Blood and Incense
On worship, blood, and the strange fire of ethnic pride
Why Orthodoxy appeals to the far right, what that reveals, and what it does not prove
If you have spent any time near American Orthodoxy in the last decade, especially among converts, you have met them, or you have at least seen them online: young men who arrive at the faith carrying a flag as much as a cross, for whom Orthodoxy is patriarchy and hierarchy and hardness and an ethnically pure past, a weapon against the modern world before it is a way to the kingdom of God. At its public edge this movement has produced figures like Matthew Heimbach, the white nationalist who helped organize the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, who marched under a banner reading “Orthodoxy or Death” and spoke openly of his dream of an “autocephalous Dixie Church.” Online it has produced a whole subculture, the so-called “Orthosphere,” with its own influencers and its own memes. It is real, it is not always fringe, and if you are thinking of converting, you deserve to know it is part of the room you are walking into.
But I have to be careful at the outset, because this subject invites a cheap argument, and the cheap argument is false. A faith is not refuted by the people it attracts. Christ Himself drew a Judas into the inner twelve, and the early Church drew thieves and zealots and frauds. “Look who converts” proves nothing about whether a thing is true. If it did, every tradition on earth would stand condemned, including my own. So let me say plainly what this essay is and is not. It is not an argument that Orthodoxy is false. That argument, if it is to be made, has to be made on other ground entirely. This is a warning about a structural vulnerability and a culture, written for two kinds of reader: the one being drawn toward Orthodoxy who should see clearly what else is being sold alongside it, and the one already inside who has felt this and wondered whether he was imagining it. You are not imagining it. But naming it honestly means refusing to claim it proves more than it does.
A faith organized by blood
Here is the structural fact that makes the rest intelligible. Orthodoxy is organized along ethnic and national lines in a way no other branch of Christianity is. Its very map is a map of peoples: the Greek church, the Russian church, the Serbian church, the Romanian church, the Antiochian church. These are not denominations in the Western sense but national bodies, each largely coextensive with a people, a language, a homeland, a history. For most of the faithful this is harmless and even beautiful, the way a grandmother’s hymns and a homeland’s saints become inseparable from the faith itself. It is heritage, not hatred.
But that same structure is a template, and an ethno-nationalist can lay his own ambitions directly over it. When a man who wants a racially homogeneous nation looks at a Church already divided into ethnic homelands each with its own bishops, he does not see a problem to overcome. He sees a model to imitate. This is exactly the move Heimbach made when he spoke of a separate church for white Southerners. He was not importing something foreign into Orthodoxy. He was reading its existing shape and recognizing his own face in it.
And here is the detail that turns this from an impression into an argument. The Orthodox Church itself condemned this temptation as a heresy in 1872. The term is phyletism, and the council that named it ruled that organizing the Church so that pastoral care follows ethnic lines, that blood determines the altar you may approach, is a sin against the catholic nature of the faith. Now ask the obvious question: why would a Church need to anathematize a temptation that never tempted it? You do not pass a solemn canon against a danger that does not recur. The very existence of the condemnation of phyletism is evidence that the fusion of blood and altar is not a freak accident at the edges of Orthodoxy but an endemic pull near its center, strong enough and persistent enough that the Church had to formally forbid it. The far-right convert is not exploiting a flaw no one noticed. He is leaning into a weakness the Church diagnosed in itself a century and a half ago and has never fully cured.
Why the “no” does not stick
A Church can have a bad tendency and still police it well. The question is whether Orthodoxy can actually expel what it has condemned, and here the problem compounds, because it runs straight into the authority structure.
When Heimbach was excommunicated for phyletism, the discipline was canonically sound, and on paper it bound everywhere: an excommunication by one canonical jurisdiction is supposed to hold in all of them. But watch what happened in practice. He simply drifted. He claimed, on his own say-so, that another jurisdiction had lifted the sentence. He attached himself to an unnamed priest in an unnamed country who, the evidence suggests, belonged to a schismatic group outside the canonical Church altogether. And among Orthodox observers a genuine quarrel broke out, not merely over the man but over the principle: some insisted the excommunication was universal and binding, while others argued that an American bishop’s ruling carried no weight against the ancient national churches of the East, that Romania or Greece would never honor it, that the whole proceeding smelled of American politics rather than Orthodox conscience. A few went further and denied that his ethnic nationalism was heretical at all, citing their own saints and their own national histories as proof that the Church had always thought as he did.
The pattern is not unique to him. Mark Hodges, an Orthodox priest who took part in the January 6th assault on the Capitol, was suspended by his diocese in the Orthodox Church in America, and later resumed ministry under the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. A man disciplined in one corner of the communion finds an open door in another.
