Categories of identity in the Secular Global West (SGW,TM) center on Race and Sex in an insanely transhuman way.

In the view of SGW, these qualities of identity are essential–inherent to the individual, not subject to question or change by others, and if “minoritized” (supposedly related to the majority of the globe as “people of color” and “queer” — the latter everyone not Christian basically) demand forcible accommodation.

But wait–these characteristics are also not essential! They are not categorizable or limitable by any biology, socioeconomic/cultural class, or tradition.

It reminds me of one of the most annoying TV ads ever.

Like “two minds in one,” SGW identity is a blue-pilled delusion both essential and not essential–a twinned split unity of intense psychological stress, supposedly “revolutionary,” “natural,” based on science, cloyingly cute, and intensely consumerist all at once.

Identity has become a product, as inane and banal as the classic TV ad–comically commercial while proclaiming itself revolutionary, scientific, and natural. Indeed, the ad demurely reflected a nascent sexual revolution, not only in the kiss at the door from sorority co-ed twins to their boyfriends, but in the hidden real-life pregnancy-out-of-wedlock of one of the twins at the time the ad ran.

And today’s identitarian movement, appropriate to its nihilism, is both not a joke and a joke.

It splits self, environment, and perception in ideological schizophrenia. It nurtures totalitarian culture by its mental illness. Essentially anti-Christian in anthropology and strategies, it puts a bulls-eye on Orthodox Christian beliefs and believers. It encourages identifying with passions, of power and lust. It celebrates the sin of Pride, racial and sexual.

In its nihilistic sense of identity, humanhood is reduced to an atomized individual essence of material traits (a paradoxical disembodiment of race and sex), adamant in individual nature while totally malleable to self-will.

This faux substance of modern gnostic (abstract and fundamentally atheistic) identity seems to come from Planet Krypton as in an old Superman comic. It is isolating because it claims to operate outside the relationship with God, Who, as Orthodox Christianity teaches, is good and the lover of mankind, and beyond His Creation.

The purposeful confusion of identity makes race and sex transcendent in an ontological replacement of faith. At once anti-biological and anti-Christian, the ossifying of identifying surface categories as objects of our will advertises “trans-humanness” by ignoring the soul. The new identitarianism ditches cosmology for cosmetology. No offense meant toward cosmetologists, but it offers transcendent meaning to race and sex on the surface, with no meaning at all.

What it does offer is a basis for overthrowing social norms: The individual value of rigid definitions of sexual and racial categories is made politically unassailable. It encompasses multiple sexes and types of relationships, along with customizable racial identities, under the umbrella of marginal. Then it claims for them a central role socially, demanding forced public accommodation by all.

In this, for example, in America a queer international Ivy League graduate student of color receives categorical moral and socioeconomic superiority to a white working-class heterosexual man in a traditionalist religious minority, denigrated as a systemically racist colonialist settler.

Or a privileged Brahman Indian tech-savvy immigrant enjoying elite educational and economic status becomes in America an oppressed “person of color” in America, a mystical category identifying him with an unemployed African-American whose family tree goes back to slavery, and with special career accommodations for his privilege.

And what privileged person of any minority status in this identitarian system will give up their position for someone more in need?

Identitarianism chalks up a gnostic win of will over skin-deep categorizations, for self-advantage. The ideology is skin deep but a nexus for a pretend revolution, while a perpetual source of ethical conflict of interest, seeking advancement in social revolution while keeping to privileged high ground.

Like its racialist partner, queer ideology ignores bodily difference while seeking to remake it, and claims superiority over those in traditional forms of family and anthropology that it labels oppressive, while gaining career success at the expense of those not so privileged.

