Nevertheless, it’s there. What is the source of its appeal? Let me think about what drew me to it as a young man. When I was around 14 or 15, I got rid of the Christianity in which I was raised. My folks were the kind of Methodists who went to church on Easter and Christmas, and every now and then throughout the year. Our Christianity was cultural, in the sense that Kierkegaard said in his ‘Attack Upon Christendom’. I forget his exact quote, but he basically said that when people are counted as Christian simply by virtue of having been born into a Christian society, then Christianity effectively ceases to exist. His point was that Christianity made constant demands on the believer — that it was something radical, that it required constant conversion. It would be a few years before I read Kierkegaard, but when I finally encountered him as a college student, I recognized the Christianity that I had left behind for agnosticism.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As a teenager in the 1980s, I thought Christianity was either the boring middle class at prayer, or it was Jimmy Swaggart’s hellfire Pentecostalism. Neither one spoke to me. It wasn’t until I stumbled into the Chartres cathedral at age 17, on a tour group, that I was confronted by a form of Christianity that overwhelmed me. Nothing in my life in small-town America in the late 20th century had prepared me for the grandeur of God made manifest in that Gothic cathedral. What kind of Christianity inspires men to build this kind of temple? That was probably the first time in my life that I was truly struck by awe, in the old-fashioned sense. I remember standing there, in the center of the labyrinth, looking all around at the stained-glass windows, the arches, and the vaults, thinking, “God does exist — and He wants me.”

I didn’t walk out of that cathedral as a Christian, but I did leave on a search. I read Thomas Merton’s “The Seven Storey Mountain,” which knocked me flat. I saw a lot of myself in pre-conversion Merton — an intellectually  curious, slightly louche aesthete — and, along with him, I was completely seduced by the austere, mystical Catholicism he found in Trappist monasticism. It was so radically different from anything I had encountered, or imagined. Eventually I converted to Catholicism, and quickly learned how badly dated Merton’s book was. He wrote it in the 1940s. The Catholic Church that won over young Thomas Merton in fact barely existed anymore.

Of course from a strictly theological perspective, the Catholic Church was, and is, one and the same. But from an experiential point of view, contemporary Catholicism is a lot like contemporary Protestantism. That was a hard thing to get used to, but I did it. A decade after my conversion, I was living in New York and working for National Review. I was covering the Catholic abuse scandal, and just reeling from it all. My wife and I paid a visit to friends in suburban Maryland, the Orthodox Christian writer Frederica Mathewes-Green and her husband, a priest named Father Gregory. We attended the first half hour of the Divine Liturgy at their parish. It was so incredibly rich, aesthetically and spiritually. I remember thinking that this is what I thought I was converting to in Catholicism.

After a short while, though, we had to leave to go up the road to the Catholic parish to satisfy our Sunday obligation. We arrived at some early Seventies church that looked like Our Lady of Pizza Hut. We took our place in the pews, and, having just left an Orthodox parish, with colorful icons covering the walls, long tapered candles burning, and clouds of incense wafting high in the rafters, I was struck cold by the utter bareness of the place. It wasn’t the kind of plainness that conveys spiritual power and depth, as I’ve seen in some Catholic monastic chapels, but rather the absence of something. It reminded me of a dollar store at the end of a going out of business sale. The mass — all altar girls, by the way — was so puny and half-hearted. The elderly priest was delivering his final sermon before retirement, and all he could talk about was how much he looked forward to kicking back in Florida.

We left after the homily to go back to the Orthodox parish. My wife and I both had tears in our eyes. I started to speak, but she said, “Don’t say it.” I didn’t say anything. Three years later, having relocated to Dallas, both of us crushed by the abuse scandal and the total loss of trust in Catholic authority, we took refuge in the Orthodox cathedral there. We were so raw and broken that neither of us knew if we would ever be able to trust the institutional church again. But we knew at least we could rest in the beauty and richness of the liturgy and the church interior itself. After a year, we converted, and never looked back.

