Christian Churches have a problem. Right-wing ideology with claims to Christian orthodoxy is converting young people, mostly men, all over the world. This problem has become more noticeable since the Covid lockdown. Apparently, young people who were not able to talk to each other in person socialized online. Right-wing ideology associated with Christianity was the introduction for many of them. Afterward, many of them joined churches in an effort to further the right-wing agenda. Steve Hayes’s video on YouTube traces the progression of this increase in right-wing members. This article is a summary of his speech. I am calling it the radical Right’s Siren Song.
Hayes is an Orthodox deacon and a freelance editor, writer, teacher and missiologist. (Missiology is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry into Christian mission or missions that utilizes theological, historical, and various social scientific methods.) He lives in Pretoria, South Africa.
An Ideological Split has Developed Between Christian Males and Females. Men are More Right-Wing.
If his speech seems mixed up, Hayes explains that he’s throwing a stone into the bush to see what comes out. He is concerned about a recent phenomenon. This information is important and I didn’t want to leave anything out, so I’ve tried to write it in the same order. I hope the reader doesn’t lose interest. The information gets more disturbing toward the end.
In the years 1996 to 2015, male and female Christians experienced an ideological split. Many young people who had just come into the church suddenly started spouting right-wing ideology. This has not only affected Gen Z in North America. It includes Generation Zed outside of North America as well. The Orthodox Church is also affected. All Christian churches are experiencing this. The situation was intensified by the covid lockdown.
In a recent survey of conversion respondents aged 21 to 30, seventy-five percent of respondents were male. The sexual gap narrows somewhat among older people, but respondents are still majority male. Previously, the sex gap was a characteristic of mainline Protestant churches, but it has increased in the Orthodox Church since 2019. It now affects all Christian churches, except for Evangelical. The sexes are represented equally among Evangelicals.
The Orthodox Church is Attractive to Some People Because it is Pre-Modern
Hayes speculates that so many right-wingers join the Orthodox Church because Orthodoxy places a high value on tradition. The perception that the Orthodox Church is pre-modern in its theology and ethos might explain the difference.
But today, many consider modernity to be superior because it is newer. For example, modern people say no one can possibly believe that in 2024, whatever that might be. Some people do not feel at home in this kind of atmosphere and they look for more tradition.
The Orthodox Church did not Experience the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment
The Orthodox Church is pre-modern because it did not experience the three main characteristics of Western modernity: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. These three events shaped Western modernity and spread throughout the world as a kind of culture and worldview. One of the features of modernity is that it does not like tradition.
Modernity, Pre-Modernity, and Post-Modernity
History as an academic discipline came about really in the 19th century among Western Historians. This resulted in the division of history into three time periods and worldviews: modernity, pre-modernity, and post-modernity. (Therefore, these divisions and the corresponding worldview is a Western phenomenon.)
Modern history covers the period from 1500 on. Antiquity is everything before the year 500. Historians did not know what to do with the years in between. They called them the Middle Ages because they came between those other ages, which were more historically important. These developments shaped the idea of modernity as a worldview and a thing. And there was another influence that shaped modernity: printing.
The Invention of Printing
Today when you think of the holy scriptures, you think of the Bible. But the Bible didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. It only came about after the invention of printing. Before printing, people heard the holy scriptures read in a community setting.
Printing meant that people could take the Bible away and read it individually. Therefore, modernity meant that individuals could follow ideas that they got from books. One result was that the way people experienced the Christian faith changed.
Covid
Because of Covid, churches did not meet. Individuals went online and heard one voice telling them what to think. The people who were were unhappy with modernity and threatened by change heard about tradition and thought it might give them a sense of security.
Tradition
Where does the word tradition come from? Our English word comes from traditio. It means to hand over tradition. In the sense used by the Orthodox Church, this means handing over the good news, the message of Jesus Christ. You hand it over to other people, or pass it on.
