Secular Age
STEVEN CHRISTOFOROU
“Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds came and devoured them. Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth; and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” (Matthew 6:3-9)
This seems like a good time to be an Orthodox Christian. Major news outlets are writing about Orthodoxy. Celebrities and internet influencers are talking about us, and in some cases even converting. Parish halls are groaning under the weight of dozens of new inquirers and catechumens.
And yet, I can’t help but look at these developments with skepticism. Over the years that I’ve spent in full-time Orthodox ministry, I have often found myself arguing that the “growth” so many others are talking about is more likely a bubble that will eventually pop.
Of course, I do recognize that more people are joining the faith. Before I began to work with FOCUS North America, an Orthodox organization that helps provide food and other basic resources to the poor, I spent a decade directing the youth ministry of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. In both capacities, I’ve visited many of these packed parish halls myself, and I’ve heard countless conversion stories. In some ways, I’m happy to see so many newcomers in the Church. But I also wonder if we might be seeing the rapid growth of the seeds that fell on stony earth, rather than the early development of seeds that landed in good soil.
Many newcomers these days say they feel turned off by “secular” innovations in other religious traditions, and they’re seeking a form of Christianity that seems more pure—one that has escaped the world’s influence. But I want to challenge some of the underlying premises of this idea. As people who live in a postmodern world, we are all deeply influenced by postmodern ideas. Secularity is not just an external thing that we can escape if hunker down in the correct ecclesial bunker. And even the ecclesial bunker that we’ve chosen may be less ecclesial (and more ideological) than we think. It's possible, in other words, that interest in “Orthodoxy” doesn’t actually correlate with interest in the Orthodox Church.
But to probe these questions, we’ll need to start with a deeper engagement with the notion of the secular.
Part 1: What Does it Mean to be Secular?
One of the most helpful books I’ve read on secularity is James K.A. Smith’s How (Not) to be Secular, a book introduced to me by my dear friend and colleague Christian Gonzalez. Smith’s handy volume is a close reading of Charles Taylor’s influential tome, A Secular Age. While we explore some ideas posed by Taylor, we’ll do so through the lens of Smith’s text.
As contemporary Christians, we tend to assume we’re surrounded by “secular” forces that are hostile to the Church—and we feel like the walls are closing in. This assumption shapes our approach to everything from pop culture to Christian ministry. We blame the culture for leading our young people away from the Church, and we try to inoculate them from the “secular” forces they’ll encounter when they go to college or start their first jobs. This assumption also influences the way we talk about the apparent “growth” of the Church: “secular” forces are destroying religious traditions around the world, so people are finding their way into a space that hasn’t yet caved on issues like female ordination and gay marriage.
Taylor understands the secular in a different way. He begins with a description of premodern societies, where there was no divide or hostility between the “sacred” and “secular.” The “secular” referred to the temporal or the earthly. In that sense, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers had secular vocations. But those vocations complemented the sacred vocations of clergy and monastics who burned the candles they made and blessed the loaves of bread they baked.
In that era, almost everyone lived with a sense that physical reality was permeated with the transcendent. It was an “enchanted” world, where earthly kingdoms were thought to be grounded in heavenly ones, and where anyone could turn a corner and stumble upon an angel or demon. The notion of “believing” or not believing in God wouldn’t have made much sense—conceiving of a world without God was scarcely possible.
This all changed in the Age of Enlightenment. Starting in the seventeenth century, Europeans were overcome with a sense of intellectual confidence, a belief that they could understand all things by the power of pure reason. They ceased to think of the world as a cosmos (where God created all things for a purpose) and more as a universe where rational actors could discern the scientific laws that govern the material world. As Smith puts it, during the Enlightenment, “we get the ‘mechanistic’ universe that we still inhabit today, in which efficient causality (a cause that ‘pushes’) is the only causality and can only be discerned by empirical observation” (42).
This shift came with a “subtraction,” as the sacred—with all of it bias and irrationality—was removed, leaving a pure “secular” reality behind.
We can see this in a variety of fields. Take astronomy, for example: the sun ceased to be seen as a god moving across the sky, and rather as a giant ball of gas that could be understood in terms of chemical and physical laws. And in politics, people were no longer subject to kings who ruled by divine right; instead the wisest were selected to debate in a congress or parliament and craft rational laws for the good of the polity.
This “subtraction story” should be familiar, because it’s one that we Orthodox Christians tend to use to explain the state of ministry and the Church: we find ourselves in a battle with secular forces to prevent the continued “subtraction” of the sacred out of our lives. It’s why American Christians react so viscerally when prayer is removed from public schools, for example. But these concerns are wrongheaded, because they’re designed for a world that is long gone. As Taylor argues, we have moved on to another era, one where the forces of “secularity” have already won.
