Post #3276523

2026-05-26 21:45 UTC

@stavvers@masto.ai true but I suspect it is probably a narratively useful overlap rather than engineering proper, in the same way many (esp. European) racists love LOTR and use it for recruiting despite this not being Tolkien's goal even though his moral geography draws from the same well which feeds Eurocentric theories of race. Much of the gritty aesthetics of space marines in modern media owes as much to Call of Duty as to crusaders, for instance. What I'm saying isn't that they are totally without relation, but that to the extent there is appeal to Orthodoxy for reactionaries, I might caution even the Orthodox church itself that, just as with adult Catholic converts, often enough these guys are converting to an idea of a kind of exoticized (in the "the past is a foreign land" sense no less than geographically distant and prone to a kind of orientalism) older and thus 'truer' (more 'hardcore') practice with more options for granting their preexisting ideas bona fides through rules lawyering.

Replies (1)

@Colophonscrawl@monads.online 2026-05-26 21:58

@stavvers@masto.ai many adult converts from protestant backgrounds have very similar root issues even as their goals and aesthetic preferences differ on a surface level. For instance, converts to "Taoism" feel quite comfortable citing English translations of two or three works they read on their own as though these readings (best for them if the texts are root texts vague enough that almost anything can be projected onto them) are authoritative, sometimes (often enough) directly to practitioners in China itself. They come about these projects of conversion as projects of finding some backing to their media-received notions of what Christianity "looks like" and who is its keeper, even as it's clear they are part of the same aesthetic project as, say, Hegseth and his notion of a protestant crusader. In this sense, it might not be such a good idea from the perspective of the Orthodox church to go rushing towards direct recruitment from protestants. I'm drifting from your main thrust tho, sorry

Open ##3276524