But now, tradition is also a difficult concept. We sometimes wonder if something is a bad tradition. Tradition can be good or bad. The word tradition also leads to the English word traitor. For example, someone who hands their country over to the enemy. Or someone else who handed Jesus over to be crucified. So, tradition can be good or bad.
Traditionalism
You also find that people become Traditionalists, which is different from tradition. Traditionalists think tradition in itself is good and should be valued for its own sake. Rene Guenon and his followers, who taught early in the twentieth century, were the precursors of the people who are joining the Churches now. Today, new converts are bringing these Traditionalist ideas with them.
Rene Guenon was very unhappy with the modern world. And it’s true that modernity has its problems. One problem is that modernism is its own kind of ideology. Modernism teaches that modernity is good and everything else before it is inferior. It also teaches that things are getting better all the time. (In my opinion, we saw an example of this in Steven Pinker’s defense of liberalism.)
Modernism can put some people off. However, Steve Hayes argues that modernity is neither something to be worshipped and regarded as the best way, nor completely rejected. As Christians, we can look at modernity and evaluate different aspects from the point of view of Christian faith. We can see what’s good and bad, what we can cultivate and what we can try to reject. But to Traditionalists like Guenon, the modern world is altogether bad. For him, the earliest forms of religion were better.
Eugene Rose
Guenon thought primitive forms of religion were better. He influenced Eugene Rose, a young American. Rose converted at the age of 14 to the Methodist Church. The following information about Eugene Rose is from Wikipedia.
Rose studied Chinese philosophy at Pomona college. He also studied under Alan Watts at the American Academy of Asian Studies before entering the master’s degree program in Oriental languages at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated in 1961 with a thesis entitled “‘Emptiness’ and ‘Fullness’ in the Lao Tzu”.
While studying at Watts’ Asian institute, Rose read the writings of French metaphysicist René Guénon. He also met a Chinese Taoist scholar, Gi-ming Shien. Shien emphasized the ancient Chinese approach to learning, valuing traditional viewpoints and texts over more modern interpretations. Inspired by Shien, Rose took up the study of ancient Chinese so that he could read early Taoist texts in their original tongue. Through his experiences with Shien and the writings of Guénon, Rose sought out an authentic and grounded spiritual tradition of his own. He became interested in the Russian Orthodox Church sometime after 1956.
Rose eventually became an Orthodox monk with the monastic name of Seraphim Rose. He and Gleb Podmoshensky, a Russian Orthodox seminarian, began a community of Orthodox booksellers and publishers, the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. In March 1964, Rose opened an Orthodox bookstore next to the Holy Virgin Cathedral on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco. In 1965, the brotherhood founded the St. Herman Press publishing house, which still exists. Rose and Podmoshensky became monks in 1968 and transformed the Saint Herman of Alaska Brotherhood into a full-fledged monastic community.
Traditionalsim Found its Way Into the Writings of Seraphim Rose
Now we return to Steve Hayes’ narrative. The books published by Seraphim Rose’s St. Herman Press were in demand, as there were not many books and magazines about the Orthodox Church for the English-speaking world. So, Seraphim Rose’s publishing house made the Orthodox Church more widely known. But Guenon’s traditionalism shaped the presentation of the Herman Press. Seraphim Rose did not teach wrong doctrines. (According to the Wikipedia article, some of his teachings were controversial in his lifetime.) In fact, he warned against Traditionalism. But he made more of tradition than is generally done in the Orthodox Church. He taught Orthodox doctrines in a Traditionalist way. (My own Interpretation of Hayes’s narrative is that Traditionalist ideas are what had attracted Rose to the Orthodox Church in the first place and that’s how he understood it.)
Frank Schaeffer
Another teacher influenced by Guenon was Frank Schaeffer. Francis and Edith Schaeffer, Frank’s father and mother, were co-founders of L’Abri community in Switzerland. They were trying to enable Christians to witness to the Christian faith in the modern world. Francis wanted Christians to see how the Christian gospel could be presented to people who had a modernist understanding of the world. Francis was an American evangelical theologian, philosopher, and Presbyterian pastor.
