A “Christian” cosplay coup d’état

“I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.”

— G.K. Chesteron

Lydia Bringerud may look like a homely trad girl, but she is one of the many faces of leftist subversion digging her way into the Orthodox Church. Those within this network may dress the part and speak the language, but only as rites used for undermining the Church and building their new progressive religion.

It’s a modern faith that co-opts the foundations of the ancient faith and is aimed wholly at reconstructing God, for its change agents find His statutes too tedious, His Word too confining, His Church’s traditions too hateful. And Orthodoxy, well, you know, it’s just so darn authoritarian and patriarchal and waaaay too white. Icky!

“White supremacists … may well be the number one threat to the Orthodox Church in the United States,” opined Bringerud in her most recent Orthodoxy in Dialogue essay “Michael Sisco, white supremacy, and loyalty in the Orthodox Church,” echoing the Department of Homeland Security’s lunatic claim that “white supremacists are the number one domestic terror threat” in America. Let us not forget that it was this very federal agency that crafted the Russia-gate hoax to which all fashionable Russophobes subscribe.

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Bringerud begins her hit piece by denigrating Saints Edward Media creator Michael Sisco as a “nationalist.” Funny that he’s not the one citing the behemoth DHS bureaucracy, whose main goal is domestic surveillance and curtailing the 4th Amendment all in the name of centralized expansion and furthering US hegemony. Talk about “extremist, national views” and an “enmeshment with nationalist regimes,” as she describes Sisco.

Sisco, who I interviewed back in the fall, simply wants to restore peace and order, but through a Christ-centered, communitarian approach, as well as through lawful political processes. Read for yourself what are his “extreme” beliefs or listen to him taking on Bringerud’s mischaracterizations, weak guilt-by-association attacks, and outright mistakes (such as the fact that Dr. Paul Gottfried coined the term “alt-right”).

Bringerud’s circular logic is mind-numbing, but it really shouldn’t be surprising since, just like their Evangeleftist counterparts, these Ameridox think logic is a tool of the patriarchy. Smash toxic masculinity, bash the fash, and punch a Nazi, and then you’re free and clear to abuse both rules of rhetoric and writing, not to mention biology and Church tradition. No wonder people embrace being woke. It’s so darn easy, especially if you’re cute.

“It’s a universal law: intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Bringerud’s emotional screed is a far cry from Journalism 101, much less her PhD (even it it was in folklore). And “emotion” certainly is the operative word here.

We’re living through an intellectual crisis based upon feelings, counter-factual responses, and lacking self-reflection, notes Dr. John Devanny of the sad state of American miseducation and the prideful and pedantic borgs it creates. Unconditional loyalty to this left-wing religion is realized through either victimology or virtue-signaling.

I’ve heard people from historian Dr. Tom Woods to writer Nero Augustus refer to these self-proclaimed elitists as “midwits.” They’re not dimwits, since they’re often book-smart, but they undoubtedly consider themselves your betters, hence, the reason they must incessantly lecture you about your backwardness and unenlightened beliefs. Economist Ludwig von Mises called these peevish puritanical-progressives “muddle-headed babblers” and historian Dr. Clyde Wilson pegged ’em the “Kevins.”

Meddling midwits dwell within what Curtis Yarvin has coined “the Cathedral.” I don’t love the label, since as a Christian I believe a cathedral is a Holy space. (Why not a mosque or a synagogue, right?)

But because a cathedral is a church with a bishop’s seat (thus, implying hierarchy), I do get the use of the word. And in this case, Bringerud sees herself and her co-religionists as people in this high position who are asserting authority over others, and even dominion over Church dogma.

The Cathedral is comprised of “intelligent people whose role it is to train genpop to believe and more importantly repeat things in violation of reality,” explains author Michael Malice. This would include apparatchiks from corporate media, academia, and government, as well as the new priesthood from the legal, business, and acceptable-opinion social classes.

