Piety-signaling priests play with fire, part 2

Thank you for reading part 1 and coming here to finish what I believe is a conversation that matters.

“To fight for God’s truth against demonic evil,” explained Archbishop Averky, requires taking a stance and knowing that you can’t please everyone. But equivocating, proclaiming “peaceful coexistence,” or conforming to the spirit of the age will only lead into the “thorns or thistles” that Fr. David Galloway insists he wants to avoid.

A champion of pure teaching in defense of Orthodoxy throughout the 20th century, Archbishop Averky wrote these sober words in tracing the “apostasy of our times” throughout history and preaching contemporary wisdom regarding the coming of anti-Christ. Clergy should take heed and keep the wolves at bay, even if they happen to be other priests. Like Christ said, “Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you for so did their fathers to the false prophets.”

Unfortunately, for too many clergy it’s easier to try to tear down those who are contrary to the world than it is to stand firm with them. But we Orthodox laity need their back! In fact, I made a similar appeal to a monk who back in the summer of 2020 was publicly appeasing the violent heathens instead of pushing back against the zeitgeist of perpetual revolution.

Archbishop Averky’s warnings were also on full display during the plandemic with the demands that unorthodox renovations and sinister syncretism be viewed as piety, unquestioning obedience as faithful zeal, and resistors demeaned as “rigorists.”

“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.'”
— St. Anthony the Great

Back then, a friend was told by our former OCA priest, “I’m not a white supremacist. I believe in science.” Sheesh, talk about unsavory! Seems a compassionate conversation between pastor and parishioner during that highly calamitous and confusing time was too much work. Simpler just to write off an “extremist,” I suppose.

Fr. David might brand a young dad’s reasonable worry about the peak COVID paradigm playing out within some parishes as challenging “ecclesial fidelity.” However, I would describe many priests’ response as this: spiritual abuse. And lamentably, it persists on with Fr. David’s deceptive diocese presentation.

So let me be clear: I am done with progressive priests wanting to shut down my speech, my parish, my fellowship, and my family’s access to the Eucharist. And by bolstering the nefarious narrative against the “toxic trads,” that’s exactly what they’re attempting to do (yet again). And they’re playing with fire.

“Not only for every idle word must man give an account, but for every idle silence.”
— St. Ambrose

“People turned to bloggers for information because in some cases they knew more about the science of COVID than the bishops,” noted Fr. Andrew Moore. “The blogs not only provided information and a much-needed relief from isolation, but allowed people to express their frustrations and fears during a time when the threat of death was eminent.”

Honestly, this is the bloggers’ biggest sin: nonconformity to coof cultism. Personally, I think triggered priests still see this as an unforgivable affront, but more to their clerical egos and less to Church authority. This makes any current claim of them being a victim of circumstance even more outrageous.

Bear in mind, these are the same globohomers that shamed folks questioning lock downs, draconian parish measures, and the jab. You know, the same leftydox who you heard snidely chirp, “Well, where are you going to go?” when you’d sincerely attempt to share a rational concern … when even given the opportunity, which was/is a rarity.

These clergy know full well that we Orthodox don’t have a doctrine or dogma of bishop infallibility as do the Romans with the Pope. They also know that hierarchs can be wrong, just as we all can, and that the mature Orthodox response is to own up to your transgressions and seek forgiveness, not to double and triple down on error. Discernment is the queen of virtues, after all.

“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them.”
— Ephesians 5:11

In fact, because my (now) parish took off during the COVID-era restrictions, some priests have even taken to calling us “toxic” and “sheep-stealers.” Might this be because I’ve been dishonestly smeared by leftydox as a “racist” and a “neo-Confederate”?

Nope! It’s because of Mother of Five! See, my friend expressed (in what morphed from a comment into a viral essay of its own) the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs of so many distressed Christian parents in the spring of 2020. She, like I and many others, eventually fled a masked-up, closed-down parish for a wide-open ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) parish. Heck, some of us even took to building missions of our own.

Fr. David and his ilk and a few bishops see this as audacity and “unreasonable faith.” Yet, they seem to be missing the elephant in the room: that it’s because of their over-the-top response and rhetoric to the coof and the jab that parishes like mine even exist. It ain’t rocket science, y’all.

You’d think if they truly considered people like us so deplorable, they’d be happy we were gone. However, our very existence and subsequent growth just grinds their gears. Like the tactics used in digital struggle sessions, they’d much rather squash noncompliance (and the competition) than ever admit they made a mistake or, at the very least, that there might be opinions other than theirs. Thus, instead of removing the plank from their own eye, they prefer to belligerently swing another plank, bludgeoning anyone who holds up a mirror.

[Might we “science deniers” and “grandma killers” have a plank, too? Maybe, maybe not. But I do know that many of us would be more than willing to dialog if the piety-signaling priests reached out, as opposed to just cutting us off and insulting us behind our backs.]