Frank eventually went to America to study, and found that the modern world went against his values. As a result, he moved to a kind of right-wing understanding and tried to persuade his father to do the same. His father chose not to move in that direction, but Frank went on to write a series of books criticizing American culture as he saw it. The titles were catchy, in the words of Hayes. The title of one book was Sham Pearls for Real Swine. Frank believed that American culture was real swine. He attacked American culture until he discovered the Orthodox Church, which was more traditional. But because he had become a Traditionalist before joining the Orthodox Church, he continued to preach the same anti-modernist message he had preached when he was a Protestant.
An Orthodoxy With Teeth: Orthodox Bolsheviks
Steve Hayes heard him speak in 1995 at the Orthodox Mission Conference in Brooklyn. At that conference, Frank called for an Orthodoxy with teeth. He wanted the Orthodox Church to have teeth and attack American modern culture.
However, there was a Russian Orthodox Bishop in attendance who didn’t speak much English. Someone was whispering a translation in his ear. At the end of Frank’s speech the bishop said, You call for an Orthodoxy with teeth, but what will you do if those you want to bite grow bigger teeth and bite you back?…No! We have people like you in Russia who want to grow teeth like that and we call them Orthodox Bolsheviks.
Hayes explains that the Bolshevik period in Russia had ended just four years earlier. After Bolshevism ended, a survey showed that of all the Russian institutions in the early 1990s, the people trusted the Church the most. They did not trust politicians or academics, only the Church. Thousands of people were baptized in Russia after the fall of Communism, including a lot of people who had been in the KGB. Unfortunately, some of the new KGB converts’ practiced a method of persuasion that went, you do what we say and you believe what we say, or else. That was what the Russian bishop saw in Frank Schaeffer.
Frank eventually changed sides in the American culture wars. Now he calls himself a Christian atheist or an atheist Christian. He had joined the Orthodox Church not for what it was, but because he thought it would prop up what he already believed about the ordering of society. And when he stopped believing that, the secondary thing was less important and he drifted away from the Church. That’s the problem with anyone who comes to the Christian faith with an ulterior motive. They think Orthodoxy will provide a spiritual home for their already held beliefs, which already may be nationalist, racist, and exclusive. They think, we are in a group that is better than anyone else.
This has spilled over into quite a few Orthodox podcast groups.
Ortho Bros
Among the podcasters are people who come across as very arrogant, abrasive, and thinking, we are better than anyone else and you’d better follow us or else. It’s an Orthodoxy with teeth. People who follow them call themselves Ortho Bros and they come across as very abrasive and attack people.
But the Orthodox are not the only ones. There were other Traditionalist groups present in the 2020 riots. For example, Nick Fuentes preaches this right-wing message, often attacking conservative Americans and saying they should be radical.
Some Christian Traditionalists tend to be radical Right, racist, nationalist, and in some cases, neo-Nazi. Hayes calls out Jay Dyer in particular as being especially abrasive and attacking other people. Apparently, Jay promotes an orthodoxy with teeth, and if anyone disagrees with him he will dox them. This means getting documentation of everything a person has done and putting it online. People they approve of, they call ‘based‘. People they don’t approve of, they call ‘degenerate‘ or ‘gay‘.
When Right-Wingers Join the Orthodox Church
Some people who talk in this way joined the Orthodox Church when covid ended. The priests taught them, but they don’t really know where the new converts are coming from. They don’t realize the converts have a different lens.
The teachings of Father Seraphim Rose, who got the teachings from Guenon, were a milder version. but Traditionalism is no longer mild.
The philosophy of Traditionalism also came into the Orthodox Church through Alexander Dugin. Dugin is Russian, and during the Soviet period, he belonged to a circle of people who studied esoteric or occult religion. At that time, they studied East Asian religions in the light of Western occult understanding. But Dugin soon realized that Western occultism is modern–because it had appeared in the Renaissance. So, he followed Guenon in looking for the earliest versions of different religions. Another name for this focus is the Perennial philosophy. The Perennial philosophy teaches that there are basic ideas that underly all religions. Religion must keep these basic ideas.
