Is there a massive movement of young men to Eastern Orthodoxy? The New York Post seems to think so. A viral article by Rikki Schlott last fall painted a dramatic picture of young men converting to Orthodox Christianity “in droves.”
As someone curious about denominational trends and with missionary experience in a culture dominated by Orthodoxy, I read the report with interest. But I found it heavy on stories and light on stats.
Appeal of Orthodoxy
The young men interviewed in Schlott’s article shared why they find Orthodoxy attractive. They desire something unchanging in a world of flux. They’re disillusioned by the perceived superficiality of what they’ve experienced in many Protestant contexts: short worship services, TED Talk–like sermons, and a version of Christianity that demands little in terms of daily habits and disciplines. In contrast, Orthodoxy offers structure and continuity—rigid, unbending traditions that require frequent confession, prescribed prayers, fasting, and long worship services.
Father Josiah Trenham, a priest in California, says his church is part of a “massive uptick” in conversions. A catechist in his church highlights the “call to adventure” Orthodoxy provides, describing its traditional practices as “masculine,” something exciting for young men on “a journey of self-improvement.” (This trend aligns with the broader cultural turn toward neo-Stoicism and figures like Jordan Peterson who inspire young men to seek rootedness and structure in a chaotic world.)
Numbers Behind the Stories
The article does include one stat—a 78 percent increase in converts to Orthodoxy in 2022 compared to prepandemic levels. That’s a striking number, but it needs context.
Ryan Burge’s forthcoming book from Oxford University Press, The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends, and the Future, provides a bigger picture. From 2010 to 2020, the number of Orthodox adherents in the United States declined from 817,000 to 676,000, with regular attendees dropping from 212,000 to 183,000. A different survey, however, shows a modest increase in adherents from 0.4 percent to 0.7 percent of the population.
Why point to the numbers? Because Orthodoxy is a tiny tradition in the States, smaller even than the liberal United Church of Christ. For perspective, there are more than four times as many Baptist churches in my home state of Tennessee alone as there are Orthodox churches in the entire country. Eight of the 10 U.S. counties with the largest Orthodox populations are in Alaska, a fact that reflects Orthodoxy’s historical ties to Russia.
Speaking of Russia, immigration plays a significant role in Orthodoxy’s American story. Burge points out that only a quarter of Orthodox adherents have been in the States for three or more generations. Twenty-seven percent are immigrants, and another 27 percent are children of immigrants. Having lived in Romania, I’ve seen how Orthodoxy intertwines with national identity and how that cultural identity then shifts and stabilizes when people are on the move. New converts drawn to the strangeness or otherworldliness of Orthodox worship are also encountering, in Orthodox communities, the “foreignness” of other peoples transplanted into the American context.
The internet plays a role here, as Schlott’s report shows. If I hadn’t married a Romanian, it’s possible my great-grandmother and my grandparents would’ve gone their entire lives without ever encountering an Orthodox Christian. But YouTube has made all kinds of Christian traditions “accessible.” Wings of the church that young men never knew existed now come into view, with the internet giving voice to traditions, large and small, across the spectrum. The irony is, it’s a technologically connected, consumerist-influenced culture that makes some of these conversion stories to an “unchanging” tradition possible.
Put Growth in Perspective
Orthodoxy shows signs of vitality. The average age of attendees is 42, with 62 percent between 18 and 45. That’s significantly younger than other major traditions. Attendance has also increased slightly, bucking broader secularization trends.
Still, we ought to proceed with caution in how we interpret recent shifts. Percentage increases can seem dramatic when the baseline is small. A church growing from 40 to 80 members can breathlessly announce their 100 percent growth year over year, but it’s the same numerical increase as a church growing just 10 percent (from 400 to 440 members). A small parish of 20 people can triple its numbers but still only have 60 attendees.
It’s also worth noting that more Orthodox adherents convert to evangelical churches than vice versa, following broader immigration trends where Catholics (often from Mexico or South America) are more likely to become nondenominational charismatics than American Protestants are to become Catholic. Much of Orthodoxy’s recent growth appears to stem not from secular or irreligious individuals converting to Christianity but from disillusioned Protestants discovering the rich history of Orthodox theology and worship via the internet.
Lessons for Evangelicals
All that said, evangelical Christians can learn from recent trends. Here are a few takeaways.
1. Nominal Christianity Is a Turn-Off
Young people are hungry for vibrant, immersive faith, not a watered-down version of Christianity that makes few demands. This phenomenon isn’t unique to the United States. In Orthodox-majority countries, where faith is often cultural and superficial, young people also seek a real encounter with Jesus, which is why many become Baptists or Pentecostals. We’ve got to look beyond the expression of a particular faith tradition to the underlying reality of regeneration and the call of Jesus to faithful obedience. Pastors and church leaders must model and hand down a faith where following Jesus is central, not a peripheral “hobby” for someone who wants to engage their “spiritual side.”
2. Stability Is Compelling
In a chaotic world, young men crave rootedness and structure. Orthodoxy’s unchanging traditions appeal to this desire. As evangelicals, we can also rise to this challenge by tracing the line from current practices to the church’s ancient roots. There are ways of connecting what we do on a given Sunday to the church’s ancient traditions, of reminding our people we aren’t the first to discover and hear the sacred Scriptures and to better familiarize ourselves with our tradition. We should remind people our faith is grounded in the gospel and apostolic witness, not in chasing innovation. The goal is a fresh expression of what’s ancient, not a faddish embrace of the aesthetics of antiquity.
3. Rigor and Discipline Are Attractive
Many young men seek structure, discipline, and rigor in their faith. Gen Z wants a serious faith. Evangelicals have a rich tradition of spiritual practices that can meet this need without slipping into a gospel-less legalism or a “journey of self-improvement” you can find on offer scrolling through Instagram reels. We need to recapture the spiritual practices and postures that bring about true life-change—where the Spirit does his work in and through us. Without the gospel’s transforming power, discipline becomes just another man-centered approach to religion.
4. Worship Must Be God-Centered
Over the past few decades, as Gavin Ortlund points out in his video responding to the Schlott article, evangelical worship has sometimes slipped into something entertainment-driven and has lost a sense of God’s transcendence. Critics of Protestantism often highlight our weakest practices, presenting them as representative of the whole. But within our tradition, we have worship practices intended to lift us beyond ourselves, to anchor us in history, and to challenge us with the gospel afresh.
One young convert in the Post article expressed it well: “Orthodoxy isn’t about us, it’s about God.” That ought to apply to all of us, no matter what tradition we belong to. All Christian worship should center on God, not us. If there’s one takeaway from this report, it’s the need for renewed God-centeredness in our worship.
Call to Intentionality
The appeal of Orthodoxy to young men highlights a hunger for depth, structure, and transcendence in the Christian life. I feel the need to put these statistics in a broader context so we don’t overstate the trends indicated by the headlines, but I do hope evangelicals will heed these stories as a challenge to recover and embody the richness of our own tradition.
Let’s model a faith that’s vibrant, rooted, disciplined, and, above all, centered on God.
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