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We Are Booming

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Clarissa

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Orthodoxy is, indeed, experiencing a boom. The majority of our parishioners are now very young men. Two of them are African American.

Orthodox Christianity has no roots in the African American community, so these young men must have really wanted to be there. As an Orthodox parish in a very white town, you know you are getting popular when black people make a point of seeking you out.

All we are missing is some young women. Sadly, we are not in a place culturally where young women do the sort of seeking that brought their male peers to our parish.

18 responses to “We Are Booming”

  1. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    I don’t have much in the way of belief but I wouldn’t like to live in a world without religion. I’ve mentioned before I sometimes go to my korean friend’s church because being in places of worship makes me feel good. My friend obviously wants me to become a christian but for me it’s not practical because my cultural roots don’t belong there. Sometimes I think that if I were ever to turn toward religion, I could always return to my family’s tradition, since its cultural practices and language are already hard-coded in me, just waiting to be reactivated.

    Adopting the practices of, say, the Orthodox Church would always feel artificial to me, like a LARP. So, the question is do you think it’s easier to achieve a relationship with God, or to reach some sort of transcendence, if it’s through a religion that is already a part of your culture, rather through one that is completely foreign?

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    1. Random reader Avatar
      Random reader

      I do not believe that religion does not matter as long as you have one. There is one Truth and when you find Him, He will not be foreign, because He is the one who made you.

      Liked by 1 person

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    2. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      Depends on if you’re talking about “a religion” or Christianity. I expect as a roundeye it’d be hard for me to get into, say Shinto or Cao Dai, for cultural reasons.

      But as RR points out, Christianity is a relationship with God, more than it is a set of cultural practices. Even in Orthdoxy, which looks very ‘foreign’ in America… what you’re mostly looking at there is the accretion of cultural practices, which vary quite a lot depending on whether the church is Greek, Arab, Serbian, Russian, etc. Give it another 300 years and there might be a distinctly American version of all that. You don’t have to bake kulich, speak Greek, or learn how to dye eggs with onion skins to be Orthodox 😉

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    3. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I do have historical roots in Orthodoxy through my mother’s side but because our practice was interrupted by socialism for 3 generations, it will always feel somewhat LARPey to me. It’s definitely easier to come back to something in which you are genetically rooted but it might never feel entirely natural after a long break. And that is fine. Looking for a seamless fit in any form of relating to other people or things outside of yourself is a neoliberal avoidance device.

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  2. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    Ditto at our parish. The onslaught continues! Do we need to start some kind of evangelism/outreach aimed at single women?

    OSI looked at the recent PEW religion survey here:

    https://www.orthodoxstudies.org/documents/11/american-orthodoxy-today-2025.pdf

    And there’s a lot you can’t say using someone else’s data, because PEW doesn’t ask the questions we really want answers to. But it does confirm that we are the most male-skewed church in America now– though even according to the data, that basically means we have about equal numbers of men and women, where other churches skew female. The analysis points out that PEW respondents skew older, and this data is missing younger people, who are… most of the new converts. So it’s probably a bit more male-skewed than these numbers capture. (see everybody currently in an active Orthodox parish do an eyeroll here, because 90% of the new Intro to Orthdoxy class is young men, and this has been the case for four years running).

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Yes, in pure numbers, we do have about equal male-female proportion. The women, however, are, to a large extent, older. They are wonderful, they make everything run smoothly. But we have a dozen newly arrived young men. They will invariably want to meet young women. It would be great if they could meet them at church. If somebody could let young women know that there’s a treasure trove of really great young men right there at church.

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        IKR?

        Ladies, thinking about marriage? Wondering where all the eligible young men are? Young men who also want to get married?

        We’ve got a lead on that! Can we introduce you?

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      2. Avatar
        Anonymous

        There was a Nick Fritas show a few days ago that had something interesting to say about this specific topic. About why there are older women in church, but no younger women.

        One of them stated that women tend to be conservative, not in terms of politics, but in terms of defending whatever is the current set of values. So for the elderly women when they grew up, going to church was the current set of values, so they defend it. But the younger generations grew up in a time of great wickedness, which is why they defend it so heavily. They will hold on to it because it is the set of values they grew up with.