This may be hard for us to accept, because we (especially we Orthodox Christians) believe the same things that our forefathers in faith believed. But our society is secular because we live in a time where belief in God is understood to be one option among many others. The sacred has already been subtracted down to zero in our lives. We are trapped in the “immanent frame,” a way of seeing the world in purely mechanistic and material terms.
Taylor and Smith point to a few assumptions that undergird the way we, as twenty-first-century people, tend to see the world. Meaning and significance have come to be understood as constructs of the perceiving mind. Faith has become a matter of private opinion. And we think of time purely linear—not cyclical, in the way liturgical time is.
If those are the assumptions that underlie our current secular age, what does that mean for us today? Even for those of us who choose to believe? In short, it means we’re all secular. Like it or not.
Faced with the cold emptiness of a merely physical universe, people still search for meaning to help give their lives direction and purpose. This flattened existence is simply too empty to bear. So we try to believe—not as our forefathers in the faith did, but as people firmly grounded in this secular reality. As Smith explains, “even as faith endures in our secular age, believing doesn’t come easy. Faith is fraught; confession is haunted by an inescapable sense of its contestability. We don’t believe instead of doubting; we believe while doubting. We’re all Thomas now” (4).
We Christians stand in the splendor of the Liturgy and wonder whether any of the ritual has a point. We stand at our icon corners and wonder if we’re just talking to ourselves. We stand at the graves of our lost loved ones and wonder whether there really is a God after all. But this doubt isn’t limited to believers. Even non-believers are haunted by doubt—though, in their case, the doubt that haunts them is faith.
Non-believers hold their children and wonder how it’s possible to love someone so deeply. Non-believers stand at the graves of their lost loved ones and hope that there really is a God after all. Because we are all caught in what Taylor calls the “cross-pressure” between faith and doubt. And all we can do, in the midst of this formless chaos, is plant our flag somewhere and choose to believe something. But for us, unlike our premodern forebears, it’s always the case we that have to choose.
Part 2: Secular Thinking in the Church
It’s critical to keep in mind is that faith is certainly possible today. In fact, we see it all the time. As we said earlier in this post, religious affiliation may be dropping—but that doesn’t mean a desire for faith is diminishing. And that desire can manifest itself in any number of ways, from New Age spirituality to Orthodoxy Christianity.
Yet, just because a contemporary person ends up in a traditional faith, that doesn’t mean he or she is exempt from our common secular condition. Most contemporary converts still tend to think about faith in individualist terms, as part of a personal quest. The convert maintains an interior checklist against which he judges various traditions. And when he’s satisfied that a particular ideology (like “Orthodoxy”) satisfies the criteria he’s looking for, he “joins.” It’s hard for us to maintain any real, felt sense of being received into the Church sacramentally, or of encountering Christ and being united to Him. We simply do our research, determine our own personal criteria for truth, and then begin identifying with the club that meets the criteria we set.
This is a consequence of the “buffered self” that Taylor and Smith describe. As the center of meaning shifts to the individual mind, the person becomes more and more closed off to the possibility of transformation. Even conversion becomes something that happens on my own terms, based on my own criteria.
And these criteria tend to skew in a particular direction. Taylor and Smith both observe that this modern approach to faith is particularly at risk of looking backward to an imagined golden age. It’s easy for a convert to believe he has returned to a premodern state, and achieved some kind of re-enchantment. But this confidence is folly because, as Smith stresses, “There’s no going back. Even seeking enchantment will always and only be reenchantment after disenchantment” (61).
We certainly see this in the contemporary Church, where many people seem to be drawn not to the Kingdom of God, but to an idealized version of Imperial Russia or Byzantium. And they rejoice in “castigating the unfettered subjectivity of modernity” while making names for themselves criticizing bishops on Twitter and setting themselves up as the ultimate authority. But again, this isn’t to say that genuine faith is impossible in our secular world. We just have to know what we’re up against before we can proceed.
This brings us to one of contemporary Orthodoxy’s most divisive subjects: the internet.
Part 3: Is the Internet Driving Church Growth?
If you recognize my name, it’s likely because of the work I spent nearly a decade doing online. In 2013, I launched the weekly video Be the Bee, as part of my work with the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese youth ministry, and ultimately hosted nearly 180 episodes. I was also a co-host of Pop Culture Coffee Hour, which I helped to launch in 2015. Both shows developed fairly large audiences, at least by the standards of our little Orthodox world. So it may come as a surprise to see me critique online Orthodoxy in all its forms (not just the “bad” stuff). Online media and the contemporary influencer economy are a potent distillation of the forces we identified above: the individuated, self-curated search for authenticity in a world stripped of meaning and enchantment. Rather than a way through our current condition, the internet is a sort of quicksand that is trapping the Church in immanence. It’s changing us, as a Christian body, in ways that are subtle but sure.
