Great and Wonderful Days
“You can enter the old world through your new-world parish, where the harsh rules have remained and the old Russian princes live on as Orthodox priests…”
Daniel Sandoval is the pseudonym of a 21-year-old undergraduate studying History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His current employer, a newspaper, prevents him from writing for other publications.
The last six months have revealed the existence of a Chicagoland Century in modern Christianity. We have seen the birth of a new pope who dropped abruptly from Dolton’s once-fertile loins and the death of the other most famous American Christian, Charlie Kirk, who grew up in Arlington Heights — a northwest Illinois suburb where there are very little “heights” both topographically or otherwise to speak of. There’s Kirk and Pope Prevost, but then there are the others: Christian nationalist Nick Fuentes who was known infamously on the local Model UN circuit when he was in high school; Russell Vought and Ruth and Billy Graham who all spent their formative university years in Wheaton, Illinois; and then there’s the Pope’s anti-woke brother who grew up in the city but now lives in Florida and had an active Facebook presence.
To diagram this idea, I envision something like a map of 1913 Vienna superimposed on Northeastern Illinois: around Arlington Heights is the late Charlie Kirk, the Pope on the periphery of South Chicago in Dolton, his brother — I assume — placed squarely in his former residence of a ranch-house somewhere in the corporate-park flatscape of the south suburbs with a “no solicitors” sign on the glazed window, Fuentes to the west in La Grange, and the Grahams and Vought at their alma mater Wheaton College, which in 1978 the New York Times called the “Vatican of Evangelicals.”
The Wheaton Vatican, Charlie Kirk, Nick Fuentes — they are all fixtures on the current spectrum of conservative Republican Christianity, and they are all products of this same region. Chicagoland is a place where one of the biggest and most chaotic cities sharply meets the suburbs, where dramatic segregation makes it so that people of different colors rarely meet each other but talk about each other a lot, where liberal, nominally secular machine politics are both historically and currently seen as the root of problems like crime and corruption. It’s the perfect laboratory for reactionary politics. The counterculture is pure and toughened, lean and mean from years on the front lines, from practicing stubborn oppositional politics with little to show for it. Now, with the current federal invasion of the city, they have their vengeance.
As American Christianity grows older, it must reckon with its own schisms beyond the old-hat Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox divides, becoming more uncompromisingly political. These aforementioned figures — though they hail from the same religion and the same corner of the United States — are fighting in their own ways for the hearts and minds of the spiritually hungry people who live in places like the suburbs. Around the usually affluent Chicago suburbs, earthquakes and tornadoes don’t reach; grand spires or cathedrals are not built (at least anymore); and poverty and automobile accidents are the only near-dangers. Some of these hungry people from the Chicagoland area (but also other states, Ireland, or Quebec) can be found together in suburban Deerfield for the Christian magazine Touchstone’s annual conference. This year’s theme: “Great and Wonderful Days.”
Trinity International University is dwarfed in fame by neighboring evangelical powerhouse Wheaton College. Whereas Wheaton could be a movie stand-in for Bates or Bowdoin or some other last-name, East-Coast college, Trinity looks a bit like a Minnesota rehab facility, and more sober. I visited on a Thursday evening, the first day of the three-day conference, and was not expecting it to be booming with students, but there were altogether maybe six people in the library, in addition to the very kind African clerk who greeted me with a booming, “Hello! Welcome to the library!”1
A deserted Thursday evening may actually have less to do with the fact that Trinity is a Christian divinity college than with the fact that its undergraduate programs have been mostly shelved, as a neat man in a three-piece suit and posh glasses told me. When I tried to follow up on another rumor — that the Touchstone Magazine Conference would be the last event to be held in the University’s Olsen Chapel — he confirmed that too, adding that the university would be moving to British Columbia come next year. Another rumour told in incredulous tones — that the campus would be sold to a tech company — went unconfirmed.
In the evenings, the sloped side of the barely quarter-mile campus was coated in brightness as the setting sun shined on the spire of the A.T. Olsen Chapel like a sundial. The building seemed to have a capacity of around 250 to 300 people who filed in right on time and all at once, in keeping with an emailed directive to not arrive early so as to not overwhelm a staff of folksy older women and guys with beards and hipster glasses working the desks. The chapel comfortably fit the conference population of mostly middle-aged attendees, a smaller proportion of which was young men, and an even smaller share — ten at most — of women under the age of forty.
Touchstone counseled every speaker across the three days of the conference to end their speeches with marching orders for attendees to take home in preparation for different tests — chief among them the great and evil push towards transhumanity, defined as the attempt to transcend humanity through both technology and gender. The first clarion call came from Douglas Farrow, a theology professor at McGill.