“There are few things more Russian than an entire media apparatus dedicated to training the populace to disbelieve what is profoundly evident to everyone,” Jewish-American Malice, who was born in Soviet Ukraine in the 1970s, notes of the USSR’s agitprop. This is why a chick with a fancy doctorate uses command language to purposefully confuse and obfuscate, not elucidate, to agitate and propagandize, influence and mobilize.

“More often than not, Cathedral operatives are completely unexceptional people,” Malice remarks. “The reason they fight to maintain its cultural dominance … is quite simply because it is the entire source of their power. Without it they would be utterly obscure and irrelevant.”

Thus, they castigate as “extremist” any person daring to repel their malleable edicts. This is nothing shocking for anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of the intelligentsia, who have historically been a vanguard of political, social, or artistic elites with a penchant for caustic close-mindedness, all while claiming to be free-thinkers.

“We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”

— Vladimir Lenin

Bringerud feigns fairness and charity in parts of her essay, never even outright calling Sisco a “white supremacist.” She implies that. His name and that ad hom are in her headline. She says he’s been “flagged” as such, but by whom, we do not know. She alleges that his “rhetoric is reminiscent of Corneliu Codreanu” and that Sisco “allowed white nationalist Michael Fuentes to speak.”

Sure, Bringerud misidentified Nick Fuentes, which to me, means she only just recently heard of him by her fellow Cathedralists at Salon or The Atlantic, but has never actually heard him. Lame, I know, but certainly not a smoking gun since leftists are well-programmed and most don’t have an original thought, relying solely on the platitudes of others.

But more importantly, Bringerud’s duplicitous style sometimes seems to give her plausible deniability when it comes to reconstructing Orthodoxy. For example, in her dissertation, she wrote, “Despite the illusion of theology as the exclusive purview of clergy, laypeople exercise interpretive agency to creatively adapt doctrine to their individual life circumstances.”

But don’t be fooled by her word salad. None of this quote is Orthodox. We are not papists and our dogma is not fluid or intersectional. Whereas clergy are the sacred priesthood, laity are the royal priesthood, and we do work in concert together for the good of the Holy, Apostolic Church.

Nevertheless, adapting doctrine is a heretical belief. There is no wiggle room in Orthodoxy when it comes to such foundational big-T traditions. After all, the definition of the word “orthodox” is “beliefs conforming to what is generally or traditionally accepted as right or true; established and approved … strictly keeping to traditional doctrine and ritual.”

This is why Bringerud offers “a theory of vernacular feminisms, in which women create strategies of empowerment within a patriarchal system. By creating these choices for themselves, they simultaneously subvert and support a system that limits them on the basis of gender.”

Subversion, for sure; support, not so much. Like Father John Whiteford so pointedly surmises, “It is a betrayal of the Orthodox Faith to suggest that our moral tradition is on a different footing than the dogmatic tradition of the Church.”

Bringerud’s academic works set the egalitarian stage for her OiD articles, in which she doesn’t just chip away at the system, but instead, takes a sledgehammer to it. In her piece “On being Orthodox and genderqueer,” “She invites her subject to share their experience of being Orthodox and a seminarian while not identifying as male or female.”

David therealMedWhite breaks down the disturbing justification of voluntary transgressions and perversion of God’s law within the essay. This includes not only trans acceptance, but also the promotion of porn, masturbation, non-monogamy, and “dramatically re-evaluat[ing] the concept of sin and sins.” Anaxios! You cannot barter with the devil.

Similarly, Bringerud penned a glowing review of the documentary Circus of Books which she says is about “a wholesome, friendly straight couple who have made a career out of selling hard-core gay porn.” She preens that it speaks to the “dynamics of love, family, and faith in an unexpected place.”

In “Plague: Untold stories of AIDS and the Catholic Church,” she wrote, “I was struck with the deep resonances between the AIDS crisis and our current political climate with COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement.” She sets up a straw-man in order to paint the Orthodox Church as hateful and intolerant. How vernacular.

“Churches do not die because of an absence of belief. They die when they become gated communities, excluding those who can’t afford to get in.” What a self-defeating pretext that is. Belief is by virtue not inclusive to those who don’t believe. What could be any more exclusive than repent and sin no more? It is the wide-open gates (i.e. the wide path) that kills a church and eventually kills God’s children.