Moreover, in some cases, I think their pernicious rhetoric is so casually bandied about because it works in concert with America’s peak Russophobia. “Eastern Orthodoxy is a KGB conduit” and beware of the “fascism-to-Orthodoxy pipeline,” insist the leftydox. And because perception is too often reality, it becomes a win-win for priests who already wanted to tar and feather traditionalists.

ROCOR, a jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate (MP), has been so handily painted as the enemy that my parish and a few others in the Carolinas received death threats like the one above left. The message? Commemorate Patriarch Kirill, the MP’s first hierarch (depicted above right as the “evil Putin” puppet and genocidal monster in grotesque but all-too-common propaganda found on social media), and you will die.

As touched on by Abbot Tryphon, Archbishop Elpidophoros and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew have been fully weaponized by the anti-Russian deep state to tear the heart out of Orthodoxy, especially in those places where it is seeing exponential growth, such as in Russia and in the South, and even more notably within a jurisdiction that is a refuge for priests relinquishing ecumenism in “what will likely come to be the church of the Antichrist.”

Fighting “bad old Russia” is the party line used in buttressing globohomo, meaning both global homogenization (the smashing of sovereignty and distinct traditional cultures) and global homosexuality (its spread, normalization, and institutional proliferation and protection to the detriment of traditional marriage and the nuclear family). It’s almost as if it’s by design.

Is it any wonder that these hierarchs have even been encouraging Orthodox to snitch on their fellow Christians new-Stasi style? Seems eerily similar to the social-media censorship that DC politicians, self-appointed “experts,” and Fr. David are all cheering on.

Only after Christians succumb to neocon/NATO misinformation and the wiles of Fordhamite newspeak is such wild-eyed duplicity even considered reasonable. And their hackneyed tropes against traditionalists are why ROCOR parishes receive hate mail, icons get defaced and cemeteries vandalized. Eventually, the bully tactics are going to get someone killed.

It’s not just a foreign war that’s used as an excuse to try to purge American Orthodoxy of traditionalists, but it’s also the domestic culture war. And because cultural collapse is nearly inescapable, even for those who want to stick their heads in the sand, the progressive pivot now is to claim (with a straight face) that the culture is “a distraction” or even “a conspiracy.”

Fr. David asserts that to “engage in the culture war … hurts us and our unique witness to America” – a truly telling statement considering he’s giving aid and comfort to the cultural crusaders who foment the degeneracy, hate, and violence within society, and make a pretty penny off of their lies to boot.

“Culture: the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.”
— Cambridge Dictionary

Instead of embracing creeping modernism, gnosticism, and encouraging others to do the same, why not embrace that the Church is the cultural authority? That is historical and ecclesiastical fact and something that Christians have known throughout the ages. God is the final arbiter on all matters, not the whims of passive or utopian priests.

Antichrist means “instead of Christ,” explains Dr. Clark Carlton, and this is exactly what Orthodox who either don’t understand or don’t want you to understand are propagating in our culture: that there can be “transformation through man” and “away from God and his order.” And if you happen to notice the lie? Off with your head!

Carlton, who’s also a co-founder of the Ludwell Orthodox Fellowship, talks with me in a more recent recording about the importance of maintaining traditional culture and permanence within the “anti-cultural” and how Orthodoxy absolutely answers the culture. This is nothing to shy away from; it’s a true, beautiful, and good thing.

“Politics is essentially spiritual warfare carried out on the human level.”
— James Perloff

Moreover, Orthodoxy is a blend of enculturation (language and locality and the customs therein, like dress, food practices, music, liturgical distinctions, social manners, and other folkways) within the Church-wide apostolic traditions. This is why the Orthodox Church has many churches within her who have a national character, such the Russian, Georgian, Serbian, Greek, Romanian, and Bulgarian Orthodox Churches. That’s what ya call authentic diversity!

“There is no spiritual/cultural divide,” states Dr. Steve Turley, who is an Orthodox Christian. “Culture, after all, is centered on ‘cult,’ and the cult of a culture is its sacred. It literally means ‘that which is worshiped, that which honored and revered.'”

In America, there are “competing sacred systems” that are most broadly encompassed under the left/progressive vs right/traditional paradigm. (That isn’t a “political” statement; it’s simply a description by means of realistic categorization of our social reality.) So, the choice is either protect the latter, or give way to the former. To me, it’s obvious what Fr. David has chosen to do: comply with the individuals, organizations, and ideas that are “wounding human nature by falsehood.”

“Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing.”
— C.S. Lewis

The Orthodox I know personally don’t put “Orthodoxy on a shelf” after Liturgy wraps up on Sunday. We take a holistic approach. Not only is our faith supposed to instruct us in all we do, but if you haven’t noticed, the satanic world is pretty darn unavoidable, especially when it comes to trying to raise godly children who love the Church.

