Dear fellow clergy:
I am writing this letter on the eve of the Orthodox celebration of Holy Pentecost. We celebrate and remember and experience the Personal Descent of the Holy Spirit, Who has come to make our hearts "streams of living water," to make us shine with the "light of life," as Jesus has come into the world of darkness as the Light.
We are accustomed to diagnosing the darkness. We are well-practiced in proclaiming the usual denunciations of transgressions like abortion, sexual sin, violence (at least, the violence of "others" who don't look or sound like us), and challenges to our own influence and power.
But the real darkness has always extended far beyond this diagnosis. And now, in these last few years, the superficiality of our "hot-button" denunciations has become painfully obvious.
While we march confidently in the National Right to Life March against abortion of unborn children, we are silent about the abortion of fourth-graders in Uvalde and grocery shoppers in Buffalo.
While we record podcasts on Ancient Faith against Critical Race Theory and against classroom discussions about non-traditional families, we record nothing about voter suppression and white nationalism.
Brothers, if we're going to be prophetic, then let us be faithful to the complete prophetic ethic of Scripture and Tradition. If we're going to busy ourselves with cultural denunciations, then let us be brave enough to denounce also the sins of social injustice, wealth protection and capital accumulation, environmental degradation, and masculine domination.
Shame on us for ever calling these concerns "liberal."
But there is a burgeoning darkness today. You and I stand on the cusp of a bleak generation.
We've been blessed in America to live in a democratic republic, a liberal democracy that insures the liberty of religion and individual rights.
But now, America is gripped in the clenched fist of rising extremism and authoritarianism.
It is not the ridiculous notion of "soft totalitarianism," a notion that is oxymoronic at best and is more likely to be slavishly devoted to the likes of Orbán and Putin.
Today, we face a monstrous wave of fascism outright -- a seething mass of intolerance, extremism, cultic and conspiratorial myth-driven mob identification. It cloaks itself in superficial religiosity that has nothing to do with the Gospel and everything to do with the worst moments of our long history in the world.
I ask you, brothers, to consider something. Not to join the partisan opposition. But simply this:
Let us preach the Beatitudes. Let us be characterized by the care and character of the Mother of God, who said "Behold the handmaiden of the Lord, be it unto me according to your word."
Let us rebut and refute the ideologies that beset our communities -- the irrational conspiracies of stolen elections and pedophile cults; the libertarianism of radical weaponization; white nationalism and fundamentalism; authoritarianism and racism; chiliasm and "non-monastic monasticisms"
Let us at least turn off the oxygen to the fires of masculine domination. And let us, even, step boldly into the moral necessity of putting down QAnon cult theories by demanding that such accusations must be confirmed by "two or three witnesses" (i.e., the witness of rationality, in a spirit of careful and peaceful discernment).
Let us preach the Apostolic Gospel of the feetwashing Jesus, the kenotic power of the Ascended Lord.
Let us not be goats but sheep who recognize the Theanthropos in every face.
Let us work for the night is coming -- and come it most certainly will if we don't do our job.
Fr Jonathan Tobias
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