Economic Eth

In 1867 America bought a land that had already been Christian for seventy years. The faith had come from monks instead of soldiers: St. Herman on Spruce Island, and St. Innocent teaching Aleuts to read in their own language. By the time of the sale, roughly 12,000 of Alaska’s Native people were Orthodox Christians. The treaty of sale promised that they would be protected in the “free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and religion.” Then the “Christian nation”, the Americans, arrived. Its soldiers looted Sitka, including St. Michael’s Orthodox Cathedral. Its Presbyterian missionary, Sheldon Jackson, called the Protestant mission boards together and divided Alaska among them, as though the baptized were heathens and the altars already standing there counted for nothing. Washington DC then made Jackson its General Agent for Education, and some mission schools received federal money under government contracts. In those schools children were punished for speaking their native languages. Orthodox boys could attend Saturday Vespers but were kept away from the Sunday Liturgy and most feasts. Natives were sometimes turned away from the Presbyterian hospital unless they converted. In 1897 the territory’s marshal and governor helped carry the coffin of a Tlingit woman who had wanted an Orthodox burial, so that she could be buried as a Presbyterian. Jackson was candid about the goal. When an Orthodox bishop appealed to the President, Jackson predicted that “twenty-five years hence will see the end of the Greek Church in Alaska.” So here is the question for anyone who says America was a Christian nation: what Christianity are we even talking about? Historic America was always suspicious of and hostile towards authentic Christianity. A nation that treats the Church of the Apostles, of Nicaea, and of the Fathers as a foreign superstition to be schooled out of children was not a Christian nation in any sense the early Church would recognize. It was Protestant and civil-religious, and “Christian” was simply the name it gave its own culture. The Tlingit saw this more clearly than the missionaries did. They turned to Orthodoxy in the 1880s as a way of holding onto their independence against Presbyterian pressure to become "Americans". They recognized that the Church which honored their dead, blessed their fishing boats, and prayed in their language believed in the Incarnation enough to let it take flesh among them. As we know today, Jackson's prophecy failed.

Yesterday I posted that America is not and has never been a Christian nation, that there is nothing to defend or to save, and that it is more like Rome before Constantine. It caused a lot of backlash, and short posts left out most of what I believe. Here it is. First, what I want. I want America to be a Christian nation, in a fuller sense than most people mean by it. I want the faith established: honored by the public order as true, keeping the public calendar, and shaping the law. I want it Orthodox, because Orthodoxy is built to become the faith of a whole people, with a national church and a patriarch who can gather a nation into one mind, Church and state each in its own lane. The old name for that harmony is symphonia. Other faiths would be free: synagogues, mosques and Baptist churches keep their doors, property, schools and the full protection of the law, just not the public honor and support of establishment. A Christian public order also would not license what the Church calls sin: pride parades, abortions, degeneracy, etc. That is about the street, not anyone's worth. The man who would have marched in a pride parade keeps his dignity, his safety, his home, his work and his vote. He bears the image of God no less than I do, and the Church names my sins before his. When I say America is not a Christian nation, then, it is not because I don't want one. It is because I want the real thing. A Christian nation is not a country where most people tick "Christian" on a survey. It is a baptized people gathered at one altar. Its year is kept by the Church's feasts, its children are raised at her font, and its rulers answer to a law older than their own. I have spent a decade going back and forth to a country like that, Georgia. The man it trusted most was the head of the Church, not a politician. When he took office under the Soviets there were a few dozen working churches left. When he died this year there were about two thousand parishes. He offered to be godfather to the third and later children of married Orthodox couples, and tens of thousands were baptized with him beside them. Nobody legislated any of it. The people came back to the churches first, and the law followed them. Now hold America up to that. It was founded with no national church on purpose. The Constitution never mentions God, bans religious tests for federal office, and forbids Congress to establish a religion. Today about 62 percent of Americans call themselves Christian, and only about a third go to church even once a month. On a given Sunday, roughly one American in a thousand is in an Orthodox liturgy. Our feasts are consumerism and our established morality is anything but Christian, and often it is anti-Christ. That is what I meant by nothing to defend or to save. I did not mean nothing good. There is real decency here, real freedom, and neighbors I love. I meant there is no Christian order under the surface waiting to be restored, because you cannot restore what was never built. America is a pagan nation with a veneer of Christianity, pagan in the old sense: many gods, no common altar. That is why I said Rome before Constantine. The early Church was a small minority in an empire full of gods. It did not take over the government. It preached, baptized, fed the poor and buried its martyrs, and Christian establishment came three centuries later. Tertullian told the persecutors, "the blood of Christians is seed." That is our work too. You cannot vote your way into holiness. A law can govern what a man does; it cannot make him love God. Holiness comes up from the people, and only when the people are actually Christian can politics change anything that lasts. Laying a Christian state over an unconverted people is not a Christian nation. It is brute force, and it fails. Which is where I part with the white nationalists. Their Christian America is a restoration project, a white Christian country that supposedly existed and must be taken back. It is wrong about the history: that country was Protestant where it was Christian at all, and several of its states barred from office anyone who would not profess the Protestant faith. It is wrong about the Church. A white Orthodox America is not a stricter Orthodoxy. It is a schism. It also fails as a mission. About seven in ten Orthodox Christians in this country were born abroad or have a parent who was. Most of our laymen, deacons, priests, bishops would not be considered "white" under their version the State, meaning they don't even consider them Americans. In the last census, fewer than half of American children were non-Hispanic white. If America ever becomes Orthodox, it will be through the very people that vision tells to leave. I also wrote that the loudest voices about bloodline are mostly single and childless. I put a number on something I cannot count, and I take it back. The point stands: talk about "my people" costs nothing. A household, a parish and a neighbor brought to the Liturgy cost everything. For America to become Orthodox means baptizing all of America: the descendants of the founders and of the people they enslaved, Mexican and Korean and Ethiopian and Appalachian, old families and new arrivals alike. "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them." America is not a Christian nation to be saved. It is a mission field, and we are a tiny minority who need to act like one. It does not need restoring. It needs the font. In Acts, an Ethiopian official asked Philip, "See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?" Nobody asked about his ancestry. They went down into the water together.