Revising Marxism While Targeting Christian Tradition

This self-willed confusion of essence and personhood reflects aspects of Marxism revised to fit a post-communist West besotted with comfort and consumer pleasure. For classical Marxism, the collective socioeconomic status of the proletariat was an essence unchallengeable. But it was not any restriction on the fluidity by which a member of the proletariate could remake himself into an individual in the ruling class in Communist systems. The combination of essential and fluid identity inspired nihilistic revolutionary chaos and power-seeking alike in the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Within this “cultural Marxist” model lies a counterfeiting and parodying of Christian theology and anthropology with deeper roots than Marxism. For in Christian understanding, human beings are made up of both body and soul, limited in earthly experience by fallen human nature, yet capable of redemption through the openness of their spirit or nous (the eye of the soul) to God’s grace.

The difference between the Christian view of identity and that of current secular identitarianism, however, lies in the latter’s total focus on self-assertion rather than self-emptying in Christ. Pride becomes a virtue worthy of a month of parades that eclipse old community patriotic celebrations like the Fourth of July or more ancient Church festivals. There are no Humility Parades.

Orthodox Christianity, by contrast, involves self-emptying in Christ, who is understood to be one Person with two natures, fully God and fully man, yet not confused or divided in those natures. Humans find themselves in Christ through the engagement of His human and divine natures in His Person. But humans are not similarly God by nature. You could say that our human nature is conditional on His Person, on our participation in Him, as we are made in Him, according to God’s Image, Jesus Christ. Relationality, not self-assertion, is key.

Totalitarian Identitarianism

The current nihilistic confusion of essence and person in identitarianism ultimately involves what the Soviet dissident writer Igor Shafarevich called the self-destructive mental illness of totalitarianism. Philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that totalitarian cultures involve atomistic individuality, alongside terror, and a “banality of evil” that normalizes violent destruction of humanity. The end result is a destruction of self.

The psychological stress of living as both an individual essence (leading to extreme atomism) and a fluid vessel of one’s own will (leading to the terror of “the ends justify the means”) leads further to what Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as the ethos of totalitarian society: Principles of “survive at any cost,” “only material results matter,” and “the lie as a form of existence,” in which virtual reality replaces personal life (see Part IV of his The Gulag Archipelago).

Thus we see the ultimate psychological unsustainability of both sexual and racial identitarianism in ways of life built around transgenderism (attempting to alter one’s sex and gender in self-centered and consumerist ways) and racialism, by which for example being a “person of color” becomes a category transcending personal or spiritual life including socioeconomic circumstance. Self-identity categories supposedly transcend actual bodily and social experiences of place involving country or nation and family household. The resulting placelessness across generations is a type of polyamorous agglomeration, an ideological universal household that leaves alienation and unaddressed stress in the wake of essentialized lies about one’s self, in one’s feeling that one’s identity is both absolute and defined only by one’s own will. The resulting stress of isolation and the terror of those seeking total verification of their abstracted identity by others marks the recipe of Hannah Arendt for totalitarianism: Atomization plus terror. It also indicates what Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov said: That lying about yourself and to others precludes being able to love, which is hell. For the Devil, as the Gospel said, is a liar and the father of lies.

Non-Chalcedonian Heresy and the Roots of Secular Identitarianism

Only from an Orthodox Christian standpoint can the psychological crisis and totalitarian temptation of identitarianism be completely discerned and disarmed. It is also only in an Orthodox Christian perspective that the roots of this confusion in non-Chalcedonian theological errors can be seen. For the cultural roots of this identarianism lie in the formerly Christian cultures of the West, not originally in Marxism but in heretical developments of Western selfhood long before.

The Council of Chalcedon, held in 451 AD, is called the Fourth Ecumenical Council in the Orthodox Church, one of Seven in the first millennium that are especially regarded as inspired by the Holy Spirit in articulating more fully the dogmatic theology of Christianity (although the Photian Council in the ninth century is sometimes called the Eighth Council). Chalcedon’s main finding again was that Jesus Christ is God, One Person, with two natures, divine and human, unconfused and undivided. This “hypostatic [personal] union” as understood by the Church Fathers, a composite union, gives priority to the Hypostasis of God the Word.

