Technologies for Defeating Demons

Shaw and the Orthobro Challenge

After I posted my review of Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild the other day, I sat here tapping my toe. I kept the essay within some pretty tight parameters and still pushed 4,000 words. And I still didn’t say all the things I could have said, or even the most pressing things on my mind. But after reading a few really insightful public and private comments, I thought, oh heck, let’s just do it.

Let’s have the talk. You know, the one about what’s happening with young male converts and online Orthodoxy.

Photo by Anton Pavlov on Unsplash

You know who I mean. The guy in his twenties or thirties who shows up having consumed hours of Pageau, probably some Jordan Peterson, maybe some deeper (and darker) online masculinity content. He knows the symbolic reading of Genesis, he’s read about hierarchy and cosmic Christianity and traditional gender roles. He’s intellectually sophisticated, genuinely seeking something beyond materialism, has a beard, and... is sometimes kind of difficult.

He struggles with female readers and talks a lot about head coverings. He wants the parish to be more “traditional” in ways that map suspiciously onto online talking points. He’s frustrated that Sunday coffee hour isn’t a symposium on patristic cosmology. He talks a lot about what Orthodoxy should be and seems less interested in what it is—which is mostly ordinary people living ordinary lives in the presence of God.

This is a real pastoral challenge we’re facing, and I don’t think dismissing these guys as “orthobros” is enough. I believe that most of them are genuinely seeking, and many will enter the catechumenate and become faithful members of the Body. But they need help getting from online consumption to embodied practice, and they need help leaving behind the toxic parts of what they picked up online. This isn’t an intellectual exercise for me, either. Manosphere content has been shared (privately) at my home parish.

This is where Shaw’s work has the potential to be a powerful bridge.

If you read my last essay, I talked about how the mythopoetic men’s movement that Shaw inherited was organized around a “we men” collective identity—men gathering to address shared masculine wounding, to retrieve lost authentic masculinity. Even when it wasn’t explicitly reactionary, it created structures that were organized around masculine identity.

Unfortunately, that kind of framing maps really well onto manosphere content. Both are organized around masculine grievance, both locate the problem in modernity/feminism, both offer retrieval of traditional masculine authority as the solution. If you’ve read any of my other work on Nuclear Eros, you’ll know that I repeatedly insist that this kind of framing errs when it turns the particular into the universal. The living, actionable issues that need to be addressed are not “modernity” or “manosphere” or “feminism” but the individual, particular relationships each of us has with other human beings-- other icons of Christ.

Shaw is working this way in Liturgies. He takes the mythopoetic method—story, symbol, psyche-nature integration—and opens it out of the “we men” framework entirely. He shows how these tools work for anyone humble enough to receive them. Each individual chapter is not focused narrowly on masculine initiation, but instead demonstrates how to use story and myth to contemplate the universal human experiences of suffering and cross-carrying and maturity and transformation.

More importantly, Shaw demonstrates how the cosmic and the ordinary are already interpenetrating. We don’t need wilderness retreat or special masculine ritual to encounter the sacred. The Sign of the Cross makes “the daily luminous.” The gift of creation is available in our backyards. The mystery is here, in the particulars of liturgical practice, not somewhere else requiring special symbolic knowledge to access.

This matters for our orthobro problem because it offers a way forward that isn’t just correction.

See, when these guys show up frustrated with parish “normalcy,” what they’re often expressing is real spiritual hunger dressed in problematic frameworks. They are hungry for cosmic Christianity. They do want meaning beyond materialism. They’ve correctly identified that modern secularism has hollowed out reality.

The problem is they think the answer is retrieval—going back to traditional structures, reclaiming masculine authority, fixing what modernity broke. That’s the framework they picked up online, whether from legitimate mythopoetics or manosphere or both.

Shaw has the street cred to offer transformation instead of retrieval. Claiming Bly as his mentor in the introduction, he makes his lineage clear. He’s done the wilderness work, he’s lived the tenets of the movement, and when he found that he still wanted more, a voice spoke to him in a dream. He has moved past “let’s go back to when men were men,” into “let’s be changed into the image of God through the actual practices the Church offers.” Not to reclaim cosmic Christianity from the feminized modern world, but to discover how the daily is already luminous through participation in the divine life.

So here’s what I think we can do with this:

When a young guy shows up who’s clearly been formed more by online content than embodied practice, instead of just correcting what’s wrong with his attitudes (though yes, that’s necessary, it’s usually not our job but that of our priest), we can offer him a better story.

We can hand him Shaw. We can say: “You’re hungry for mythopoetic encounter with reality—here’s what that looks like when it’s actually baptized. When it’s oriented toward theosis instead of gender essentialism. When it’s open to the whole human experience instead of organized around gender wounds.”

We can help him see that what he’s looking for—cosmic Christianity—is already present in what he’s dismissing as ordinary. The annoying kids at Liturgy. The lady who always brings cheese to fasting coffee hours. The guys who talk football instead of St. Maximus. The regular people he’s perhaps struggling to love.

Shaw writes that stories are “technologies for defeating demons.” The demons these guys are fighting include the ones they picked up online—distorted views of women, resentment dressed as tradition, intellectual pride, the need to be special or initiated into secret knowledge.

A story that shows transformation happening through ordinary practice, through humility, through the actual mysteries the Church offers everyone—that’s a technology for defeating those particular demons.

But we can’t just hand them this new book and call it good. We have to find a way to engage with where they are instead of just correcting where they’re wrong. Perhaps we can do this by allowing Shaw to translate their legitimate spiritual hunger out of the language of online frameworks and into the vernacular of lived, embodied experience.

And no matter who is pointing them out, it’s good for us to keep our eyes open to real problems in parish life, in how we’ve sometimes reduced Orthodoxy to ethnic tradition or therapeutic niceness or social club. The cosmic vision is real, and there is a place for the symbolic reading of reality in the Orthodox life. No one is wrong to want that.

But we also know that the devil is a wily guy, good at taking our best intentions and turning them against us. We can look for the right things in the wrong ways—through content consumption or masculine identity consolidation instead of through liturgical practice and cross-carrying.

Shaw’s gift is showing a third way: Not secularized therapeutic Orthodoxy, not reactionary masculine retrieval, but mythopoetic encounter with God through the actual ordinary means of creative liturgical life.

I don’t think Shaw is a magic bullet. Some guys are too invested in their online identities to be reached-- they are held captive by one of the many malign forces of fairyland. Some will need firmer correction than a book recommendation, and need their spiritual fathers to tell them directly: “Your attitude is sinful and you need to repent.”

But for the ones who are genuinely seeking? For the ones who have real spiritual hunger underneath the problematic frameworks? For the ones who might actually be willing to be transformed instead of just validated?

Shaw promises to be a real bridge from where they are to where they need to be: From online consumption to embodied practice. From masculine retrieval to human transformation. From “we men” to “we who carry crosses”-- which is to say, everyone who follows Christ.

And that might be exactly what our parishes need right now.