The Emerging Orthodox "Scene"
After a wave of converts, Orthodox artists are making a mark on the culture
When my wife and I joined the Eastern Orthodox Church a few years ago, we often felt lost. Imagine My Big Fat Greek Wedding except without your Greek fiancée showing you the ropes. If some churches feel like a Ted Talk and others like a martial parade, Orthodoxy’s Divine Liturgy is closer to a family holiday. The rich tapestry of traditions are comforting to an insider but often impenetrable to a newcomer.
We were part of a broader wave of converts, and recent articles in the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times describe “overflowing pews” despite the rigorous fasts and services that last “up to two hours.” When I talk with fellow parishioners, they are often frustrated by the coverage: these media people just don’t get it, we don’t think 2 hours is a grueling service—that’s the baseline!
They resent being treated as an exotic species, but to the average reporter, Orthodoxy does not map neatly onto American religious and political culture. Are they Orthobros or the Greek festival people or Paul Kingsnorth hipster intellectuals? Do they really think the Enlightenment was a mistake?
While zealous converts may try to explain what “real” Orthodoxy is in the abstract, I am more interested in the art of Orthodox converts. In the past few months, I’ve encountered three of them personally: the novelist Jordan Castro, the storyteller Martin Shaw, and the filmmaker Josh David Jordan. In their own niche, each of them have broken through.
Jordan Castro’s novel Muscle Man tells the story of a seething Nietzschean and avid weightlifter stuck in a university English department, and everyone from The Atlantic to Vanity Fair to The New Yorker praised it. Martin Shaw’s book Liturgies of the Wild recounts his surprising encounter with the “mossy face of Christ” after a hundred-night vigil in the wilderness, and it hit the New York Times-bestseller list its first week. Josh David Jordan’s El Tonto Por Cristo is a Tarkovsky-influenced film steeped in the idiosyncrasies of an Orthodox monastery that was screened recently to a packed theater at the Trump-Kennedy Center.
While none of these are blockbuster releases, they represent Orthodoxy’s growing cultural influence and hint at an emerging American Orthodox aesthetic.
Orthodoxy emphasizes the unknowable and mysterious aspects of the faith, and Castro says his novel is not offering “truth as an abstraction” but rather engaging with reality beyond just the “head level stuff.” He explores Vitalism through one character’s resentments, passions, and self-contradictions rather than a dry intellectual history.
While Orthodoxy is not unintellectual (as critics sometimes claim), priests will often advise seekers to simply attend liturgy and focus on prayer rather than reading theology (or God forbid, debating doctrine online). There is a physicality to the faith that can only be internalized through practice—much like weightlifting can only be learned by doing.
Orthodoxy can seem like it’s stuck in AD 33 with no guitars, organs, or smoke machines to be found, but Shaw found its ancient rituals put him in direct communion with “the Galilee Druid.” He says that “if you have too much tradition, everything starts to feel a bit breathless, and you feel constricted. However, if everything is innovation and freedom and an à la carte approach, then you feel that you’re building your house on the sand, not the rock.”
That balance informs his own approach to storytelling: every tale he tells must combine the timeless with the timebound. His book gathers together all his favorite stories about “the condition of living,” most of which will be unfamiliar at first but surprisingly relevant on reflection.
Finally, Orthodoxy can seem repetitive. Newcomers are often put off by how many times we say, “Lord have mercy” in our services, and in El Tonto Por Cristo, Jordan depicted this struggle with the monotony of the spiritual life literally. As he described in a Q&A after the screening, the seemingly banal, ineffective work of the monks—they sweep the same steps or saw the same branches without ever appearing to make progress—symbolically represents the tedium of prayer.
Reciting the popular Orthodox “Jesus Prayer”—“Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”—seems like the simplest, easiest thing in the world, yet Jordan said it’s easily neglected because it feels pointless in the moment, like sweeping the same step over and over and over again.
In each case, these artists opt for the mystical and intuitive rather than the rationalistic and didactic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Orthodoxy’s minimal political influence in US politics, most converts don’t prioritize polemics. All three expressly decried the agitprop that often passes for “art.” Shaw admitted, “As soon as a storyteller or a piece of art is polemicized by a tradition that isn’t really one that has a heavenly dimension to it, I’m immediately less interested.”
Jordan contrasted his film with the typical “Christian” film that spoon-feeds a moral rather than authentically depicting the strangeness and variety of real life. For his part, Castro rejects the garishness of culture war generalizations, instead trying to draw out the universal from the particular and “the socially meaningful or psychologically meaningful from a very specific situation and character.”
That doesn’t mean that they will escape getting pigeonholed. Shaw says he’s now getting called a “right-wing nationalist,” and Castro was frustrated to see his book reduced to a “novel that explains the manosphere.” To some extent, that flattening is inevitable, but Castro sees his vocation as an author not a pundit, and all three tend to steer clear of the issue de jour.
They are artists first and foremost.
While Orthodoxy lacks the broad appeal of a contemporary megachurch—it only counts one million members nationwide—the converts it attracts are zealous. Likewise, all three of these artists admit that their work is not for everyone, but they would rather participate in art that they believe reflects reality rather than compromise to achieve greater relevance.
The ultimate effect is much like the Divine Liturgy itself—it does not move everyone, but those who are moved are moved deeply.