As one explication of the Council’s finding puts it: “The Word was made incarnate by assuming flesh with a rational and spiritual soul and uniting it with His Divinity, in such a way that this eternal Hypostasis of His became also the Hypostasis of the assumed flesh…. enhypostatic character of the assumed flesh”…. [meaning that] “the Word Himself now eternally constitues the Hyposatsis and Person of Christ, the Word Incarnate…. God the Word united these natures in Himself… the Person (that is, God the Word) effects the union.” (Holy Monastery of St. Gregory, p. 23) Thus the Person of God the Son is the Person of Jesus Christ.

This permits the exchange of properties, or attributes “in such a way that the Incarnate Word has a composite Theandric [God-man] energy,” two energies and one Christ acting either Divinely or Humanly, “One Person willing and acting naturally in both Natures” (26). “Since the Divine properties as much as the Human are attributed to one and the same Hypostasis of God the Word, the Word suffers on the Cross in the flesh, and the flesh of the Word is said to be, and is, life-giving.” (27) Thus an essence of human individualism is not saved, but human nature, enhypostasized in Christ in His Incarnation. This is done through the mysteries of the Church and in them the self-emptying in Christ that involves becoming one with God’s uncreated grace.

During and after the Council of Chalcedon, confusion over these issues led to the first major schism of Christianity, between the Orthodox Church and the Coptic and Oriental Orthodox Christians, the latter two stricken with Monophysite and Nestorian heresies respectivley that led them either to overplay or underplay the divine nature of Christ in relation to His human nature. The right balance is important to the nature of human being and its fulfillment in Christ, as understood in Orthodox Christian anthropology. The Non-Chalcedonians regarded “nature” and “person” as the same, while distinguishing between “hypostasis” as essence and rejecting how the Church Fathers redefine that Greek term as person. The net result was to regard Christ as an amalgam of the divine and the human that formed the person, an error in Orthodox Christian teaching. The Hypostasis of the Son in turn became regarded incorrectly as the unity of that amalgam including the person shaped by the coming together of two natures. The proper understanding of the Logos and Son as a divine Person, one in essence with the Holy Trinity, but with two natures, fully God and fully Man, was lost in the confusion of nature and essence.

It is noteworthy that the confusion of nature and essence, along with a wholesale rejection of Christ, marks the secular identitarianism of today in the West.

The Emergence of the West and Compounded Identity Confusion

That first schism was largely forgotten historically in the West whose historical attention focused on the famous Great Schism of the 11th century, in which Roman Catholicism diverged from the Orthodox Church. That split compounded the already mentioned theological issues of heretical Christology among the non-Chalcedonian schismatics and heretics. While Catholicism subsequently subscribed to the Council of Chalcedon, it added elements to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and ecclesiology that in effect encouraged similar heresy to the earlier Schism while compounding the earlier problems further and more complexly.

This occured by adding the filioque to the Creed, stating that the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son (filioque in Latin), which had the effect of subordinating the Holy Spirit to a compound of Father-Son, thus weakening the Triadology of Orthodox Christianity. This made the Father-Son parallel to a combined subject acting on the Holy Spirit as object, creating an instrumentalist binary rather than a unified Trinity. Western theology, following St. Augustine, tended also to draw heavy parallels between the Trinity and human psychology, while expresisng an unbalanced emphasis on the one essence of the Trinity (re-focused on the Father-Son together) while de-emphasizing the distinct Persons. The binarized emphasis in the Trinity came to reflect a heightened individualism in the West, with an abstracted rationalism acting on Creation (and other humans) in an objectifying as well as self-objectifying way. The psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva argued that this modeled hyper-intensive individualism in the West by contrast with the Orthodox Christian East, which continued the earlier Triadology of the Church (Kristeva, 173-218). That hyper-intensive individualism, she argued, was reflected in the emergence of the Papacy centered around one individual, and the divine right of Western monarchies, rather than the model of conciliar governance in the Orthodox Church. In addition, it can be added, that with the Protestant Reformation came an emphasis on governance of Christian bodies by kings who headed Protestant state denominations (as in England, Scandinavia, and Germany), but also on a kind of monarchism of individual believers as their own interpreters of Scripture (resulting in the estimated 40,000 to 60,000 mainly Protestant Christian denominations in the world today, with even further fragmentations for individual beliefs supposedly based on reason).