Farrow is something of an enfant terrible of the Canadian intellectual sphere, which is impressive in its own right considering the outsized influence and attention paid to another conservative firebrand, Jordan Peterson, who formerly taught to the south of Farrow at the University of Toronto.
“What are we left with?” Farrow asks a crowd of people who seem to, from my early conversations, already think the world is ending but appear to be a little shocked at it actually being articulated. “With Hume and Bentham, emotivism and utilitarianism, a pincer movement that so constricts the flow of moral goods on which civil society depends that only the ruthless prevail.”
For a man who seems to be so concerned with his own long arc of history — a revanchist historical conservatism — Farrow’s railings are very much steeped in the myopia of the current events cycle: chief among them the killing of Charlie Kirk, whose assassination he cited as an example of society becoming more bloodthirsty. The day is coming, he says, when a man will “kill you and think he is offering service to both of you.”
“Never were men more dishonest or unreasonable, I suspect, than they are today, in the West,” he said on the first night. Someone coughed and a great nervous shifting happened in the seats.
Attendees are the now-Orthodox, the double converts (from Protestant to Catholic to Orthodox Christian), the more timid Anglicans, the Lutherans (who told jokes involving knuckleheads called Sven and Jari), and the priests from all these sects, who float in their robes as they move toward the complementary plates of cheese and crackers during the intermissions.
All these people — barring the priests — are more generally divided among the non-converts and the converts. The non-converts, people born into their religion, seemed to keep to themselves; they tended to be severe-looking older people who, from what I could tell, didn’t really want to talk to me, and when I tried, were a little coy. The converts, though, were young men. The ones I talked to were all formerly Protestant in some form, and, despite converting to the Christianity of the East, all non-Slavic.
My friend’s father and a group of once-Amish guys told me how difficult it is to convert over plates of provided Chex Mix at an after-conference reception. Conversion is also incredibly serious, which I was sternly reminded of when I asked if there were similarities to the Seinfeld episode in which George converts to Latvian Orthodoxy to impress a girl.
My friend’s dad — a middle-aged man with a trim beard who started on his journey when he stopped one day at a monastery on a motorcycle ride — laid it all out for me: You find a local church and go to services. That seems easy enough, but as anybody who has been will tell you, many services are conducted in other languages, especially Old Slavonic — which is itself not spoken outside of the church. Other than that hurdle, there’s also the struggle of integrating into a church that was founded for and by now-dwindling Eastern European communities that are usually rather elderly and not altogether famous for any sort of Balkan conviviality.
The initial process of conversion is letting the otherworldly language and ominous chanting wash over you, becoming dignified by the faith in a dark place untainted by the incessant buzz of the highway and ignoring the cellular device on your person. I got the impression that this seed of affinity, this hunger — if it is truly sincere — cannot be taught but instead must be caught, whether that is by the Byzantine aesthetic that has enough gold and darkness to allure even the most non-spiritual or by the hypnotic silence of a church asleep between services.
Then you find a priest, usually Eastern European (and always a man), and talk to him a while to start your “catechism.” Catholics might observe similarities to their own “catechism.” It is basically very similar, consisting of a period of intense religious education to build up knowledge of, understanding of, and connection to the faith. Sometime later, after a seemingly enormous amount of studying and practiced devotion, you get baptized and Vanya’s your uncle.
Everyone I met who was Orthodox, either of the newer “American Orthodox” sect or of others more closely connected to the old countries, seemed to appreciate the difficulty and discipline required not only to convert but also to practice.2 It seems like that’s the whole point. Orthodox Christians are not looking towards religion in the older born-again sense; at least they don’t seem to desire weightlessness, or even happiness, necessarily. Whereas growing numbers of born Catholics and Christians — myself among them — feel alienated by the unwillingness of certain churches to reform and adapt to modern gender and social norms, these men relish the firmness. “I like it because it hasn’t changed,” I was succinctly told.
The formerly Amish men at the conference were quiet until you got them to open up a bit with surgical jokes. It helps if you know them well enough beforehand to know that they tend to like basketball and that they likely grow potatoes because potatoes can grow anywhere where there’s soil and even rocks. But one, who seemed to be less taken with casual conversation than his friends (one of whom had traveled across the country recently to attend the Kirk memorial), wistfully recalled the church’s similarities with his former life. He drives to church now and uses a Samsung, but he maintains his religiosity with both fervor and determination, or at least enough to show up to a conference like this where the people are serious and the faith is strong.
