More African-Americans Are Turning To Eastern Orthodoxy

Many black Christians join move to Orthodox traditions

After a lifetime in traditional black churches, Robert Aaron Mitchell discovered the sights, smells, sounds and ancient traditions of the Orthodox church.

"I discovered Orthodoxy while I was on the Internet one day back in 2001, and I was so drawn to it that I had to go attend a liturgy," Mitchell says. "I had no frame of reference for these traditions, but suddenly, I felt like this void was filling in my life. I felt like I was finally coming home."

Mitchell, 48, a project manager for AT&T in Detroit, is among a small but growing number of black Americans, many of them professionals, who are joining Orthodox churches. That's the branch of Christianity that split with Rome about 1,000 years ago and is known for colorful icons and the ethnic traditions it preserves in religious customs.

The attraction, Mitchell says, lies in discovering that for thousands of years, Africans played a vital role in the Orthodox world.

The Rev. Moses Berry, an Orthodox priest and pastor of Theotokos "Unexpected Joy" Orthodox Mission, Ash Grove, Mo., began his career as a Protestant preacher, a family tradition reaching back into the 1800s. Then, in 1983, he visited an Orthodox church in Atlanta and was so moved that he retrained to become a priest in the Orthodox Church in America. He also helped to organize the coalition of clergy, scholars and lay leaders coming to Detroit.

"Reconnecting with the Orthodox tradition connects us with the earliest Christian traditions," Berry says. "It means that, when our ancestors were brought here as slaves, they didn't arrive here with just a collection of tribal religions. They didn't all discover Christianity here. In fact, many Africans already were part of the ancient Christian church."

That was especially true for Africans with roots in the eastern part of the continent, Laike-Mariam Misikir, 50, says. An automotive engineer from Ann Arbor, Mich., Misikir is from a family of Orthodox priests that extends back many centuries in Ethiopia. In Detroit, Misikir serves as a subdeacon, assisting priests during liturgies...

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THE CATHOLIC KNIGHT: Talk about getting in touch with your roots -- wow! This is really good news, because ancient African Christianity is so rich in tradition and culture. It makes sense that African-Americans would be attracted to this. It makes a lot more sense than the 'black Muslim' movement we saw back in the 1960s. Africans were Orthodox Christian long before Islam came along. The first black Christians were baptized way back in the middle first century. (It's actually recorded in the Bible -- Acts 8:26-39.) While the first black Muslims didn't come along until six-hundred years later. In fact, many Africans were worshipping the one true God, with dignity and beauty, while northern Europeans were still worshipping the sun, moon and trees. That's just a matter of historical fact. Northern Europe wasn't evangelized by Christianity until the middle 5th century. So there is a lot of cultural recovery to be gained by African-Americans returning to their Christian roots in Africa. The dignity and beauty of the Eastern Orthodox liturgy is second to none. Only the traditional Latin mass of Catholicism comes close, and even then there is some debate. I sincerely hope this movement takes off. It would be a wonderful thing.

The Brotherhood of St Moses the Black is a pan-Orthodox nonprofit organization. Its mission is to minister to Americans the gift of Orthodoxy. In an effort to be good stewards of the manifold grace of God (I Peter 4:10), the organization presents an annual conference that targets those who have little exposure to Orthodoxy as well as the African roots of Orthodoxy. Its vision is to bring Americans closer to Jesus Christ.

Links to Orthodox Churches in the United States:

http://www.oca.org/
http://www.goarch.org/
http://www.copticchurch.net/

America Is A Masonic Nation

THE CATHOLIC KNIGHT: I always get a chuckle when I hear Evangelicals tell me that the United States of America was founded as a "Christian nation." No, I tell them, that's what it was BEFORE the American Revolution, when the colonies were ruled by a Protestant Christian king. After the Revolution, the colonies ceased to be Christian, and became the world's first Masonic nation! Granted, America's founding fathers were cooperative with Christians, mainly because they had to be, but don't think for one second that those same founding fathers had any intention of America keeping any trace of a Christian form of government. The founding fathers agreed that the moral foundations of religion were useful in building the country, but they kept it strictly to a moral understanding of the Christian religion, as all good Masons do. The idea of American government actually recognizing the real authority of any particular Church was repugnant to them. Of course, most repugnant to them was the Catholic Church, which the founding fathers were determined to keep in it's place. Need I remind my readers that following the American Revolution, Catholics suffered some of their greatest indignities at the hands of those who claimed the highest loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and the American Revolution.

Freemasons don't rule America in the literal sense, like a king might rule his subjects, but they do rule America in principle. In fact, the United States was founded on Freemasonry, and thus it is the world's first Masonic Nation. The idea being that Freemasons rule America through it's system of government, designed and ordered through Masonic principles. The idea of democratic republicanism (popularly and incorrectly referred to simply as "democracy") is Masonic in origin, a product of the Enlightenment era, which opposes Christian monarchy, the foundation of western civilization.

I want to make this very clear. Western civilization was founded on Christian monarchy. Kings and queens were subject to the ecclesiastical authority of the Catholic Church, which had both the power to coronate them and excommunicate them. By coronating them, the Church gave them power. By excommunicating them, the Church diminished their power, and sometimes dethroned them entirely. Thus western civilization was ruled by a Christian system of government during the middle ages. It was only after the Protestant Reformation that we start to see significant problems with these monarchies, which of course gave birth to the Enlightenment era and the rise of the Freemasons. The Freemasons in turn toppled the monarchies, or at the very least diminished their authority, thus giving us democratic republicanism.

The problem with democratic republicanism, besides it being an unChristian form of government derived from ancient Pagan principles, is that it always leads to socialism. We can see this in various degrees in democracies throughout the world, and even here in the United States, which continually slides deeper into socialist rule.

Many Catholic Americans don't understand the intrinsically anti-Catholic nature of Freemasonry. You have to understand that in America, Freemasonry has already accomplished most of it's goals. The government is totally Freemason. The democratic road to socialism is well underway, and nothing less than a total collapse of Washington DC can change this. Therefore, there is no need for Freemasons to work so hard in the United States. Most of their work is already finished. The primary function of most American Freemasons is now mainly fundraising, to help spread Masonic ideas around the world. In Europe Freemasonry takes on a much more openly anti-Catholic role, as it continually tries to undermine the influence of the Catholic Church there.