‘Is the Cure to Male Loneliness Retaking Constantinople?’: the Keyboard Crusade of the Orthobro

It is an axiom of the Information Age that while there are lonely young men, there will be bizarre online subcultures. Male-doninated internet forums range from the dorky and innocuous to the openly misogynistic and outright violent. Somewhere in the murky middle are those which fetishise Classical, Mediaeval or pre-Sexual revolution Western culture, their valorisation of patriarchal gender roles, enforced monogamy and Western chauvinism all the more insidious for their disarmingly nerdy facades. Trad-Cath and trad-wife content may be all too familiar to anyone who scrolls through Instagram more than they should, but occupying a smaller niche in the contemporary memescape are the Orthobros, young men with a zealous but shallow and self-serving interest in Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Last Supper

While the internet has made the Anglosphere more homogenous, the Orthorbro is still largely an American phenomenon. The USA and Canada host several ethnographically fascinating communities of Eastern Orthodox Christians, from Toronto’s Greek diaspora to the Old Believers of the Pacific Northwest, but the terminally online Orthobro is typically a convert from some form of Protestantism. Ironically there is something of the Puritan’s quest for intense, personal religious experience in this attraction to the dignified solemnity of Eastern Orthodoxy: while a Pilgrim would hardly see eye to eye with an Orthobro on icons, clerical dress or even the books of the Bible, they might be as disgusted with the megachurches and celebrity pastors of contemporary American Protestantism as they were with the smells and bells of Roman Catholicism and early Anglicanism.

And for those who’d rather not forgo the slick appeal of Baptist or Pentecostal preachers even as they search for a more conservative church, there is the telegenic Father Josiah Trenham. Raised Presbyterian, Fr. Josiah oozes Evangelical-style charisma from the sober robes of an Orthodox Archpriest (or sometimes a trendy North Face vest), as inviting and approachable as any business-casual Southern Baptist. The website of his church in Southern California offers a handy guide to conversion. Some American believers, even those active on Reddit, worry about the political implications of his appearance in a Tucker Carlson documentary or feel uncomfortable with the sheer production value of his public image, considering it antithetical to modest Orthodox values.

For all his media-savvy charm, Fr. Josiah is an ordained priest with a PhD from Durham and many publications and serious lectures to his name. More dangerous are overly-online laymen like Youtuber Jay Dyer, whose thumbnails read like a roll-call of manosphere fixations. Dyer engages with familiar secular topics such as UFOs and the CIA, as well as fresh conspiracy theories like the ‘Great Reset’, but is most passionate when discussing theological matters through the lens of his Orthodox faith. In one video he ‘demolishe[s]’ Anti-Trinitarians alongside, more predictably, Muslims. In another he identifies the ‘Dogmatic Contradiction’ that ‘ends Roman Catholicism’: perhaps the Vatican’s 1.28 billion faithful haven’t heard yet. In his interview with the Danish organisation Maniphesto, which offers men Jordan Peterson-influenced life coaching and outdoorsy Nordic retreats with a hint of Orthodoxy, Dyer trots out predictable alt-right nonsense about the ‘deep state’ being generously funded to push feminism on society for the last hundred years.

While Eastern Orthodoxy’s imposing authority figures and conservative values may attract frustrated young men, the aesthetic also helps, especially in the wake of the Cyrillic trend. The beauty of Orthodox icons remains exotic to the American or Western European eye jaded with the trappings of Roman Catholicism. The spear and skull-and-crossbones of the Golgotha Cross lend even a tote bag a grim majesty. The punk-aestheticised ‘zine Death to the World, founded in 1994 by musician Justin Marler during his stint as a monk at Saint Herman of Alaska Monastery in Northern California, reciprocates rock’s customary appropriation of Christian imagery. Twelve issues were produced before Marler’s return to music, but the ‘zine was later revived by a group of the Saint Barnabas Orthodox Church of Costa Mesa’s infamous punk parishioners. The project is now run by a nationwide coalition of media-literate believers. An article on AI in the latest issue quotes lyrics from X-Ray Spex’s outspoken Black frontwoman Poly Styrene and the Oxford-affiliated transhumanist Elise Bohan: Death to the World’s writers are clearly more urbane than either your average monk, shut away in some un-Californian monastery, or your average Orthobro, equally cloistered in his manosphere echo chamber. They’ve even done a coffee collab.

It’s unrealistic to hope for Orthobros and other frustrated young white men in the odder corners of the internet to instantaneously recognise their privilege and embrace left-liberal politics. While socially conservative, Eastern Orthodox Christianity could offer confused and lonely men a community more fulfilling and far less harmful to themselves and society than the internet’s increasingly morbid incel forums. The catch is that many Orthobros explore their new faith primarily online, rarely if ever attending services or seeking guidance from their local priest as is encouraged in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and even seen, proudly, as a defining feature in opposition to legalistic Roman Catholicism. Even Dyer suggests in his Maniphesto interview that young men would be better off listening to their local priests than to him. Online, however, conservative teachings on gender roles, patriarchal and outdated but hardly vituperative, are appropriated to legitimise extreme misogyny. Then there’s the bizarre obsession with retaking ‘Constantinople’, ironic and perhaps raising a smile with its invocation of men’s endearingly nerdy pet historical interests, but laced with (misguided) Western chauvinism. As always, the terminally online exert an outsize influence on each other and on the record of discourse.

Of course, while genuine participation in an Eastern Orthodox Church could potentially benefit Orthobros, converts from Protestantism or other religious backgrounds might be even better off embracing the denomination of their own families or communities, rather than investigating Eastern Orthodox Christianity to validate their conservatism or just because it’s trending. Denmark’s state church, though, with its majority of women priests, didn’t seem to appeal to the Maniphesto boys for some reason.