You’re welcome in, as the conversion statistics and the plurality of religious backgrounds show, but they’re not waiting for you. To convert, the Orthodox Christians in training have to prove themselves. There is no missionary simpering for their commitment. Suburban life becomes “remystified.” You can enter the old world through your new-world parish, where the firm rules and traditions have remained and the old Russian princes live on as Orthodox priests, men with long white beards who can marry, drink, and hold aloft the standards of nobility in a secret old language.
In line for lunch one day I overheard a guy talk about the “coming struggle against the devil.” He would tell me later about the anger that seeped into his children’s eyes when he took away their screens, which to him was due to nothing less than “demonic forces.”
Not everything is tongue-in-cheek when it comes to the “great and wonderful” motif; there is a great sense at the conference that the things that are happening in the United States — the push towards the coldly technological, the mass feelings of alienation — will vindicate Christianity, or at least these very old forms of it, once again. In an attempt at extreme sincerity, for the elimination of irony, what was said at the conference tended to sound a little dramatic. But there was a palpable sense of preparing for some sort of conflict, a war they feel they will eventually win with God’s help, but one they feel the need to fight anyway.
Touchstone’s ideas seem akin to the wonky theological Catholicism of JD Vance but are best articulated by the movement’s frontman and cultural commentator Rod Dreher, a man who converted from his Protestant background to Catholicism and again to Orthodox Christianity.
Dreher lives in Hungary by way of the American South and has written books with subtitles like “The Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation,” “A Manual for Christian Dissidents,” and “Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.” When asked why they came from Pennsylvania or Virginia to stay at a La Quinta for a three-day theology conference, many people told me that Dreher was the main draw. He has kept one foot in Europe and one in North America, places he finds currently intolerable in different ways. A defender of the Orban regime, he believes that civil war against the forces of Islam could come to Europe and gave a speech later in the week talking about Great Replacement theory, which he finds reasonable and misunderstood. I made an oath to myself that I would not talk to him. But I was coincidentally close enough to hear his conversation with a priest.
I was sitting at the back of the chapel, minding my own business and jotting in the small leather-bound notebook the conference gave out along with a conspicuous name tag, when all of a sudden I saw him, the white whale himself — the face behind the tweets, which to me represent his most notable and prolific works. He looks a little different from his online photos. He’s let his hair grow out wavily, and he’s not wearing the dandy scarf he’s often pictured wearing, nor is he wearing his Joycean oval glasses. He comes rushing over to a man who is very clearly an Orthodox priest — long beard, long black frock, weird hat. Both of these men are excited to see each other. He, Rod Dreher, knows this priest, and this priest knows him. He goes up to this priest and they exchange pleasantries.
Everyone I met at the conference seemed to say they’d been reading Dreher for, like, twelve years, as in the case of one evangelical pastor I talked to, or, in the words of my friend’s father, “I read Crunchy Cons, and I said, that’s me! I’m a crunchy con!”3
And Dreher knows he has fans. Instead of saying his name and who he was when he was summoned to the podium at one point to introduce somebody else, he simply started with “in my book…” assuming that everyone would know — one — who he was and — two — which book he was talking about. And Dreher would be right in that regard, with the A.T. Olsen Chapel being one of the few places in the world where he would not be too vain in making that assumption.
“I gotta show you something, Father, that happened to me. It was the coolest thing ever.”
He pulls out his phone — the “pocket devil”4 — and starts swiping and saying, “let me see…” and doing that thing that older people do where they hold the phone on their belly, and the priest is kind of smiling awkwardly and very lightly rocking back and forth on his heels. I’m in awe.
Then he finds it: “I was at a bingo night at a bar and the bartender tells everyone to stop.” He plays the video, and lightly out of his phone’s speakers, I hear…the national anthem.
“Isn’t that great?” he asks in his down-home drawl, which I’m sure he has been gussying up a bit now that he’s back home. The priest, gushing, says, “That’s so wonderful!”
“And not one hint of irony!” Dreher exclaims.
Ross Douthat has said the Left of this nation should be more fearful of a post-religious Right than a religious Right. Maybe he’s missing something. To me, Rightward politics tend to inevitably gravitate towards religion, whether it is sincere or not. Almost all of the people I met at Touchstone were converts, many of whom were religious before converting to Orthodoxy or something else and some of whom had not been religious before their conversions. Ever present was talk of a need for a Christian-inflected social conservatism, of a pronounced desire to “retvrn” to uninterrupted big family meals, ornate classical religious architecture, traditional gender and sexuality and a clean family Bible. And, despite all this lip service to the great merging of social Christianity and conservatism, just mere miles away, the city’s Latino residents, among the biggest religious populations in this country, were being harassed, pepper-sprayed, brutalized, and persecuted by ICE agents.
