that's what I see in Dreher. He's a Western man, born in Louisiana, and restoring his relationship with his parents was important to him. But he has so self-emptied himself of his culture that he's literally fled the West to go to Hungary, despite writing a book about how Westerners can create pockets of grace within the West after the model of the great founder of Western monasticism.
If I mean anything by this long post, I mean to say that Orthodoxy feels foreign, alien, even converts often feel somewhat odd or unusual, and very often its prescription to Westerners is "reject your people, RETVRN to ours." And that this is picked up by non-Orthodox women more than non-Orthodox men, because of their strong attunement to social signals and preference for the conventional.
You give an accurate and quite entertaining description of a certain type of Orthodox parish/parishioner. As a cradle Orthodox Christian who is the child of American converts, my central member of the class Eastern Orthodox is quite different, but I understand how off-putting the types you describe would be if they were one's first Orthodox experience (and they certainly exist).
I belong to the Orthodox Church in America, which was founded by Russian missionaries and has self governed since the rise of communism in Russia. Most churches in the OCA serve fully in English. Priests are required to have secular and seminary degrees and are generally well-groomed. The liturgical chant is the Russian-style four part harmony, so it is basically music sung by a Western-style choir. There are traditionally ethnic parishes, but in many areas (like the Southeast, where I live), the churches are culturally American.
The Greek Orthodox churches in North America might sometimes be less welcoming to non-Greeks (though this is quickly changing in many places as converts come in), but they are generally pretty Westernized and clean-cut (the Greeks Westernized their liturgical/clerical practices in America to give off a more "normal" Catholic/Episcopalian vibe - the GOA church in my city even has an organ).
The Antiochian Churches are also often full of American converts, or, if they are more ethnic, similar to what TheLoser describes below regarding his/her experience in the Coptic Church.
The type of experience you had sounds stereotypical of ROCOR or maybe an insular Greek or otherwise ethnic parish. To the degree that Orthodoxy has a future in the West, it is probably not in parishes like that.
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Honestly, your experience doesn't match mine at all. For context, I am a cradle Coptic Orthodox in Canada. From my experience, most converts are either converts through marriage or through outreach on the part of Orthodox parishioners. Maybe its because Canada is more catholic, but I do not think I have ever seen a, as you say, "intellectual, introverted, evangelical, college-educated man" convert.
You characterize Orthodox parishioners as "odd" or "hippies", and priests as "intellectuals". This does not match my experience at all. Are there one or two crackpots? Sure, but what organization doesn't? The vast majority of parishioners where I'm from are perfectly normal members of society. The young people in Orthodox churches are even more approachable; they go to the same universities, work the same jobs, go to the same parties, do the same things for fun. The priests are nice, welcoming, and secularly educated. I feel that you've approached orthodoxy from an intellectual paradigm, and that's coloured your perception of the orthodox community. From my perspective, most Orthodox are normal western people, who just happen to be Orthodox. The median introduction to Orthodoxy is from an average young adult introducing their partner/friends to the Church, who play up the history and "connectedness" of the church to society and history in general.
You've mentioned that Orthodox communities seem like social clubs. I'd like to point out that it seems like that because Orthodox churches in the homeland actually are social clubs. They basically operate as NGOs that offer social services, and act as community centers.
Also, you've mentioned that joining an Orthodox church often feels like you're giving up your own culture. Sadly, I agree. Preferably, an indigenous Orthodox Church of America would be established that represents the culture, history and ethos of America. Unfortunately, establishing such a church is a centuries endeavor.
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I wonder how much of it is literally just orthodox cassocks seeming like the wrong size half the time and the clergy tending to have beards that… don’t look well groomed.
The Latin mass has a lot of the same issues with being literally in a foreign language and attracting plenty of obsessives but manages to be much more female friendly because it looks good. Not just beauty and grandeur but neat and orderly. And I have heard comments from women that it struck them when they first went that seeing immaculate, well choreographed and behaved boys serving the priest made an impression. Aesthetics has two dimensions, after all- there’s a ‘clean and well maintained’ look to go with the classical beauty look and women are very sensitive to the former. It definitely seems like in nonreligious contexts women really care about that stuff- much more than men- too.
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I haven’t observed it either, but it is rather difficult to raise small children Orthodox, everything s long and Sunday School is after Liturgy. It sounds like they have three kids and we’re homeschooling, I could see that being pretty rough if she wasn’t into it. Some Orthodox families I know seem to have the wife going along with homeschooling because the husband has strong opinions, but isn’t that into the actual teaching part.
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Islam is a fargroup conservative belief, Orthodoxy is an outgroup one. If my country went full Handmaid's Tale, it would be the Orthodox putting the women back under the boot sooner than the Muslims, despite the sizeable Muslim subpopulation.
I have no idea what type of orthodoxy you guys are dealing with. The type I'm familiar with (immigrants and such) encourages women to get degrees and high-powered jobs.
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I know it's a metaphor but I feel the need to nitpick- the Byzantine rite doesn't have an altar rail. Communion is received from a cleric standing in front of the iconostasis and the service takes place mostly behind the iconostasis.
Yes, I’ve been to orthodox services.
And if we’re going to pedantically pick apart metaphors, most Latin churches these days don’t have an altar rail either.
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