My three basic concerns are that the internet:
Appeals to our baser passions (even at its best);
Reinforces the hyper-individuality of our secular world; and
Transgresses even the most basic canonical boundaries.
I think these points are all fairly uncontroversial. We all understand that the internet is a breeding ground for the salacious and scandalous, that it facilitates the self-directed quest for authenticity at the heart of our secular condition (“I converted” vs “I was received,” as we noted earlier), and that it encourages people to self-anoint themselves as preachers, teacher, and prophets.
Even so, most of us, in our own ways, continue to feed the content machine of contemporary, internet “Orthodoxy.” I suspect that’s because we interpret the three points above as risks that, somehow, don’t apply to us. We sidestep the concerns by sorting Orthodox content into two buckets: good and bad. As long as the content I produce or consume is on the “good” end of the spectrum, no further analysis is needed. Here’s the dance in action:
I agree that the internet appeals to our baser passions, but I’m producing/consuming content that appeals to something higher.
I agree that the internet reinforces the hyper-individuality of our secular world, but I’m building/part of a community of believers who are moving beyond the secularity of the wider culture.
I get that the internet transgresses even the most basic canonical boundaries, but I have a blessing to do this work.
Now, I’m not interested in having a conversation with every Orthodox content creator or consumer about their favorite media. A lot of people have invested a great deal of effort into their identities as content creators, and they take pride in feeling that they’re helping the Church. I’m not here to criticize them. Instead, I’m just going to critique myself.
I quit making Orthodox videos and podcasts back in 2022; but I’m still primarily known for that chapter in my life. Every time I visit a new parish, people thank me for that work. Both laity and clergy—whether deacons, presbyters, or bishops—tell me Be the Bee and Pop Culture Coffee Hour helped spur real growth, both for people who grew up in the Church and for those who discovered the Church through our work.
So sure, the content I helped create may very well have been “good,” but it nonetheless contributed to the quicksand of modern, secular self-direction and authenticity-seeking.
This all boils down to a simple proposition: there simply can be no blessing to preach and teach universally, without regard to canonical boundaries, as one does on the internet.
If that’s true, then what does the blessing to preach and teach actually look like in practice? Well, in early 2024, I was in Nashville to lead a retreat at a parish in the Antiochian Archdiocese. That Sunday, I offered the sermon during the Divine Liturgy. And I did all of this only by invitation and with the blessing of the presbyter who is responsible for that eucharistic community (serving, as he does, with his bishop’s blessing). I have no business speaking to a congregation just because I think I have something true or important to say. A few weeks later, I helped lead a retreat for the OCA’s Diocese of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania—and again, I was there only by invitation.
The Church, if it’s anything at all, is local and eucharistic. Its fullness is found in the bishop surrounded by his clergy and laity. And it’s the bishop who has ultimate authority to preach to those in his diocese: no other person, not even another bishop, gets to walk into this diocese and start preaching or teaching.
Now let’s say I want to set up a YouTube channel to teach and preach to people, not just in Nashville and Pittsburgh, but anywhere in the world. Who can give me a blessing to do that? If we took the ecclesiology of the Church seriously, we’d know the answer to that question is “no one.” There are no universal authorities in the Church, and there is no one who can grant someone the ability to preach and teach anywhere in the world. That’s why, for example, there is no universally recognized catechism in the Church. No living person has universal teaching authority, so there’s no one to either draft or bless such a project.
That said, if you have a keen ear, you might have heard reference to universal (or ecumenical) teachers at the last service you attended. Leading up to the dismissal, you’ll normally hear a long list of saints that the presbyter invokes. These include a mention of “our fathers among the saints, the great hierarchs and ecumenical teachers Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom.” “Ecumenical” here means these saints were recognized as teachers for all people throughout the world, not just the cities where they reigned as bishops of the Church. There are other ecumenical saints besides those three: St. Athanasios, St. Cyril, St. Maximos, St. John Damascene, St. Gregory Palamas; and more recently, Nikolai Velimirovich, Silouan the Athonite, and Sophrony of Essex, to name a handful. I’m sure we’ll add twenty-first century saints to this list in due time.
But this doesn’t mean anyone can start preaching and teaching on the internet to whomever they can reach. All of these ecumenical teachers have something important in common: they didn’t present themselves as ecumenical teachers during their ministry. When Saint Basil was the bishop of Cappadocia, for example, he would have never walked into Thessaloniki or Antioch and acted like he was the ruling bishop there. It was only later, after his repose and recognition as a saint, that the Church recognized him as a father and teacher of all.