        We will likely have to wait for a new generation of women to grow up with a set of values that prioritizes God, family, honor, etc. before we see women moving in large numbers into the fold once more.

        It was kind of odd hearing that women were really conservative and men very changeable, but once the speaker divorced it from politics, he had a point. Men do tend to shift and realign our values depending on basis question of is this threatening my family or my way of life. Women tend to dig in their heels and defend what they have known all their lives.

        Naturally you still have the brainwashed, and idiots who are the outliers, but I think that guy had a fairly decent point about this.

        • – W

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          I do keep hearing the odd complaint from the younger set though: “Where are all the good men?” “Nobody wants to get married” etc.

          I feel like if we could just reach *that* subset…

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        2. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Women simply don’t seek out their own spiritual journey in this culture. A woman who decides to start going to church is a woman who sees herself as her own person. Who values her inner life. Who knows how to put her own inner life before her usefulness to others. The Biblical story of Martha and Mary is precisely about these different kinds of womanhood. Jesus tells women to stop bustling around, trying to earn praise for fluttering around. Instead, He tells women to start with bringing their own soul into order. But that lesson still has not been learned. A woman will follow her favorite pair of pants to any adventure but will not seek her own spiritual enlightenment.

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          1. methylethyl Avatar
            methylethyl

            Fun follow up: OSI looking at the most recent FIRE survey, that’s just college students:

            https://www.orthodoxstudies.org/documents/13/New_data_Orthodox_college_students_august2025.pdf

            TLDR: Orthodox are 1.37% of students surveyed (.49% in the general population surveys), even though students are on the whole much less religious than the genpop. 11.5% of students who said they were Orthodox, were black or african-american, and only 45% were white.

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              It’s a testimony to the bankruptcy of the Protestant denominations that even black people, who are historically wedded to them, are abandoning them.

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              1. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                I expect that number is complicated by Copts. I’d love to see a breakdown, but the survey doesn’t capture it.

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  3. oldcowboy3 Avatar
    oldcowboy3

    methylethyl

    Well. it is not as easy as one would suppose. When I was young, away back when the dinosaurs still roamed, one simply had to be somewhat physically attractive to your future wife and have sufficient ability or prospects to support a family.

    Today many young women seem to have somewhat higher expectations, e.g. to mention just two of many, six feet height and earning a six figure salary. In America, that represents only 15% of the former and about 20 % in the latter group, suggesting that only approximately of 3% of men qualify. And that ignores that many in the latter group are older and likely already married.

    There is no point in mentioning any male expectations, suggesting a few several months ago led to somewhat rather, well, abusive distaff commentary ;-D

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      What people say they want and what they actually get attracted to are very different things. Most people are not very in touch with their actual feelings.

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    2. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      Sure sure. Everybody *says* they want that– six feet, jacked, rich, whatever.

      That’s like talking to women about their dream house. People talk about wanting a ten thousand square foot monstrosity with an indoor swimming pool, walk-in closets, palatial bathrooms, french doors that open onto the verandah, a fountain in the front hall, a dramatic staircase, marble floors…

      They’re not telling you what they *expect*, or that they wouldn’t settle for something else. That’s a fantasy. You know it, they know it, nobody takes it seriously. Nobody’s ever thinking, oh, I can’t sell that gal a modest 2br bungalow, because she’d rather be homeless than live in anything that’s not an absurd rococo mansion in a gated estate.

      But when women express similar fantasies about a dream husband, for some bizarre reason people take them seriously.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        Exactly. Most men are not 6-foot tall muscled millionaires and they are all happily married and their wives adore them. A student came in today. He’s blind, tiny, scrawny, and is engaged to be married. If he found a woman to love him forever, everybody else has excellent chances.

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          Exactly. If anything, where *happily married* is the goal, people who meet the “fantasy husband/wife” specs seem to have worse track records, once you weed out obvious red flags like criminality and frank mental illness. Looking around at people I know, the couples who seem happiest are the ones who settled down with somebody… basically very similar to themselves. I’m sure I remember reading at least one study concluding the same thing: regardless of what people say they want in a partner, they usually go for somebody who comes from the same economic class, ranks about the same in physical attractiveness and intelligence…

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