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Sts. Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Richmond, Virginia is absolutely beautiful, and, on Malvern Avenue just off Cary Street, it’s not too far from me. I wish I could have had the opportunity to visit the sanctuary of the building, which is from the outside aptly-described by the old trope “gleaming ediface.” Stark and with a design smacking of art deco, it’s a modern building housing that ancient faith, a sort of anchor for Orthodoxy in the staunchy Baptist stretch of central Virginia, a state once known for its firm Episcopalianism. I, in fact, live within four blocks of a Baptist church, an Episcopal church, a Reform synagogue, and the Cathedral seat of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond; if I up the ante to ten blocks, I can add no few than six houses of worship to that number. Long a city of churches, their number, order, and type have only increased.
What was I doing at Sts. Constantine and Helen? Engaging in some down-home, grassroots, full-on practical ecumenism. I’ve long felt that the various Christian bodies need to engage with each other on the practical level of you-and-me, people on the streeting meeting and knowing each other, not only in high-level bodies hammering out agreements on justification. But too often, that vision of low-level meeting simply becomes inter-church picnics, wherein the messy issues are avoided, so we can all meet and be friends. This is absolutely necessary and good and proper; we need to do it more, so that we can actually come to see each other as members of the one body of Christ. But the issues that separate us need to be understood and engaged as best we can.
So, my friend Patrick Hedley invited me to attend the Sts. Cyril and Methodius group, a discussion group that meets once a month consisting of both Catholic and Orthodox participants, in which we can both meet and know each other, and actually discuss to whatever extent we’re capable the problems that keep us apart and how they might be resolved, not so that we might formally end the schism — nobody is expecting a phone call from the pope or the ecumenical patriarch saying “Hey, you guys did it!” — but so that at least the healing process might start to occur in this long and painful wound.
The group is unfortunately getting pretty long in the teeth, and they want to infuse it with new blood so that it might continue; as passionate as I am about the issue, I’m unfortunately not going to be in Richmond long enough to really become a part of it. I hope there are groups in New York I might take my place in, or that I might be able to help establish one. Our Heroine, I’m looking in your direction!
But it was productive, at least insofar as it got us introduced to the existing group, got us talking and engaging with each other on, oddly enough, my pet issue: intercommunion. What, I have long wondered, can we expect to achieve if we can’t even share communion? If we can’t all take a place together at the one table? The Orthodox theologian-in-residence explained the reasoning, that I had it completely backwards and unity in faith must precede intercommunion. But I can go and receive communion at some blindly heterodox Catholic parish where some bizarre teaching is proclaimed, and its not even an issue. Why should it be between an orthodox Catholic and an orthodox Orthodox?
I’ve been engaging in something of a debate with my dad regarding a topic frequently discussed here: political tyranny versus human freedom and irrelevance of one to the other. My dad’s a pretty classical conservative, and it’s an area where we clash, and we have for the past few days been trading points on his myspace. The whole process derived from a post of his claiming Obama’s health care plan as the End of the Republic. Now, I’m not too versed on the health care thing. Insurance plans don’t really worry me, and I’m not gonna sit up at night fretting about it, so I posted some snark about trusting not in princes, which led him into some curious territory.
George Washington’s army saw His miraculous deliverance the same way Israel’s armies saw it in the Old Testament when it was kill or be killed, and the bloodline leading to the birth of Christ was at stake.
The human heart has two natural cries: (1) to stand righteous in the sight of God, even in those who deny His existence; and (2) to be free to realize the potential the Creator gave every person. The Founders, for all their faults, knew these things. Neither of these is on the agenda of the new rulers of America.
A day is coming, son, when the final confrontation occurs, when lovers of freedom and the God of the Bible have finally had all they can take. I have been praying for this to happen at the ballot box. This now seems unlikely. He will be there for them then. The enemy of their souls will be very powerfully active but he can’t stand against them because he is already defeated. (That’s the “future past tense” indicating something is absolutely certain that has not yet happened.) Trust in princes? Not on your life. Trust in Him who set the stars in their courses and is the Author of Liberty? Always.
