When the hallowed moment finally arrived, Irenaeus couldn\u2019t remember his name. The priest stood over him, a wine-filled spoon balanced precariously in one hand. \u201cIt\u2019s Luke*,\u201d he said, incorrectly. He had changed his name on Lazarus Sunday earlier this year, but hadn\u2019t used it much since. The Priest was new and didn\u2019t know him. After a few seconds, he remembered it: \u201cI\u2019m Irenaeus.\u201d He opened his mouth, and received the spoonful of unleavened breadcrumbs mixed with the communion wine. Then he walked back to his seat in the Agias Sophias, a Greek Orthodox Cathedral on the Moscow Road in West London.<\/p>\n
You could tell Irenaeus, a 23-year-old banker, was a convert. Unlike the cradle Christians, who rocked up towards the end of the service for the Eucharist and a natter over coffee and muesli, Irenaeus arrived on time and sat through two hours of inscrutable Byzantine chanting. He even prayed like an Anglican, leaning forwards with his hands pressed together and crushed into his skull, revealing the cuffs of his starched white shirt and gold Bulgari cufflinks. There were around 400 people in the church, but he was the only one in a pin-striped suit.<\/p>\n
Irenaeus was received into the Orthodox Church in April this year, during a mass baptism<\/a> at the Twelve Apostles church in Hatfield, Hertfordshire \u2014 the nearest church to London with a baptismal pool deep enough to drown a man in. To drown him, and let him be reborn. His head was forced underwater three times. Once for the Father, once for the Son, and once for the Holy Spirit.<\/p>\n The Orthodox Boom has arrived in Britain. That day, Irenaeus was baptised by His Eminence Nikitas, the Archbishop of Thyateira and Great Britain, along with 200 other people. Only three years earlier, in that same service, the Archbishop had baptised merely 13. Next year, he expects 400. \u201cIt\u2019s something that has taken us by surprise,\u201d he tells me, \u201cas if these people were thirsting, and all of a sudden we\u2019ve come with the living waters.\u201d He says that in parishes as diverse as Bath and Birmingham, Falmouth and Edinburgh, the pews are packed with people in their mid-20s. The Orthodox Boom was still too small to be noted by The Bible Society\u2019s \u201cQuiet Revival\u201d report earlier this year, but its author Rob Barward-Symmons tells me that, \u201canecdotally, we are hearing that the Orthodox Church is growing at quite a rate\u201d.<\/p>\n The boom started in America, as such trends often do. A wave of conversions to the Eastern Church swelled there around the time of the pandemic, as the number of adult converts doubled between 2019 and 2022, and is now crashing onto Britain\u2019s shores. A recent New York Times article suggests<\/a> that it has been precipitated by a loose band of online influencers called the \u201cOrthobros\u2019 \u2014 hyper-online, hyper-masculine, hyper-Right-wing Orthodox Christians who have, in most cases, fled a Protestant church which they deemed too irredeemably woke, or woman-led, or amenable to the secular world. The archetypal Orthobro chose Orthodoxy because of its trad aesthetics (the icons, the incense, the Byzantine chants, the twice-weekly fasts). He often quotes the Church Fathers and early Saints, especially when they agree with him \u2014 like Saint John Chrysostom, the fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople, who said that Jews are \u201clower than the vilest animals\u201d. Within the Orthodox Church, the Orthobros are frowned upon \u2014often because they rarely show up to worship.<\/p>\n Does this explain the rising number of Orthodox converts in Britain? Father Nikitas, whose flourishing church in Falmouth has 13 young, male catechumens, doesn\u2019t think so. He is looking to relocate since his church is now \u201ca bit of a squeeze\u201d. But, he tells me, he doesn\u2019t \u201cthink any of [the converts] have been coming for politics. This is what people want it to be who look at it from the outside.\u201d Likewise, one convert tells me that he\u2019s \u201cnever known anybody who has come politically\u201d.<\/p>\n And yet, online preachers are successfully converting people in Britain. In her recent book, Don\u2019t Forget We\u2019re Here Forever, Lamorna Ash describes a conversation with one convert who became Orthodox after watching the YouTuber Father Spyridon Bailey. Not long before, his partner had had an abortion. This created an emptiness, an emptiness which the preacher fills. Father Spyridon is an aging English priest, one who claims to have cottoned onto \u201cthe sexual deviance of Hollywood long before the Harvey Weinstein case hit the media\u201d. On YouTube, he asks whether \u201cTHIS IS THE AGE OF WHICH WE WERE WARNED<\/a>\u201d, \u201cTHIS VERY NIGHT YOUR SOUL MAY BE DEMANDED OF YOU<\/a>\u201d, and \u201cDO CHRISTIANS HAVE A DUTY TO SUPPORT ISRAEL<\/a>\u201d, on a quiet bridlepath in the Shropshire hills. He is extreme, but his emphasis on demons and spiritual warfare \u2014 a belief which, to the secular observer, seems conspiratorial to the point of paranoia \u2014 is commonplace in Orthodoxy. It is also part of its attraction. \u201cFor many people,\u201d Father Damick, an American Orthodox priest, has said<\/a>, \u201cthey\u2019re not so much concerned about whether God exists or not. They want to know about the demons that they actually are experiencing.\u201d Irenaeus tells me that he must fight \u201cthe forces of sin, which are part of life in a post-lapsarian world\u201d. Another convert tells me that \u201cdemons are angels that want to stop you from serving God\u201d. They attack him with \u201cthoughts\u201d. But he will persist: \u201c[Demons] always exist, until the end of the world\u2026 You can\u2019t be like: \u2018I went 15 years without temptation\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n But Father Seraphim, a monk based in a monastery on Iona, an island off the west coast of Scotland, is worried about a different sort-of demon: ideology.\u00a0In a 2024 YouTube video titled \u201c\u2018Protestant Orthodoxy\u2019 and its Demons\u201d, he says that he recently visited a booming mainland parish and despaired at what he saw. Christian Nationalism. Christian Misogyny. Christian War. Christian Murder. Someone told him that an Orthodox Christian is a Christian who is \u201cnot afraid to protect [their] country with a gun\u201d. He is exasperated. This is not Orthodoxy. \u201cIt is beyond low: it is evil, it is demonic, to reduce Orthodoxy to a faith where women are some sort-of second-class Christian, second-class souls, that have to be kept away from education.\u201d He then cites a prophecy made by his namesake, Saint Seraphim of Sarov, an 18th-century ascetic. A time will come when the people will flock to the Church and the pews will be filled with worshippers, the saint foretold. And yet, one would struggle to find a single Christian soul among them. He fears that time has come. Others have noted this trend, even if they\u2019re not quite as concerned. George Lapshynov, a researcher at the think-tank Theos, tells me: \u201cIf I\u2019m being honest, most of it is young people with some reactionary view towards the West, whether it\u2019s LGBTQ+ or fourth-wave feminism.\u201d<\/p>\n