“What motivates people to actually go to Church is their hunger for something that the world can’t provide them, and that is the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” notes Fr. John Whiteford. “The world can only point to the wrong way, promotes lies, and lead to death.”

“Emulating the great, original lie as told in the Garden, every last facet of the Enlightenment has proven a malicious deception.”
— Perrin Lovett

When you have ostensibly Orthodox Christians promoting “democracy” as the cure for what ails us within the Church, in US society at large, and in “our” foreign policy, that’s horrible history, sure. But it also unleashes human horror: a single-minded agenda “of unrelieved destruction of traditional cultures and morality, religious faith and belief, and the imposition of a foul global hegemony, intolerantly pagan and Godless, all in the name of ‘liberal democracy,'” explains Dr. Boyd Cathey.

One of the central cornerstones in inflicting despotism on citizens at home and aggression on innocents abroad (especially Christian peoples) is LGBTWTF. If you still somehow believe the delusion that the culture isn’t a spiritual matter, just wait until “pride” month kicks off tomorrow. Or ask people who are dealing with transmania in their families if they think the personal isn’t political.

Or ask the people who lost loved ones in the Nashville shooting. Or maybe ask yourself why this Christian massacre at the hands of an anti-Christian lunatic is not a hate crime and, as of this writing, the FBI still hasn’t released the shooter’s manifesto. Or do you think these questions regarding the murder of Christians is merely a culture-war obsession?

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
— Leon Trotsky

When the political institutions allow for the gaying of everything and undergird socially engineered gender-dysphoric violence, and you can see with your own eyeballs the ruination of the majority of mainline Christianity and the increasing “LGBT war against Orthodoxy,” are we not permitted to ask, “Just what will the Church in America allow itself to become?”

When the OCA Synod rightly rejected “any attempt to create a theological framework which would normalize same-sex erotic relationships or distort humanity’s God-given sexual identity,” the “impostors in the Church” went full Orwellian! All of a sudden a First Amendment purist, Sarah wrote that the “authoritarian anti-LGBTQ statement” released by the bishops posed a “serious threat to academic freedom.”

You see that? Hyphen Grrrl asserts that only “scholars” have a right to voice their beliefs. “Queer spirituality” good. Traditionalism reactive and bad. Got it, transphobes?

It really shouldn’t be surprising since the job of the secular theocrats is to enhance the globohomo illusion, underpin the fundamental objectives of the elite, and silence dissent through what Orthodox bioethicist Tristram Engelhardt called “liberal cosmopolitanism.” In others words, the opposite of Church authority and the noetic experience. Priests should recognize and not participate in the bamboozle.

“The Enlightenment ideal that a minimal code of values can apply universally has been completely repudiated.”
— T.L. Hulsey

The culture war is here, Fr. David. So, instead of spending your precious time attacking those defending the Church’s teachings and trying their best to live out an Orthodox life personally and in our homes, parishes, and communities (dare I say, “the culture”), why not offer us some support? Or at the very least, you could not abet the subversives. A little solidarity would be nice.

St. Ephraim the Syrian’s “Prayer for the Holy Church” reads that “the hater of mankind, in his shameless impudence, attacks her in the person of her servants” and implores to the Lord, “Do not let her majestic beauty be disfigured.” So why are some clergy not fortifying her gates and strengthening her bars, but instead, letting the enemy within the gates and throwing to the lions those who are ringing the warning bell?

Per the image above, I’m not saying that godless totalitarianism in America is on par with that of Soviet-era Russia or in current Ukraine. But the writing on the wall certainly implies that it could be and soon. So, we must be extra vigilant and courageous in holding the line, just like the Orthodox woman seen below. (That’s why I’ve used artistic renderings of her as the feature images for both parts of this series.)

“We must understand well that communism is certainly not the last word of the ‘father of lies’ as many try to imagine today,” Archpriest Alexander Shargunov remarked in 2022. “In this ‘freest’ country, where Christian churches are sold one after another to become nightclubs, where the power of the ‘new world order’ rules the country under the guise of so-called political correctness, the persecution will be of a completely different form. Because of the rapid Americanization of the entire world, because the devil hates Orthodoxy most of all, this can’t but affect us.”

Is Fr. David a Trojan horse or just a naive newbie priest? I’m not sure. But what I do know is that he is playing with demonic fire. And if he and other Orthodox keep it up, we’re all going to get burned, some before others, but all of us eventually.

So let us continue to do what the Saints teach us: to practice and preach true Christianity, to refuse to yield to strange doctrines, to inspire one another in the faith, and to not become enslaved by the opinions of men.

Let’s be more like the pious Ukrainian lady and other fearless Orthodox at the Kiev Caves Lavra and less like the piety-signaling priests here in America. That is how we become Orthodox in spite of the world.

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