Why can’t we say what we believe?
On distractions, a rejected subscription, and the importance of doubt.
When I asked a colleague to subscribe to my Substack newsletter, he told me he’d rather not, because he was going through a “Taoist phase,” which involved unplugging from distractions. While I understood that he had other things to do, a flicker of self-doubt made me sensitive to the brutal undertones of the word “distraction,” from the Latin “to drag apart.” Not to mention “subscription,” which, when yoked to rejection, turned an invitation into spam, the target of a cleanup app.
A few days later, a mutual friend suggested another reason for the turndown. My colleague still worked in China and had his career to think about. Perhaps that was it; he had started to self-censor, anxious that he might commit some inadvertent online infraction. His jokey allusion to “Taoism” was a coded justification for non-action, nothing to do with yin and yang and the pursuit of spiritual immortality.
Whether or not that was the reason—and it may well not have been—it got me thinking about the contradictory nature of self-expression today. While there have never been such public platforms for expression, people are increasingly cautious about the things they can say, to the extent that vast swathes of human experience are no longer open for discussion. The whole world, it seems, is going through a “Taoist phase.”
Which brings me to the thorny issue of religion. No doubt it’s my education, but addresses to God and Jesus outside a church make me uncomfortable. Especially on TV. As when J. D. Vance in his recent CBS debate with Tim Walz slipped in “Christ have mercy” after learning that Walz’s teenage son had witnessed a shooting incident at a community recreation center. Perhaps the sympathy was genuine, but sneaking the Jesus prayer into a political tussle felt de trop.
Still, it should be acceptable to identify as a believer and talk about religion in public. Except it isn’t, particularly after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, which has divided religious leaders over the issue of abortion. Religion in America has become so wildly polarized that many pro-choice, church-going progressives are keeping mum in case they land in hot water.
The other day, I was put on the spot when someone asked me what I was. “British,” I responded, thinking she meant the accent. But it turned out she was after my religion. Saying it aloud felt unnatural and a bit dishonest, like claiming you play the cello, when the last time you picked up the instrument was in your high school orchestra. Besides, would she know what Orthodox meant? Orthodox Jewish? Russian Orthodox? Greek Orthodox? There’s something forbidding about the word in English, which happens to be etymologically linked to “orthopedic” and conjures images of grizzled beards and bat-black gaberdines.
So, I ended up fudging it with a strategic equivocation; a “you know, it’s complicated” shrug of an answer.
“What am I?” isn’t straightforward—is it ever? I was brought up non-denominational but after leaving the French Lycée attended an Anglican high school, where church attendance was compulsory. As a religious experience it was hardly demanding. There may have been hymns, psalms, Gospel readings, and uplifting sermons, but the fires of Hell had long since been extinguished and a spiritual grade inflation ensured that everyone got straight As, regardless of their conviction (or lack of). Entombed around us, the venerable dead must have groaned at the soft-bellied affability of it all.
After leaving school, I set off on a backpacking tour of Greece, hitching and busing my way across the Peloponnese, and then on to Crete by boat. Back in Athens, I was keen to head north to Thessaloniki and remembered a contact I’d been given; a writer and historian called Kostis Moskoff, whom my father had often talked about. So, I called him up, and he invited me to stay.
A few days later, I was sitting on a terrace overlooking the Thermaic Gulf, drinking coffee with Kostis and Father Simeon, a monk who was visiting from Mount Athos, a center of Orthodox monasticism in northeastern Greece. Later that summer, at the urging of Father Simeon and armed with letters of introduction from Kostis, I went to Mount Athos for the first time, walking from monastery to monastery along vertiginous stone paths above the sea. If you’re going to have an epiphany, Greece is the place to have it.
Exactly ten years later, I was received into the Orthodox Church in a rite known as chrismation, the Orthodox equivalent of confirmation. The sacrament was performed by a priest at the Orthodox Cathedral of the Dormition in Ennismore Gardens, London, which at that time was under the charge of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, a charismatic writer and pastor, who’d originally trained as a doctor, and whose uncle was the composer Alexander Scriabin.
Years passed and life got busy and messy, as it does, and I ceased to go to church. And then one day, I came across a book which Father Simeon had written and given me in Thessaloniki all those years ago. And that’s when I discovered that I had no official certificate recognizing my chrismation. Technically, I had nothing to prove I was Orthodox.
Why did it matter? After all, no one had ever asked me for evidence, and it had been years since I’d attended church with any regularity. But somehow it did, so I set out to find proof.
I soon discovered that the priest who had received me had left the diocese and was no longer in communication with it. Meanwhile, my “sponsor,” or godfather, had died. Disheartened, I asked a friend to drop by the Cathedral, to see if they had any record. While my friend was a native Cantonese speaker, the office was run by thickly accented Russian speakers, which made for a difficult conversation. But the bottom line was, they couldn’t find anything. Apparently, back in the day, the keeping of records by the diocese had been patchy, to say the least. In the end, however, a kindly priest gathered testimony from friends and relations who had been present on the occasion and, on that basis, was able to issue a formal certificate of chrismation.
Now I had the paper, did it mean I could file the evidence of my belief in a drawer and answer “Orthodox” with assurance when someone asked me what I was? Or was this need for proof in fact an attestation of doubt, not of faith? I had acquired the certificate but realized something else in the process: doubt isn’t an obstacle to be overcome, it’s a precondition for meaningful self-expression. As Metropolitan Anthony liked to say, quoting Nietzsche, “one must still have chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”