Theological trends in the West also shifted toward a more academic understanding of grace in Scholasticism. Grace became increasingly defined as created by God, as if in a model of a somewhat random “thunder bolt” approach, by contrast with the Orthodox Christian view of grace as uncreated energy or activity of the fully Triadic God. The latter could metaphorically be compared to a kind of “energy field” sparkling in Creation yet fully divine, distinguished from the Essence of God, but more relational than the individualized Western “thunder bolt.” The conflation of essence and nature in heterodox views, and the diminishment of Christian Triadology into more of a binary model, obscured soteriology in the modern West. Natural law became more of an abstract grid in the West, and not the energized “spark of the love of God in the human heart” in Orthodoxy (Siewers 2016). In this process, the Russian Orthodox Priest-Martyr Daniel Sysoev notes that Western Christianity tended toward Monophysitism in Protestantism, a variety of non-Chalcedonian belief.

Monophysitism involved an emphasis on the divinity of the Christ not properly balanced with the humanity, and encouraged ultimately the idolizing of the individual will as above all. In this error, movements such as Unitarianism and Deism could thrive, as they did in the European Enlightenment. The individual will and reason came to assume a falsely quasi-divine role. At the same time, more fundamentalist forms of Protestantism could emphasize the divinity of Christ in a way that downplayed both his humanity and the historical nature of His Body, the Church. The heresy of modern ecumenism emerged from world Protestantism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, based in the idea found among both religiously liberal and conservative Protestantism that the historical Church had been “lost” to history. An “invisible church” emerged for the tens of thousands of Protestant denominations, and even larger number of Protestant individual believers and Bible readers, to aspire to join. This movement ignored the continuing existence of the Orthodox Church from apostolic times, and the human historical continuity of the Church alongside her spiritual nature. It “lost” the historic Church in a Dispensationalism that often seeks to replace traditional ecclesiology and ideas of Christendom with Christian Zionism and new heretical belief in “the rapture,” or cheerleading for “interfaith” globalization from the standpoint of revolution (“liberation theology”) or neocolonialism (the Eurocentric ecumenism movement), or both. The loss of the a sense of the historic Church accompanies the confusion of essence and person that led to the unbalanced rationalistic individualism of the modern West.

Schizoid Modern Identity and Christian Healing

A mere return to “Western Civ” education in high school and college will not remedy these trends, which are deeply theological and psychological, and hence cultural in nature. Indeed, the confusion of essence and person relates to biblical warnings against the “spirit of Anti-Christ.”

Specifically, in relation to current materialistic identification with a combination of race and sex, Orthodox Christianity can be seen as offering the antidote to secular identitarianism in full belief in Jesus Christ. St. Maximus the Confessor discussed this in his Ambigua 67 reading the “mean” and the “extremes” of the sexes (Siewers 2016). The mean was based in the account of Genesis 1:27, with regard to the creation of man as male and female, upheld by Jesus Christ in explaining the God-given nature of marriage. The “extremes” were in Genesis 1:26 regarding man as created according to the image of God, and Galatians 3:26, in which the Apostle Paul (inspired by God) teaches there are neither male nor female–nor, on the racial-ethnic side, Greek nor Jew–in Christ. Together, these “means” and “extremes” in balance present Christian unity of self. While there was differentiation of male and female by God in anticipation of the Fall, and in our reality today, it was not absolute, but a difference that St. Maximus said was to be overcome in the final restoration of all things. Thus, for example, virtuous holy women in the Church are called properly “manly,” and the Virgin Mary is regarded as the greatest of all saints.