There is a very American moralistic distrust of aesthetic beauty and ritual in worship. You see it even among Catholics, who ought to know better. We seem to have a suspicion that you can either have moral rigor and doctrinal seriousness, or you can have beauty, but not both. When you go to church in Europe, though, you discover how stupid that is. Of course all that beauty is going unseen and unloved by the masses that don’t go to church, so we have to be careful not to over-emphasize beauty. But Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, said that best argument the Church has for the Christian faith is its saints and its art. His point was that goodness incarnate (the saints) and incarnate beauty (sacred art, music, and architecture) open the door for truth. That’s certainly what happened to me. I was incapable of taking seriously apologetic arguments for the Christian faith, but the majesty of Gothic cathedral architecture dramatically challenged my intellectual resistance to Christianity.

And so I think this is why a certain kind of person really is drawn to the older, ritualistic, aesthetic forms of Christian worship. It speaks to something deep inside us, and, I think, it is a kind of rebellion against the ugliness and barrenness of modernity, especially within the churches. Plus, an expression of Christianity that appeals to our whole body, and all our senses, not just to our head, and our abstract reason — that’s really powerful. I’ve been Orthodox for as long as I was Catholic — 13 years — and I’ve been struck too by how attractive Orthodoxy is to men. I finally figured out that unlike most Western churches, Orthodoxy emphasizes self-overcoming, with a strong emphasis on asceticism. Expecting people to master their passions, and learning to do so through ascetic exercises like fasting — you can’t imagine how liberating that is when contrasted to therapeutic Western modes of religion, which so often emphasize feminine traits and modes of expression. Don’t get me wrong — Orthodoxy is not “masculinist.” But it seems to me that it’s more balanced, and it gives men something to do, not just feel.

I have to say, though, that in America, I wonder about the class implications of all this. Here’s what I mean. If you are going to become an Orthodox Christian, or a liturgically traditional Catholic, you are probably going to be the kind of person who is a strong seeker, and willing to be thought weird for the sake of finding God. Ancient Christian weirdness is acceptable, somehow, to intellectuals and aesthetes, in a way that low-church Protestant weirdness is not. I’ve been at monasteries where I’ve kissed the skull of a long-dead Orthodox elder, and I’ve thrown wax facsimiles of body parts onto the bonfire outside of the Portuguese basilica at the Fatima apparition site. Most people outside my Orthodox and Catholic circles would find that sort of thing to be high-octane crackpottery. But you know what I would never, ever do? Go to a Pentecostal megachurch and raise my hands high in the air. I don’t look down on those who do — it’s just unthinkable for me. Way, way too weird. It kind of embarrasses me to admit this, but Christians like me prefer our religious self-marginalization to be, I don’t know, literary. So I think we have to be aware that there might be some snob appeal in all this. I don’t think it is a significant factor at all — taking the old religion straight, and espousing its reactionary social beliefs, as one must if one is not merely an aesthete playing church, is no way to advance socially. Still, I think for some of us, we have to be careful about a temptation to a particular sort of spiritual pride. Oh Lord, I thank Thee for making me a pious weirdo, but not like those fundagelicals.

That said, there is just so much depth and beauty in ancient liturgical Christianity that you feel that you could never touch bottom. It’s like being in the Burning Bush — you are on fire, but never consumed. In Orthodoxy, priests are always referencing the early church fathers in their homilies. Not only am I often amazed by the wisdom and poetry of these saints, but I love that in the Orthodox church, in the ritual prayers, in the icons on the wall, and in the homilies, the memory of 2,000 years of Christian life and worship is kept front to mind. This is true whether you are a professor or a peasant. That continuity is also a great blessing of Orthodox worship, in this world of constant flux. There’s a joke Orthodox people tell:

But it’s true! While everybody else is setting up smoke machines and strobe lights, or rewriting their hymns one more time to be ‘relevant,’ Orthodox priests are swinging the censers like they’ve done for many centuries, and the choirs are singing the same hymns that have been passed down for many, many generations. That is so comforting. It’s such a relief to not have to remake things in every generation, simply to receive what has been preserved for you. It’s a very un-modern, un-American thing, and that’s what makes it so attractive. I hasten to add that it’s not that Orthodox believers are holier than any other believer, but it’s that the Orthodox tradition, both liturgically and spiritually, has given us a reliable map and proven tools to help us along the pilgrim road to unity with Christ. Why would we not use them?