Sit with that. The condemnation existed. It was correct. And still there was no single court that could make the “no” land and stay landed, because the moment you press for that court, authority dissolves into the same fog it always does in Orthodoxy: into reception, into the dignity of national churches, into contested saints, into “the mind of the Fathers” as each disputant reads it. The decentralized, reception-based authority that makes Orthodoxy unable to settle which of two councils was genuine is the same authority that makes it slow and uneven at expelling an ideology it has formally damned. The discipline is real on paper and porous in practice. A man can be cut off and still find a cassock to stand under.
Cultivated from outside
There is one more structural reason, and it is not about who wanders in but about who is actively recruiting. The fusion of Orthodoxy and ethno-nationalism has a powerful state sponsor. The Russian government under Putin has deliberately cultivated the Western far right, presenting Russia and Russian Orthodoxy as the last fortress of traditional Christian civilization against a decadent, liberal, secular West, and it has used church-linked organizations to carry that message into Western reactionary movements. This is not the passive attraction of bad men to a beautiful liturgy. It is an organized effort, with money and media behind it, to make Orthodoxy a vehicle for a political project. When a young Western reactionary converts and gravitates toward the Russian church specifically, he is often responding to a recruitment that was built to catch him. That is a structural feature of the current moment, not a slander against the faithful.
The pedigree they claim
The modern movement also reaches back for a usable past, and it finds one. Its heroes are not invented. Corneliu Codreanu founded the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania in 1927, a violent, antisemitic, fascist movement that fused ultranationalism with Orthodox mysticism and enjoyed real support from elements of the Romanian Church. Heimbach has named Codreanu as his single greatest inspiration. Defenders of the movement point to figures like Father Justin Parvu, a Romanian priest associated with the Legion who is venerated by some today, as proof that the Church once blessed exactly the politics they want to revive. Whether that history is being read honestly is beside the present point. What matters is that there is enough genuine material in the Orthodox past for a reactionary to construct a pedigree, and the decentralized authority of the Church gives no one the standing to definitively tear it down. The “Orthodox Nationalist” is not only a podcast title, which it is, in the work of the defrocked former priest Matthew Raphael Johnson. It is a tradition the movement believes it can claim.
The hard Christ
Step back from structure to ask why the affinity has the emotional grip it does, because the answer connects to something a convert should weigh carefully. What this movement is selling, underneath the theology, is a mood: hierarchy over equality, the patriarchal household, submission and obedience as the shape of a man’s life, an unbroken past against a corrosive present, and above all a hard masculinity set against what its proponents sneer at as the soft, feminized, “turn the other cheek” Christianity of the modern West. The Australian far-right figure Blair Cottrell put it crudely but revealingly: the Christ of the Orthodox icons, with his stern straight gaze, does not look like the gentle figure of Western devotion. He looks hard. He looks, in Cottrell’s telling, like he belongs to them.
This is the same current that has pulled in parts of the online “manosphere,” the anti-feminist male subculture, where Orthodoxy is presented as the cure for a civilization gone soft. Daryush Valizadeh, the pickup-artist blogger once known as “Roosh V,” who had built a following advocating some genuinely vile things about women, publicly renounced that past and was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, finding in Orthodoxy a new and more respectable vehicle for a familiar message about male authority. The crossover between that world and the convert pipeline is well documented.
This is worth naming because it is doing real recruiting work, and it is precisely the kind of work that has nothing to do with whether the faith is true. A man can be drawn to Orthodoxy because its aesthetic flatters a grievance, because it dignifies an anger he already had, because it gives his politics a two-thousand-year-old pedigree and a beautiful liturgy to march to. None of that is the Holy Spirit convicting a sinner. It is an aesthetic meeting an appetite. And the danger for the ordinary, sincere seeker is that he can absorb the whole package without ever noticing the seam, can come to feel that the hardness and the homogeneity and the grievance are the faith, rather than a politics that has wrapped itself in the faith’s clothes.
What must be said on the other side
If this essay stopped here it would be a lie by omission, so let me be as plain about the other side as about this one. The great majority of Orthodox Christians are not this and want no part of it. Most converts come for reasons that have nothing to do with race or reaction, and most cradle Orthodox would be bewildered and ashamed to be associated with it. The ethnic character of an ordinary Greek or Serbian parish is, in the overwhelming run of cases, simply heritage, warmth, a people keeping faith with its dead, and nothing sinister at all.
And the Church has not been silent. The condemnation of phyletism stands on the books as heresy. Heimbach was in fact excommunicated, by bishops who acted rightly and promptly. In 2018 a group of clergy issued a formal “Statement Concerning the Sin of Racism” through the body Orthodox Christian Clergy Against Racism, naming racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia as sins requiring repentance. Many Orthodox writers have attacked the online reactionary subculture as a worldly intrusion, a political spirit dressed up in vestments, exactly the kind of idol the Fathers warned against. The corrective exists, and it functions, even if unevenly. It would be a slander to suggest that Orthodoxy is the far right, or that its bishops have welcomed this. They have largely fought it. The honest charge is narrower and harder to dismiss: that the faith’s structure makes it unusually permeable to this infection, and its diffuse authority makes it unusually slow to flush it out.
