Welcome back to Shams Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire.

And one of you recently asked in the comments if I would respond to some attacks on the Catholic Church made by a Russian Orthodox priest and YouTuber, Father Moses McPherson. Now, if you've never heard of him, Father Moses is a Protestant convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. He was originally ordained as a priest of the Orthodox Church of America, but left that for some reason to become Russian Orthodox. These days, he does things like making Mr. B. style videos on YouTube.

Today we bought this $2 million mansion, and we're going to transform it into a church.

Hey, that's me, Father Moses, top of our new church building.

He's also, perhaps the most public face of movement amongst extremely online Orthodox

guys, where he's promoting what he calls absurd levels of manliness.

He's a bodybuilder who posts images of his muscles, and he makes videos like this.

A lot of people ask me, Father Moses, how can I increase my manliness to absurd levels?

Well, today we are going to explore those behaviors, which will take you up and take you down.

We have this beautiful chart here that is going to show us where we place modern day activities.

Father Moses even made a chart to measure how hot and holy different women were in a video that thankfully

he has since taken down, but in which he argued that the hottest and holiest women were nuns.

And look, I know that Father Moses doesn't represent all Orthodox. He doesn't represent even

all Russian Orthodox. In fact, when the BBC ran an article on Father Moses and other Orthodox

presenting Russian Orthodoxy as absurdly masculine.

The Russian Orthodox Bishop of London wrote a public letter denouncing this as a distortion of orthodoxy and saying,

I want to say that if you're here because you think that's what we're here to do, then you are a fool.

This is stupidity.

So despite those strong words, it's probably worth pointing

out that Father Moses is part of this kind of changing face of American Orthodoxy. Let me give

you just one data point. Back in 2007, Orthodoxy in the U.S. looked like a normal church.

There were slightly more women than men, but the gender balance was roughly equal.

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