Understanding the People and the Plot
If you wander into a certain corner of the internet you’ll likely bump into a collection of online Eastern Orthodox personalities running a very loud “we are the only true church” campaign. As in the political realm, many such platforms are built largely upon slogans, posters, and making the headlines. Sophisticated issues tend to be flattened and tactics easily grow manipulative. For those in the know, the bluster can be easily sidestepped, but for the eighteen-year-old college freshman who thinks that Martin Luther was a twentieth-century civil rights activist, when this same young man reads someone confidently assert that “All Protestant churches are seminars,”1 he’s inclined to uncritically embrace the statement. Now to be fair, such rhetoric and personalities do not represent the best of Eastern Orthodox theology, nor does reductionism plague their tradition alone. Unfortunately, however, big tech has not optimized their algorithms to reward theological clarity, but rather rage bait and doomscrolling.
1. Jay Dyer (@JayDyer), “All Protestant churches are seminars,” X, May 16, 2025. Jay Dyer is one of the more popular online Eastern Orthodox personalities.
When it comes to the Eastern Orthodox propaganda machine, real damage is being done, not to the member rolls of other Christian traditions, but to the minds of people indulging their content. Adding insult to injury, the largest swath of those affected are the already isolated and chronically online. When they hear the regular refrain, “The Orthodox Catholic Church is the one true church outside of which there can be no salvation,” they are fearfully inclined to believe it. But they are often uninclined to act upon it “IRL” (in real life) because they lack the scaffolding of basic Christian doctrine. Instead, they keep going back to their favorite forum and the machine is fed. Again, this issue is not isolated to Eastern Orthodoxy, but it has become all too fashionable among many within their camp. In conversation with young people wrestling through these kinds of issues, it’s clear that their communion with Christ is being hindered as they trudge through the quagmire of these internet echo chambers. Folks like this need to be discipled, and those seeking to help them need to properly diagnose the root issue in order to work toward a lasting solution. In this article, I hope to identify this idolatry and chart a way forward.
A Disordered Love
Obsession is easily disguised as love. In his book, The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis tells a brief but illuminating story about a woman named Pam and her departed son. In a conversation with a bright spirit, Pam learns that it is possible to see her son again! All she needs to do is go to where he is. Of course, Pam is elated at the prospect of being reunited with her son, and so she is willing to do whatever it takes. Nothing will stand between this mother and getting her son back–and that is the problem. As the conversation continues, what first sounded like the relatable pleadings of a heartbroken mother begin to show their true colors. In a moment of frustrated honesty, she blurts out: “He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, for ever and ever.” The selfishness of her supposed holy love pierces through. In a later reflection upon the incident, the narrator of the book asks his heavenly tour guide if the problem was that this mother loved her son too much. To this he replies: “There was no excess, there was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much.”2
2. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 98. You can read the full story about Pam in the first half of chapter eleven.
In classic Lewis fashion, he uses this short vignette to highlight something simple yet profound: worshiping anything other than the one true God is the root of all other sins. It is idolatry. This is true of high-handed rebellion and of those “lesser” sins that we tend to downplay. And so it is also true of what can be described as “ecclesial anxiety.” If you’re not familiar with the term, you can deduce its meaning simply enough: It is a crippling fear over one’s chosen church tradition that seeks to find assurance in ecclesial identity rather than in the Head of the church Himself. The phenomenon has seen an uptick recently, in part, due to the orthobro internet subculture. Oddly enough, as more content creators flood the scene with their “expert knowledge,” the level of doctrinal clarity among viewers seems to dip.
On the ground, ecclesial anxiety often looks like people failing to join a local church due to a form of analysis paralysis. What if this isn’t the right church? What if it isn’t even a church at all? What will happen to me if I die “outside of the one true church?” These people do not love the church too much, in fact, they do not love it enough to actually engage in its life. There is a defect in their love that has grown into a paranoid obsession, just like with Pam and her son. And just like the bright spirit Pam spoke to, we need to point anyone wrestling with this towards worship of the true and living God.
