Is the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese a Religious Marxist Front Group?

OK, now that I’ve got your attention, I can dial my critique back a bit. But only a bit.

You see, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say that Archbishop Elpidophoros Lambrianides is either a subversive Deep-stater or someone who is completely clueless about America –at least of fly-over country anyway.

First he threw the priests of the GOA under the bus when he told them last year that the saving of their pension fund was job number one. Instead, he doubled down with his Archon buddies and scraped the $40 million that was necessary to restart the boondoggle known as the St Nicholas Shrine.

Then he undertook his ill-advised march alongside BLM protesters back in June, during the height of the Floyd Festivities. The second coming of Selma it was not. Even if we give half a point to BLM in its original iteration, that is to say an organization dedicated to highlighting the awareness of supposed police brutality, it’s pretty much pissed it all away in the past few weeks. According to most polling firms, the entire concept of BLM is now distrusted by pluralities of all non-black demographics in the United States. (And it’s not much better among African-Americans, who recognize a racket when they see one.)

That’s two strikes in case you were wondering.

Last night, His Eminence came out swinging –and missing yet again–when he put out this unctuous tweet to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, also known as Notorious RBG.

Now, as a Christian, I give my condolences to the late Associate Justice. I lost my own beloved grandmother to pancreatic cancer and I grieve for anybody who exits this life due to this disease. Her family and friends likewise have my deepest sympathies.

But it would be hypocritical of me to lionize her as some “icon” and “role model”. And I’m not saying this because her views and mine did not line up. Yes, she was a brilliant legal mind, of this there can be no doubt. But you know who else was equally brilliant? Antonin Scalia and I don’t remember the GOA singing his praises upon his death. Nor do I expect to see encomiums delivered when Clarence Thomas passes, and he (in the opinion of many), is an even more iconic figure than Ginsburg.

Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? Ginsburg was a one-woman wrecking ball to the concept of American normalcy. Her championship of “women’s rights” (read: killing babies in the womb) has done more damage to the stability of our culture than almost anything else one can think of. Perhaps not as bad as Roe v Wade, but awful damn close. Since then, it’s all been downhill. Obergefell springs instantly to mind.

Equally as bad was her contrariness regarding the Second Amendment. Simply put, one cannot be lionized as a “champion of individual rights” if he (or she) cannot understand the plain verbiage of the Second Amendment and realize that it is an individual right, not a collective one. Period. Full stop.

Now, I could go on and wax eloquently about the virtues that are needed to sustain a republic. As far as Aristotle was concerned, courage was the first virtue; all other virtues could not be maintained if a man (or polity) lacked courage. Arms are those hopla (tools) which every courageous man owns and knows how to use. Think of them as force-multipliers.

Our East Coast elites don’t understand that. Come to think of it, they don’t understand a lot of things about Americana and that’s troubling. There are always two sides to every story and the reason that Trump was elected is because the elites live in an insular bubble that makes Versailles under the Sun King look like a garden of biodiversity. 

As an Orthodox Christian, I’m particularly troubled to see that the “Archbishop of America” doesn’t understand that.

To soften the blow of (yet again) another non-American being placed on the primatial throne of the GOA, we were told that the young John Lambrianides, while growing up in Istanbul, “loved America”, its culture, the very idea of it. I don’t dispute that. However, I do question what exactly about “America” did he love? It’s one thing to love The Beach Boys and baseball, it’s quite another to love the soul-destroying rulings put out by the Supreme Court or the anti-Christian “education” that has been peddled by our finest universities over the past few decades.

Does His Eminence understand the insanity of the historically-ignorant of the 1619 Project? Is he OK with the destruction of American statues, including statues of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin and St Junipero Serra? Or the fire-bombing of buildings in our inner cities? How is this beneficial or indicative of anything positive?

Now, I’m not blaming Ginsburg for any of this. Nor am I blaming His Eminence. That would be silly. However, I’ve begun to question the Archbishop’s vision of America, first with the BLM march, now with this tweet. Ginsburg was an an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. She deserves recognition for that alone. As mentioned, she was also an excellent legal mind, of that there can be no doubt. Yet her expertise was put in the service of an ideology that was neither Christian or traditional. For an Orthodox primate to slather her with encomiums that would be befitting the passing of an anointed Orthodox monarch, is most unsettling.

This goes far beyond normal Byzantine sycophancy; it telegraphs clearly which side of the culture war he –and by extension the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America–is on.  If he loved America so much, why is he on the side of those who want to burn it down or civil magistrates who have consistently undermined the Constitution?

Clearly, he does not understand the give-and-take of free and open American criticism. It came to our attention that several of our friends responded to his latest ill-considered tweet. The good archbishop couldn’t take good old-fashioned American criticism so, in typical phanariote fashion, he blocked them. I guess you can say that his understanding and love for America is somewhat deficient. But then again, what could we expect from a patriarchate which is headquartered in some mythical city called “the New Rome”?