All those 'Orthobros'

"Off-brand" thoughts on a subject that I talk about too often with my priest husband

I appreciate Frederica Mathews-Green and have for a long time. She’s one of many voices who present a facet to complex discussions that is worth considering. — I’m a big fan of not being all in or all out on a writer or thinker. She posted a long piece recently that touched on Orthobros.¹ I didn’t get to read it until days after I opened the tab on my browser. I scanned at first, and when I found a portion about “finding 15 Orthobros” in the piece, I went on a hunt. I knew I would fail because the term is undefined and because the internet has tunnels like Discord, Reddit, Tumblr, etc. There are also non-Internet groups that chatter.

Without a definition, with a means for detailed research and for others to verify, this challenge is one that can be as easily rejected as the reason for giving it in the first place. Are there Orthobros?

My definition of Orthobros and others’ definitions might not overlap. I think about those men who love to explain things to people, even people who know more than they do on the subject. These are men so steeped in the culture of masculinity that they don’t stop to wonder if others might know more, especially others like women or people of a different ethnicity. They are like bulls in a China shop, as the old saying goes.

Photo by Amanda Swanepoel on Unsplash

They seem oblivious to the possibility that they are suffering from a deplorable lack of curiosity. I could go on and share more of my working definition of an Orthobro, but I think it will break down. Because there is value in moderating our tone and reaction to the kinds of masculinity now coming into the Orthodox Church. That’s what Frederica Mathews-Green was doing.

I responded with comments below on her post. I'm sharing this here because I think it matters. I spent years reading Mathews-Green and trying to internalize my concerns while I watched how some kinds of masculinity trample on and wound women. I’m particularly concerned when it happens within the faith because it leads to spiritual injury. I offer these comments to contribute to a larger conversation.

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My husband is a priest, and I have peers who are academic researchers on the anthropology and sociology of religion. Some are Orthodox, others not. ²

Because I’m part of a clergy couple, I’m networked with OCA, Greek and Antiochian priests, and the surge reports are clear. Our parish is seeing new families come weekly, and so are most of the priests in our deanery. It started with curiousity of single young men (pre-COVID) many of whom reported learning about Orthodoxy online. Not from good friends, but as part of a flow of information that often included messaging about women who rejected men and seeking a place to find a spouse who was not feminist, but more subservient. I wonder if they hoped to find women like themselves, so hungry to get married they’d put the desire for marriage above finding an ideal marital partner. Or that somehow the main quality by which these men would be measured was their Orthodoxy.

One picture I found searching “Orthodox women” -Photo by Maksim Istomin on Unsplash

Many left, some remained. Because it turns out, women in the Orthodox Church aren’t just naturally “subservient” and willing to settle for a man who wants to remain domineering in the more Protestant understanding of marriage, with all the head of the household stuff somehow being inflated while women are chided to submit, submit, submit.

The pipeline—dare I use this term?—that led those men to the Orthodox Church was not homogeneous. Not just influencers on YouTube, not just that Canadian professor who courts the conservatism of Orthodoxy while remaining cagey about his own beliefs, not Ancient Faith, not Dreher or Pageau, nor accidentally stumbling on the Church or the Fathers and Mothers of the Faith. It happened in chat rooms, on Discord, Facebook groups, etc. The influencers are still out there, but finding 15 of them (I’m curious why you chose that number?) that others could also easily verify is not straightforward.

Orthobros is going to get old and useless because its definition is unclear. The influencers I can find online, whom some converts have cited, do adhere to a kind of overreach in their rhetoric. They talk about their faith and their conservative worldview, and the overreach is assuming that Orthodoxy easily and fastidiously conforms to their worldview.

They are loud and certain inside of parishes and online, having not yet learned the grace of humility, the ability to see that Orthodoxy is big. God is big. There is room enough at the table.

My struggle with the tension of welcoming a flourishing and healthy masculinity in our congregations and the Church at large is that I have reason to ask if some men are coming into the Church because it’s more masculine.

These types tend to throw their elbows around and push women out of service to the Church and out of their own value in the Church. I’ve seen this happen. Men who push to become subdeacons by first trying to displace women from the role of choir director (”Because really it should be a reader who does that.”), or taking over a church school, or pushing the priest to talk to the bishop about making them a deacon because they completed the St. Macrina program.³ These men haven’t gone to seminary. They often are tonsured readers or subdeacons—our hierarch won’t make subdeacons. I think because he realized this is happening.

I hope these men come into parishes like ours, which is a blend of converts and the children of converts, now adults and where we’ve somehow formed a pretty healthy balance of women in leadership, even though they can’t be ordained. It took a lot of energy on my husband's part, who truly hates playing interference with status-hungry people. He encouraged our parish to nominate women to the parish council, weathered a campaign that almost knocked our very talented choir directors out of their roles, and learned some lessons about balancing peacemaking (his natural resting state) with being firm. He still has to navigate loud personalities, which often are people who are costuming up their insecurities, who demand to be called by their church title. He tells them, “Father is a term of affection and trust. I don’t demand people call me Father. They are free to choose that.”

Now, as we see this influx of converts, he learns from them about the pipeline online. Some of the seekers coming in are trying to be influencers on Discord. You won’t find them easily. I tried looking. They aren’t Jay Dyer or Fr. Moses Macpherson.⁴ Some will moderate their views if they show up to services and see the dads who care for the babies and toddlers while their wives sing in the choir or serve on committees. When being catechized or counseled after confession, they seem to become less certain of replacement theory or that wives should only stay at home. They see the mix of women who do and don’t cover their heads in church and stop prescribing how their wives show up in liturgy. If they are counting Sundays to figure out if women are not receiving Eucharist at certain times of the month, they learn not to talk about women’s issues in coffee hour.

That’s a start. The Orthodox Church does have a host of good priests. But we also have some who want to put women and all their kids on one side of the nave. We have priests who tell women not to commune if menstruating. We have priests and others who prescribe how to dress (not mindfully but literally telling women to cover every part of themselves except maybe ankles, wrists, neck and face). We have husbands who try to control their wives to stay at home, to carry more children, not to make their husbands angry or tempt men with their looks (as if men lack agency over their own emotions or sexual desire).

There is a spirit of hyper masculinity, not just male friendship, that can take over. It is a teleology that puts men in a spiritual status over women. It pressures women to quietly erase their god-given talents and gifts and replace them with a role. It hurts men, too. They don’t learn to live in the fullness of who God created them to be. When the roles of masculinity and femininity become performative and prescribed, men try to fit themselves into behaviors that contort their fatherhood, their husbandhood, their ability to share child-rearing, income-earning, decision-making, and spiritual leadership in the household. That is, if they are married, and if they aren’t, some become bitter that it’s not playing out “as it is supposed to.” They are following a rulebook that wasn’t ratified by the church or God, but by the cultural norms of their time and place.

I hope it’s okay that I share this wordy essay. You (Frederica) have written extensively on this, and I’ve read a lot of your work. I respect it. I also note that the Church and culture are going through changes. Children and parents relate differently now, as do men and women. We might be cautious about the changes, but we should not be rigid, insisting that “the way we did it before” was the right way. I suspect you’ll agree with that.

PS. I love a good, gentle bull. Below are some.

Photo by Quaritsch Photography on Unsplash

1. Probably not longer than mine! I’m loquacious.

2. I’m not an expert on the surge or non-surge, but positioned to see how, anecdotally, it feels like the Orthodox Church is growing.

3. Most of these happened within our parish or some variation (did or did not complete the St. Macrina program) in other parishes.

4. Notably, our hierarch is well aware of the hyper-masculinity being encouraged by some priests who NOT influencers.