Unfortunately, confusion is not the only consequence of this ailment. When someone is in the throes of ecclesial anxiety, the joy of salvation can feel like a distant, even unreachable reality. We know this because a commonly reported fear associated with ecclesial anxiety is the looming threat of a damnation that surely awaits all who mistakenly select the “wrong church.” To be caught in this trap is to be in a place of despondency mixed with terror, not joy and gratitude for an unmerited experience of God’s renewing grace.
As with all sin, its consequences are not confined to the offender. Ecclesial anxiety has the ability to weaken whole families. When a young husband and father finds himself stuck on this hamster wheel, the compounding effects of his anxiety work their way downstream. Church hopping, non-committalism, isolation, etc. are just the initial symptoms. If such habits are allowed to persist, other effects of spiritual atrophy will spread throughout the household. As the head goes, so goes the body.
Christ, the Remedy
How does one disciple the ecclesially anxious? Clarify what Scripture teaches about God, the church, and salvation. This creates hand-holds for the immature or struggling believer to grab as they climb out of the pit. Addressing common distortions of these doctrines is also helpful. The church is not merely a set of dogmas, and we are not saved by possessing perfect doctrine. We are saved by Christ, and he alone is the object of our faith. A wary sheep who believes that the only path away from Hell is through more introspection needs to be taken to Christ. Their longing for peace with God is not wrong, they are simply running in the wrong direction.
Ecclesially anxious Christians need to be taught sound doctrine, using God’s own language. The church is the body and bride of Christ. It is the temple of the living God. It is the assembly of the firstborn. They need to understand God’s love for his church in a way that points them to their Bridegroom. Similarly, they need to be instructed in the basic contours of salvation. They must learn to see that salvation is a gracious act of God, extended to undeserving sinners who repent and place their faith in Jesus. This is Christianity 101, and that is exactly where an ecclesially anxious person needs to be enrolled.
This brings us back to the ultimate remedy for all that is wrong in the world: the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ. He has purchased a people for God by the shedding of his own blood. Christ loves his church. When digested, this truth begins to erode the stronghold of ecclesial anxiety. Yes, as the Nicene Creed affirms, there is only “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” but that church is not delineated by merely one branch of historic Christendom. Salvation is not something that comes by way of church membership, but by grace, through faith, in Christ alone. Neither does the assurance of salvation come by way of one’s denominational identity, but by the fruit of the Spirit as a believer actively grows in their conformity to the image of Christ. The ecclesially anxious person must trade their desire for intellectual certainty, something they feel as if they cannot live without, for worship of the one true God. Jesus himself taught along these lines in Matt. 6:25–33.
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on… your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. . . . 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
Like Jesus, we need to remind people of who God is and what he is really like. He is the omnipotent Creator of the universe and he delights to care for his creatures. This is true not only of his large and impressive creations, like the sun, moon, and stars, but of small things like birds and flowers. If it’s true of the flowers, Jesus says, it’s even more true of us. And if God cares about things like tithing mint, dill, and cumin, how much more does he care about the weightier matters of the law? Things like justice, mercy, and love. When a person spends all of their time hand-wringing over which church tradition to join, they are neglecting to engage with the Christian life in more basic and essential ways. Despite appearances, they are not seeking God’s kingdom or his righteousness, rather, they are seeking a form of self-satisfaction and safety that comes with feeling as if they have made an infallible decision.
Conclusion
God has built the church to be his dwelling place with his people, and he has not surrounded that house with a wall of impregnable doctrine that no one can climb. No, Jesus is the gate into God’s house. Jesus, not one particular expression of church tradition, is the only way to the Father. It is Jesus who saves, and it is Jesus who is building his church. Coming under the care of a faithful, Christ-exalting local body is absolutely vital to the Christian life, and that is difficult to do when stuck in the rut of ecclesial anxiety. By God’s grace, mature believers can help mitigate the spread of this disease by revealing the idolatry that lies beneath its surface, and pointing people to the One who says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).