When the Bolshevik regime fell in the 1990s, Dugin decided that the Traditionalist form of religion was identical with the Orthodox Church. He joined the Church, and he brought his Traditionalist ideas with him. In Russia, Traditionalism has spread to some of the clergy and also some of the people in government.
Dugin and Heidegger
According to Hayes, Dugin expresses his notion of the Russian world as, Russkiy Mir. (In the following article by Serghei Sadohin, Russkiy Mir is a doctrine. Sadohin compares it to the ideology of Martin Heidegger, which I have already warned against here.)
The German existentialist thinker Martin Heidegger, who profoundly influenced the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin – an ardent proponent of the Russkiy mir doctrine – argued that there is only one ultimate truth: the truth of being. “The human is the place of the truth of being,” Heidegger says in his characteristically poetic, and sometimes obscure, way. Dugin found in Heidegger the philosopher who speaks to him about istina, but in a German way. “We have our special Russian truth,” he once told a baffled BBC journalist. Truth for Dugin is relative. As it was for Heidegger, who relativised truth to being, before anything else. Even Nietzsche before him said that “there are no facts, only interpretations.”
Serghei Sadohin
Hayes tells us that Dugin in particular spreads this doctrine. He has influenced people in Russia with the doctrine of Traditionalism. To be a Traditionalist, means you think tradition, regardless of its origin, is a good thing in itself.
Traditionalism is not the Same as Christian Tradition
Christian tradition hands on what it has received. It does not start again from scratch in each generation. It means following on from the generations before. Acts 2:42 reports the baptism of three thousand people. These people continued in four things: the apostles’ teaching; the apostles’ fellowship; the breaking of the bread; and the prayers. The Orthodox traditional understanding is that the Orthodox Church has continued in those four things from that day to this, without a break. There is continuity and that is what we call holy tradition. But not all tradition is holy, especially not all tradition of the Traditionalist philosophy is holy.
Christian Nationalism, Fascism, and Nazism
There is also a third well-known traditionalist, a guy called Julius Evola, who was an Italian fascist.
Now we come to South Africa with something that in our day we regard as discredited. But it is suddenly having a revival in North America. That’s Christian Nationalism. In 1942, B. J. Vorster, one of the prime ministers of South Africa, said, ‘We stand for Christian Nationalism, which is an ally of National Socialism.’
We can call anti-Democratic governments ‘dictatorships’ if you like. But in Italy it was fascism, in South Africa it was Christian Nationalism, and in Germany it was Nazism. Christian Nationalism, as a philosophy or idea gave birth to apartheid, which eventually became an ideology in its own right. The word apartheid appeared in the 1930s from a Dutch Reformed missionary. In 1948 by D. F. Malan’s National Party adopted this word. It already had the philosophy of Christian Nationalism, but not the word. Apartheid was originally a slogan of the National Party, which was looking for a way to soften segregation.
Integralism is not Gospel. It is Ideology.
Christian Nationalism is growing today in North America. Hayes has mentioned its Orthodox roots, but it has other roots as well. In the Roman Catholic Church, Integralism wants to revive Christendom. By Christendom, they mean Christianity in alliance with secular power. They want to integrate the Church into the state. The state should be the instrument of imposing Christian values on everyone. But Hayse says this is not actually gospel. It is not good news because Christian values without Christ become an ideology. It’s no longer good news, just a set of ideas that you must accept or face the consequences.
In the Protestant world, there is a guy called Rushdoony. He believed that Christians should seek to control the government and the economy and have a kind of theocratic society. They call this idea Theonomy, which means applying God’s law. (Theonomy is a hypothetical Christian form of government in which society is ruled by divine law.) Rushdoony wanted to apply the Old Testament law to the state and make the commandments the constitution.