“It’s this weird, American, evangelical, or pseudo-scholastic Western view that has been dressed up in a cassock and incense,” Lindsey, the trans in Bringerud’s genderqueer article, quipped about traditional Orthodox Christians. Of course, we know that nothing could be more post-modern, self-help gobbledygook than what Bringerud and her ilk are selling. Seems her theology is way more Beth Moore than St. Basil the Great, way more Jen Hatmaker than St. John Chrysostom.

“I questioned whether I was the only person who was bothered by patriarchy in Orthodox Christianity,” Bringerud admitted in her doctoral thesis. Well, okay, perhaps she wasn’t a feminist when she converted to Orthodoxy at age 14 (you can hear her conversion story on the Bad Orthodox Podcast from 1:22-5:46). But she sure is now, so one wonders why a grrrrrrl would remain so long in a faith that’s counter to her entire worldview. Seriously, why not just go join the “evolving faith” of Sarah Bessey and her Jesus Feminists?

What we have here, folks, is a good ol’ Hegelian dialectic.

• The agenda? Subvert the Church.
• The thesis? Manufacture the fictional crisis of white supremacy and assert the equally false claim that the traditional religion and its hierarchical system is inherently bad.
• The anti-thesis? Create division and try to institute purges of those with wrongthink.
• The synthesis? Removal of Church hierarchy, traditional gender roles, and biblical doctrine regarding homosexuality and other sins while transferring power from conservative Orthodox to the totalitarian Cathedralists.

It’s destructionism, a Misesian term that had been coined in explaining socialist schemes in terms of economics. Here’s my tweak of Mises’ quote: “Leftism produces nothing; it only consumes social order. Each step leading towards cultural Marxism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists,” namely, the Church – the Bride of Christ.

The saddest part is not that these infiltrators exist. The Bible does warn us to be wary of such wolves. Rather, it’s that these change agents use the goodwill and love embedded within Christianity in order to play the part of the sheep and twist the Gospel for their own worldly ends. The shepherds must be on guard.

The Cathedralists co-opt Christian language by saying it is we traditionalists who need a moral awakening, while they simultaneously tout immorality. They claim it is Orthodoxy that needs healing, not sinners who need the life-giving care of the Holy Church. They don’t necessarily want to change the faith but simply seek to adjust its application, to “save the Church from itself,” as Father Whiteford says.

The Ameridox “try to reconcile our Orthodox faith with all the pathological teachings and philosophies that are current in our culture, many of them are even openly Marxist,” he adds. These Chekists in cassocks will deflect, of course, putting “communist” in quotes when mocking those who call them out for being such.

Predictably, they’ll anoint themselves as victim-martyrs and malign as “white supremacist” anyone who tries to crush opposition to progressive proliferation, but this shouldn’t discourage us in our righteous battle. Jesus says we who stand firm will be hated for His name’s sake. But as guardians of piety, we must “follow the path of the martyrs and not the path of the Judases,” preaches Father Whiteford.

“What Orthodox Christians need to decide for themselves is what the Church is. What behaviors will (and won’t) believers tolerate in their communities, and how will they resolve these conflicts?” Bringerud concludes in her current article. “How do believers reconcile inconvenient facts and intense feelings?”

This is actually excellent advice. Like my friend Mike said about my recent 2-part series “Where’s the clerical consistency?” it “drew much-needed lines in the sand.” This is war, not just cultural, political, and spiritual, but existential. It’s time to pick a side and stop being so nice. Let’s clean house and reclaim our Cathedral.

“Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.”

— James 4:8

Such rhetoric is not sowing discord. It’s unapologetically standing for unchanging truth. Honestly, there should be nothing more unifying than that.

As St. Paul says, “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils; ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table and of the table of devils.”

Therefore, I’m raising the black flag in resistance to the cosplay creepers and their corrupt coup d’état. Let’s pray against the demons who surround these cultists of death and for victory of Orthodox Christians over their adversaries.