The test the Lord gave
I said near the start that you cannot refute a faith by the company it keeps, and I meant it. But there is a second use of these same facts, and this one is not a fallacy, because it is the test the Lord Himself handed us. “Beware of false prophets,” He said. “You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor a diseased tree bear good fruit.” Notice carefully what kind of test this is and what it is not. It does not tell you whether a man’s creed is correct. It tells you whether to follow him, whether a tree is one to eat from or one to walk past. It is the instrument Christ gave for deciding where to entrust yourself.
Hold the distinction with both hands, because the whole argument turns on it. The bad fruit of the convert subculture does not prove the Nicene Creed false. The Creed is true, and Orthodoxy confesses it. What the fruit can tell you is something the Creed cannot: whether this tree, in this place, at this hour, is safe to graft your soul onto. And by Christ’s own measure, a branch that reliably produces ethnic pride, grievance, contempt for the outsider, and the flattering of an old anger, a branch that draws such men and then cannot bring itself to cut them off, is a branch bearing thorns. You do not have to call the whole orchard false to be warned about the branch you are standing under.
And this is not a measure I keep only for Orthodoxy, because a test you apply to one tree and spare another is not discernment but a grudge. I would say exactly the same, in the same words, about my own corner of the Christian world. The King James Only fundamentalism that makes an idol of a translation and bears the fruit of pride, division, and conspiracy. The prosperity preachers whose fruit is plain greed wearing the mask of faith. Wherever a branch puts out thorns, faction, contempt, the cultivation of a flattered anger, the same warning falls, and I would give it as readily against my own kind as against anyone else’s. That even-handedness is the whole point. The test belongs to Christ, not to me, and it does not ask whose tree it is examining before it looks at the fruit.
What this is a warning about
So weigh it for what it is. If you are considering Orthodoxy, this is not a reason to conclude the faith is false. It is a reason to walk into a particular parish with the Lord’s test already in your hand and ask the hard question: what is this community actually forming its people toward? Is it forming them toward the love of God and neighbor, toward repentance and humility and mercy, or is it forming them toward ethnic pride, political grievance, and a hard contempt for outsiders dressed in liturgical gold? Those two formations can wear the same vestments and sing the same hymns, and you will not be able to tell them apart by the aesthetics, which are gorgeous in both cases. The fruit is the only thing that will tell you, and you are commanded to look at it before you commit.
A man may have the most ancient liturgy in Christendom, the most beautiful icons, the most confident claim to be the one true Church, and if what his religion is producing in him is the elevation of his blood over his brother, then by Christ’s own standard something has gone wrong that no pedigree can fix. The far right has found in Orthodoxy a fortress for things the gospel does not bless, and that the fortress is old and lovely does not sanctify what is stored inside it.
So let me say plainly the thing all of this has been moving toward, because you deserve a conclusion and not only a caution. The single claim that is meant to compel a person into Orthodoxy is that it is the one true Church, the only ark, the place outside of which you cannot be sure of Christ. I have argued in a companion piece that this claim does not survive examination. Here I have only added that the very structure which makes the claim hollow is the same structure that makes the house unsafe in this American hour. Now put the two together. If the one reason to go in is not true, and the fruit you are most likely to be formed by is poison, then for the seeker standing at the door the honest counsel is the plain one: do not go in. And for the convert already inside, who has seen what is growing there and felt his stomach turn, hear it just as plainly: you are free to leave.
And hear this too, because it is the fear that keeps people from the door. To walk out of Orthodoxy is not to walk away from Christ. The Christ of the Creed, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, the cross and the empty tomb, was never the private property of that communion. Everything true that you found there you may carry out the door with you, because none of it was ever theirs to withhold. It is the common inheritance of the whole Church of God. What you leave behind is only what was false, the claim to be the only door, and what was dangerous, the slow schooling of your heart to prize your own blood. You forfeit nothing true, and you walk free of something that was never going to make you holy.
Only do not mistake the way out for the destination. Leaving a corrupted house is not the same as lying down in an open field, and the answer to a poisoned community is never no community at all. Go and find a people where the Word that can be held and tested is preached without apology, and where the fruit is the love of God and of the neighbor who does not share your blood. There, and not in the most golden sanctuary on earth, you will finally be able to tell the difference between incense rising to God and incense burned to an idol that happens to wear your own face. Go there. Do not stay where the thorns are.
A note on sources. The figures named here are public and documented. Readers who want to verify the examples and go deeper can consult Lydia Khalil’s study “Orthodoxy or Death: The Embrace of Orthodox Christianity by the Modern Far Right” (Lowy Institute); the profiles maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center; and, for a careful book-length ethnography of a Russian Orthodox convert community in rural Appalachia, Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, “Between Heaven and Russia.” The 1872 condemnation of phyletism comes from the Council of Constantinople of that year; the 2018 statement was issued by Orthodox Christian Clergy Against Racism and can be found online.