So, to me, it seems that much of our disagreement is over whether or not the United States is divinely ordained, which he seem to believe and with which I fiercely disagree. We also seem to disagree over what actual freedom is. But as to whether or not the future is hostile to Christians, as described above? In the words of George W. Bush, “Bring ‘em on.” I have no fear of those who cannot harm my soul, and I have the boldness of the spirit; nothing can stop a man from being free, and nothing can stop a man from loving God. Nothing. If they prohibit me from going to mass, I will go to mass anyway. If they prohibit me from sharing the Gospel, I will share the Gospel anyway. If they prohibit me from following the dictates of my conscience in any way, I will not obey.
My dad then proceeded to make an interesting argument: namely, that whatever my admittedly-untested ability to stand in the face of dictators, what about everyone else in the country? What about the people who lack spiritual freedom?
This may sound callous at first, but bear with me: I don’t care if others are unable to withstand it. That’s strictly speaking untrue, but I wanted to say something immediately gripping.
He wrote, “You see, the locomotive of … freedom that we have enjoyed was meant to run on the rails of the Judaeo-Christian moral code.” If this is true, then we need to consider the full implications of it, because they are sweeping.
Human freedom is not, nor can it be, and neither should it be, found in civil rights. Civil rights play a part, true; namely, they allow the free to exercise their freedom, true freedom which is tethered to an honest conscience and to moral engagement of the world, the freedom to be good. Civil rights provide a space wherein freedom may be lived. But they do not provide that freedom; the space they give can just as easily be abused, corrupted, and become a tyrant all its own.
Now, this space is not, itself, sacred, and should not be of itself preserved. It’s not about me, and it’s not about my ability — what it is about is that civil rights absent spiritual freedom can be another kind of chain. The chain is strong. The chain is gripping. And the worst part of it is that its prisoners don’t even know they’re being held captive.
The reason I don’t worry so much about civil right is this: the people who cannot stand up to oppression are the people who cannot stand up to civic freedom, either. The people who cannot handle the chains of tyranny cannot handle the yoke of liberty. Civil rights follow spiritual freedom rather than precede it. In more secular terms, I’ll paraphrase John Adams, who said that the American Revolution was the change in the hearts of the people. It was a fait accompli before a single shot was fired. In the same way, the effort to spread democracy across the world is flawed because it assumes that, for lack of a better term, “republican virtue” will necessarily follow its imposition instead of being a necessary precondition. Democracy cannot happen when a people do now know how to be democrats. And liberty is impossible among a people who know not how to be free.
If Obama, as some fear (I disagree, but that’s beside the point), is going to bring about in one form or another the end of honest civil liberty, it’s irrelevant; either the American people are already free in spirit, and can handle it, or they aren’t, in which case the present republic is a sham to begin with, built on flawed notions of freedom and human identity and thus bound from the getgo for the dustbin of history, to which it will be joyfully consigned as yet another enemy of dignity. Either way, the loss of the area of civil liberties changes very little, ultimately speaking; a people who should not speak their minds are suddenly no longer allowed to, while the people who should will do so anyway. The conscience of man remains unaltered. Only his circumstances are altered.
In the event of tyranny, the mission of the Christian remains exactly the same: to provide the knowledge of the greater freedom than any government has ever bestowed, which, once widespread, cannot help but bring down monstrous government. This has been a consistent example: tyrannies cannot oppress people unwilling to be oppressed, and men and women of freed Christian conscience are exactly those sorts of people.
And let’s look at another reality, that the Judaeo-Christian moral code apart from the lived knowledge and experience of God is a farce, seeing as it demands a supernatural level of virtue or at least a commitment to try and attain that virtue. The program for life Christ laid out is entirely dependent on the love and knowledge of God, and “love your neighbor as yourself” is subordinate to “Love the Lord your God with your whole heart.” This has undergirded everything I wrote above: that freedom lived apart from Christ is not freedom at all, and no civil liberties can deliver it. This goes beyond a secular adherance to a moral code, but speaks to the need of the conversion of the heart, the need to love, know, and serve the Lord, to be transformed, remade. Freedom apart from that is simply being a liberty to be a slave to sin without the convenience of being able to blame it on government coercion.
Simply put, a people without that freedom of the heart, without that freedom for which Christ has liberated us, are not up to the responsibility of democracy. If, as some argue, the Constitution ultimately assumes a populace not simply Christian but converted in heart, the preservation of that Constitution should take a backseat to evangelization, be it under civil liberty or totalitarian dictatorship or any gradient between those poles.
This is why I no longer worry about government at all: in the end, it doesn’t matter. Either we are Christian and cannot be bound, or we are not, and are bound already.