At no time were the words “kindness” or “charity” mentioned before me at the conference — a silly (but I think ultimately illustrative) tally I kept in my notebook. But I did hear the name “Charlie Kirk” at least five times a day. Paul Kingsnorth, a visiting philosopher, asked the crowd to take out their phones and turn them over. As I sat at the back of the auditorium, I saw hundreds of screens flip towards me in unison, showcasing the bitten apple logo — “Adam’s apple” — before adding that the first MacBook cost $666.
Gone is any pretense of a universal and boundless kindness in this new Christianity. Matthew B. Crawford, a Touchstone guest, professor, and motorcycle mechanic, spoke in his speech about believing humanitarianism to be markedly “feminine,” a genre of political sentimentality that has led to a crisis among the young men of our age — an idea echoed and rationalized by other Right-wing theology commenters like JD Vance who have struggled mightily to craft a theological hierarchy of Who You Do and Don’t Have to Be Kind To.
“Daniel, are you a warrior?”
I stopped walking and stepped to the side to let the crowd of about 200 old people leaving the Olsen Chapel get out ahead of me and to collect myself before I started really talking to this guy. He was a fair bit taller than me but looked my age. His straight brown hair was parted neatly in the middle. He wore a tan button-down and what seemed to be heavy boots. He sort of lifted his feet as he walked, and as he did, I noticed an intensity of movement that betrayed what I thought to be affectation — robotic and soldierly.
“A what?”
“A warrior. For Christ.”
And his eyes — hard and unblinking. I couldn’t tell you their color because he was staring through me, maybe sizing me up, and I could only avert my gaze. He would have seemed more childish if he wasn’t towering over me, unmoving.
“A warrior,” he repeated.
By this time we were in the lobby of the chapel, past that plaque for the 2006 “Robert and Susan Andringa Award for Advancing Racial Harmony that Trinity had won, and he started glancing around. A smile crept up his aquiline face as he stared me down. He wouldn’t extrapolate until I asked him outright.
“My friend and I are trying to start something…to turn young men into warriors, physically, mentally, and spiritually. A school.”
On instinct I covered my name tag with the leather notebook the magazine had given out and made a mental note of his.
I didn’t make it immediately clear to him that I was a writer covering this event when we started talking like I had done with most other people I met, nor did I make it clear I was somebody agnostic about religion for whom this whole gathering was strange and slightly disturbing. We walked further, past the booksellers at the edge of the chapel, through the mix of lilting Minnesotan and miscellaneous southern accents reverberating in ecumenical harmony.
“My friend,” he intoned downward to me, “is an ex-Navy SEAL, in the mountains.”
Would I like to join?
I had told him I was a Catholic looking for something, though I was not exactly sure what, which made me something of a rarity in terms of denominational representation at this conference. I wanted so badly to say yes! to his offer. While I was at it I wanted to ask, “What mountains?” The highest point within, say, a hundred miles of us was Charles Mound, and calling that a mountain was about as wrong as calling me a “warrior for Christ.”
But we were outside now, in the dark. I had a name tag of my first and last name on my chest, and very few people knew where I was. I had to spit out that I had to think about it, and actually it wasn’t for me, an idea which — to a fault — I had internalized the whole conference. And with those words, I saw the silly dream of a grander story peter out.
He said this to me while on the phone with someone, to whom he also said “Hello! And Thank You For Calling The Library!” in the same jolly voice.
I try to tread lightly because, as anybody who knows about Eastern European geopolitics knows, there is a lot of conflict.
At one point I was texting my grandmother and ex-girlfriend (they are two different people), and a large old man in overalls and a blazer chided me for using the “pocket devil.”
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Interesting read, thank you for sharing your experiences. The line "the push towards the coldly technological, the mass feelings of alienation — will vindicate Christianity, or at least these very old forms of it, once again," stood out to me, as it's hard to imagine the coldly technological ever standing in for empathy and kindness. But I suppose that's why there are different interpretations of Christianity.
Yes, we all wish you’d been able to go to that mountain top for the greater story! But what you write here reminds me very much of a story in the Atlantic a couple of years ago highlighting Phoenix and a Charlie Kirk event. The same scary vibe, the same odd characters. Now Kirk is dead but it seems there are many who would replace him. From reading your piece, I understand the unintelligible a bit more, light through a stage scrim.