Unfortunately, in our contemporary influencer economy, we’ve become accustomed to people claiming an ecumenical mantle for themselves. What’s worse, we see people cultivating platforms for themselves, completely disconnected from holiness or communion with God.
For what might be the first time in Church history, “growth” is being attributed not to the witness of the saints, nor to the grace-filled words of holy people transformed in Christ, but to the ability of certain people to attract attention on platforms that are designed to spread the vile and vainglorious. These are people who have (whether they care to admit it or not) anointed themselves ecumenical teachers. They have claimed that status because of their skills with attracting attention, rather than lifetimes lived in communion with the Living God. Internet “Orthodoxy” is a place of impatience and shortcuts, where (illusory) short-term growth comes at the expense of long-term transformation in Christ.
Rather than reflecting an Orthodox Christian ecclesiology, our influencer economy is a weird mix of Catholic and Reformation ecclesiology where anybody can anoint himself (Reformation) a teacher with universal authority (Catholic). Instead of operating within the established hierarchy of the Church (seeking employment by a diocese, seeking a position at an accredited seminary, etc.), our influencer economy is a weird system where a person’s “Orthodoxy” is demonstrated by attracting attention rather than cultivating a spirit of peace.
This might be hard to accept as we look at parishes that are full of new people. Even if online Orthodoxy is terrible, we might ask, isn’t it good that it’s getting people in the door?
My experience in youth and young adult ministry makes me dubious. During the decade I spent in that field, I saw a ton of ministry that, at least in the short term, seemed successful. I saw hundreds of youth gather for retreats; I saw hundreds of young adults gather for conferences. And yet, in the long run, between seventy and ninety percent of those people—with slight variations between jurisdictions—ended up falling away from the Church. Many young adults would gather for our fun social events, but those didn’t lead them to attend parishes on Sunday mornings. I learned that enticing kids with ice cream and pizza doesn’t lead to their eventual spiritual formation, nor does attracting young adults with opportunities for professional networking and dating.
In this secular age, people are drawn to Orthodoxy for a variety of reasons: maybe they’re looking for a Christian communion that doesn’t marry gay people, maybe they’re looking for a community that feels ancient and gives them a sense of place and purpose in a culture shaped by cheap consumerism. How different is this from the kid who’s looking for ice cream or the young adult who’s looking to network?
For decades, the Orthodox Church has proved far better at raising people who ended up as former rather than faithful Orthodox Christians. What makes us think we’ll do any different with our new crop of catechumens?
Several priests have told me they’ve clashed with new inquirers who visit their parishes already confident that they know what Orthodoxy is. When presented with something at the parish, these inquirers will object and say that they learned differently from a video or podcast. Sometimes the inquirer falls away entirely; sometimes he finds a different parish that will reinforce his preconception of what Orthodox is.
It is here, perhaps, that we can see a stark contrast between the contemporary ideology of Orthodoxy, borne out of our secular age, and the mystical reality of the Church. Orthodoxy may be a personal adventure that we embark upon as autonomous individuals, but that’s not what the Church is. Orthodoxy may be a system that satisfies my own personal vetting and gives me what I’m looking for in a religion, but that’s not what the Church is.
In the Church, we are nourished by the very Body and Blood of our Lord. “You are what you eat,” as the old saying goes; and in being invited to literally eat Jesus Christ, we are called to be deified in Him. The danger in Orthodoxy is that we can be nourished instead by content. Rather than gather with other Christians and endeavor to grow in holiness together, we can be tempted to consume a never-ending stream of podcasts, videos, articles, and posts.
Of course, we don’t know how these changes—in technology, in our lifestyles, in the ways people find the Orthodox faith and learn about it—will play out in the long-term development of the Church. The Lord can turn even the most sour lemons into lemonade, so He can certainly use this moment to bring people to Him. If that’s the direction this is all taking, what kinds of signals can we look for? I can think of a few. If large numbers of newly received Orthodox Christians are still in the church after a decade, and they have stable connections to particular parishes—if they’re not jumping from parish to parish, or jurisdiction to jurisdiction, looking for “authentic Orthodoxy”—that will be a major sign of encouragement. We should also hope their home parishes, rather than their favorite influencers, become their main sources of information and instruction.
This kind of authentic growth, if it’s manifest, will also lead to more people attending seminary and more parishes opening up. Those will be tangible forms of evidence that we’re seeing more than just an internet fad.
In the Parable of the Sower, the seeds that fell on stony places “immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth,” but the sun quickly scorched them (Matthew 13:5-6). Are we seeing shoots grow from seeds that fell in stony places, or are we seeing the first growth of healthy plants that will yield good fruit? Time will tell.
In the meantime, if this reflection encourages a bit more diligence and care regarding the Church’s trajectory, I’ll take that as a good start.