The understanding of race similarly but less deeply was seen as a result of the Fall, mainly in biblical terms of nations and peoples, exacerbated with the destruction of the Tower of Babel. Israel was regarded as a race or a people, which was fulfilled in the Church, for all peoples. Being a member of the New Testament Church, as being a member of the Old Testament Israel, was a matter of subscribing to God’s law, fully realized in Jesus Christ. Protestant Dispensationalism and Christian Zionism remain a confusion of a modern state of ethnic definition, the 20th-century state of Israel, with the biblical Israel, the people or race of Christians today regardless of backgrounds.

The existence of nations or people, as in the so-called “Table of the Nations” in Genesis 10, is part of God’s Providence in our fallen state, and salvation can and does come through communities of nations or peoples. Each nation or people according to tradition had a guardian angel, with the Archangel Michael the guardian angel of Israel or the Church today.

But unlike either Enlightenment Protestant or secular-identitarian views, racial identities are not essentialist in determining salvation, as indicated in Hieromonk Seraphim Rose’s discussion of the dispersion of the peoples in the aftermath of Noah’s Flood and the Tower of Babel (Rose, 356-368). Canaanites, for example, are recognized as saved by their faith in God and by virtuous struggle, even though their ancestor Canaan, son of Ham, was placed under a curse by Noah. Contrary to Protestant-Enlightenment racialism, the “curse of Ham” (actually on his son Canaan) would have affected people mainly in the region of the Holy Land, not Africa, and not those (such as the people of Nineveh in the time of the Prophet Jonah) who became faithful to God.

The Orthodox Christian writer Dostoevsky famously warned against essentializing ourselves or others when his character Elder Zosima said in The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear and Volokhonsky translation):

Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies.

This is a sentiment decidedly at odds with the kind of Western Scholasticism (individualism plus abstract rationalism) that gave birth to our current-day materialistic identitarianism of race and sex.

Elder Zosima’s words reflect the Slavonic definition of catholicity, sobornost, not just universal in spatial terms (as in “world domination”), but in mystical depth of spiritual solidarity (as in “we’re all responsible at least in part for each other’s sins”). With sobornost, we would celebrate humility, not PrideTM.

S.L. Frank, the 20th-century exiled Russian Orthodox philosopher and “Christian existentialist,” described the last century as a time of the “fall of the idols” of Western ideals. The last and most seemingly formidable such idol remaining in the Global West, to use a concept from the Old Testament prophets, is the making of idols of ourselves. This is identitarianism today. Worldly categories of identity, focused on the nexus of race plus sex, promote absolute categories of the “saved” and “damned,” based on materialistic categories of power and self-will. These would extinguish Orthodox Christianity. Frank’s definition of freedom stands out against such will to power: Freedom, he wrote, is voluntary service to universal truth, in the Person of Jesus Christ. (Frank, 135-139)

In Orthodox Christianity, it’s all there in the Christology of One Person with two natures, fully God and fully Man, unconfused yet undivided, Christ Who is our Way, Truth, and Life. Human anthropology is different, but realized in self-emptying in Him. The Body of Christ is the historical and mystical continuing Orthodox Church. As St. Cyprian of Carthage put it, to have God as a Father, you must have the Church as your Mother.

Glory to God for all things!

Works Cited

Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Expanded Edition. Ed. Jerome Kohn and Thomas Wild. New York: Library of America, 2025.

S.L. Frank. The Spiritual Foundations of Society: An Introduction to Social Philosophy. Trans. Bois Jakim. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987.

St. Gregory Monastery. The Non-Chalcedonian Heretics. Trans. Archbishop Chrysostomos. Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1995.

Julia Kristeva. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Hieromonk Seraphim Rose. Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision. 3rd ed. Ed. Hieromonk Damascene. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2024.

Igor Shafarevich. The Socialist Phenomenon. Shawnee, KS: Gideon House Books, 2019.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956. Abridged Edition. Trans. Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willets. New York: Vintage Arrow, 2018.

Alfred Kentigern Siewers. “Mystagogical, Cosmological, and Counter-Cultural: Contemporary Orthodox Apologetics for Marriage.” In Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2016. Ed. David Ford, Mary Ford, Alfred Kentigern Siewers. 353-394.