The New Apostolic Reformation
Another movement is the New Apostolic Reformation. This started as part of the Charismatic Revival in the 1950s and 60s, where a lot of people outside of traditional Pentecostal churches rediscovered the gifts of the Holy Spirit. There was a group that developed this new ecclesiology based on St. Paul’s list of some ministries in Ephesians. (here is an article about this Revival. It was a central influence in the January 6 riots.)
Ephesians says ‘he gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers.’ But they rigidified these five ministries and claimed they had disappeared after the apostolic age. One missiologist, Ralph Wimber, called this the BOBO theory of Church history: It teaches that the light of the gospel blinked off after the apostles died and blinked on again after the Reformation.
Ralph said the origin of this teaching was the Mormons. They called themselves the Latter Day Saints because they believe there were no saints in the middle. This is the same attitude as the historians who despised the middle. Winter said the idea that there are no saints in the middle is wrong, and he helped people see that. But people who held this ideology resisted Winter. They said pastors and teachers had disappeared and then restored during the Reformation. They said the Reformers were the revived pastors and teachers.
The New Apostolic Reformation and the Seven Mountains Mandate: a Long History
In the 18th century, there were people like John Wesley and other people in North America, traveling Evangelists, who said the Great Awakening was the Revival of the evangelists. Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a Pentecostal Revival of the prophets. But now in the middle of the 20th century, they had a Revival of apostles. These people appointed themselves as apostles and started the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).
Steve Hayes reports the following from one of these apostles, Bob Mumford. Mumford was a popular preacher in the 1970s. He taught this doctrine at the Hatfield Baptist Church and appointed the pastor as the apostle of Pretoria. God had given him Pretoria, according to Mumford.
The New Apostolic Reformation dealt with the Revival of these ministries. Then, in the 1970s, three evangelical leaders found that they had a common vision. The three men were Loren Cunningham, founder of YWAM; Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ; and Francis Schaeffer. Their vision came to be called Seven Mountains. The Seven Mountains were things in society that needed Christian influence, such as government, family, education, and various social institutions or centers of power.
Francis Schaeffer spread this teaching through L’Abri. He said he was helping people look at these things in the light of the Christian faith. Then, twenty-five years later, a man called Lance Wallnau said these seven mountains needed to be conquered, not just influenced. Christians must take them over.
The Cult of Donald Trump
At some point, Bob Mumford admitted to Hayes that these teachings had been wrong and that he repented for starting this movement. But someone named Peter Wagner, another missiologist, soon became the leader of the NAR. Lance Wallnau adopted the Seven Mountains theory. A lot of the people who accepted this teaching are now in what Hayes would call the Cult of Donald Trump. They were with the others in the January 6 riots.
Summary and Conclusion
So, this right-wing movement is in both the Orthodox and Western Churches. It seems to affect Generation Z in North America and Generation Zed all over the world.
The Seven Mountains Mandate (it’s called a Mandate in Wikipedia) has echoes of the Christian nationalism that we know from South Africa. If you follow it back, you will find that a Reformed theologian in the Netherlands, Abraham Kuyper, spoke about the spheres of sovereignty, and said that every social institution should have sovereignty in its own sphere. In other words, the Church should have sovereignty in religion, government, etc. This idea became very popular among the Christian Nationalists in South Africa. And the Seven Mountains Mandate is reworking it. Their roots are all intertwined. The tree that we are seeing grow from these roots is a lot of young Christians, from 15 to 30 or 35, especially males, who are right-wing.
Hayes has a question for the converts: What is primary? Is it the Christian faith? Is Jesus Christ the center of their lives? Or is it a political ideology and a political outlook?
He sees this as a kind of missiological and evangelistic problem, and it effects the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Churches. This ideology is particularly influential because the young people are online and come from all over the world. Pastors and priests might not know what ideas they are bringing. They might find that the new converts seem to be speaking sound doctrine but then they go off into some conspiracy or anti-Semitic rant. These people largely got these ideas online and are coming into the fellowship of the church just as the church is reviving after covid, and it’s important that the Church realize where they are coming from and what kind of distortions they might be bringing to the understanding of the Christian faith.