John Kiriakou: CHURCH, STATE, BYZANTIUM with Jay Dyer

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Yeah, I wrote myself a note uh as as you were speaking because you made me think that maybe there are lessons that we can learn from the Byzantine Empire. It failed in the end, but what lessons do you think can be drawn from this historical relationship between the church and the empire? They were two separate things with separate leaderships, but they were one as part of the nation state. Is that practical in today's world? Well, this this is probably the thing that would most go against the grain of everything that people think, right? This idea that there could be a uh you know a synergy or symphonia between church and state uh is very antithetical to everything after the enlightenment. Um and with good reason because in my view the papacy was very abusive to this uh you know idea of the not separation of separation of powers. It's not that there was this supposedly separation of church and state, but depending on what you mean by that, basically there's a sphere that the church is involved in and there's a sphere of life that the state's involved in and there might be some uh you know overlap there, but they're two heads of the same body of the Byzantine eagle is the idea. So I think that there will always be a tendency to move in that direction because in my view there's no such thing as a purely neutral uh view of the world and other religions like Islam u you know they don't see a separation between the sacred and the secular or at least they don't tend to the the more orthodox Muslims don't tend to see it that way and and a lot of people in the west I think would see that as a weakness but they might actually be a strength because it allows their people to really push their religion in every area of life. And I think people in the West are going to have to make a decision between a type of Christianity that is all-encompassing and does have an impact on the civil state or they're going to have to choose something like that because the enlightenment idea of everybody having a kind of a a neutral uh almost deistic freemasonic enlightenment principle of well we can all just agree that we should have freedom of religion, freedom of speech. these sort of negative liberties. I just don't think that's going to work in the future to give adequate place for the relationship of church and state. I think that people are going to be beginning to say, "Well, wait, wait a minute. So, I've got Christianity over here. If Christianity so-called is telling me that the state should be atheistic and secular, but privately I can have my own private Christianity, then I've got Islam over here where God is Allah is the Lord of area of life." Well, >> this kind of makes a little more sense than this idea that God is only the Lord of your personal life, but he has nothing to do with the state. This is literally I mean, I don't know how people in America and the West came to this conclusion, especially the Orthodox world. This is like Quakerism. This is Robert Roger Williams's Baptist stuff.

[00:02:54]It blows my mind that the whole history of the church is an idea at least of symphonia once the church was not no longer persecuted after Constantine and Theodosius. Uh so yeah, I tend to take a pretty uh you know unpopular stance that uh Americanism is not necessarily the history of Orthodox Christianity.

[00:03:13]>> When I was studying Islam in college, literally the first thing that we were taught was that Islam is a religion, but not just a religion. It's also a social construct. It's an economic system. It's a way of life. It's everything.

[00:03:26]>> It's law. It's also >> and it's also law. That's exactly right.

[00:03:30]How do you think Orthodox Christians should view economic systems?

[00:03:36]Capitalism, socialism, communism. Is there a role for orthodox philosophy in secular economic systems?

[00:03:45]>> Um, ye yes. And but I want to be clear that we talked earlier about dialectics, right? Yeah.

[00:03:52]>> And false choices. So a lot of times what happens people think they'll say well you either love Jesus and you follow the spiritual stuff or you're in the world right well not everybody is a monastic not everybody is called to that life so many of us most of us are going to be in the world and so it's possible to have number one you know the the religious priorities if you're a believing Orthodox Christian that's your higher priority you can also have other interests and things that you do in the world where you apply those principles in the world without sacrificing that being the number one. And that's because in Orthodox metaphysics, I don't want to get too too out here, but we believe contrary to a lot of the medieval Latin theology that there's actually a multiplicity of goods. In other words, if you chose to be single or to be celibate, that doesn't make life bad or evil.

[00:04:45]>> That's right.

[00:04:45]>> It just means perhaps that it's a lesser good. Okay. But there's nothing inherently wrong with lesser goods. But in a lot of medieval and ancient Augustininian ideology, there's it's always a presentation of a false either or. Well, either you choose the good path of celibacy or you choose an evil path of being married. And and Augustine even himself said at times that he he even though he had to admit that marriage was a sacrament, he said he could never understand how it would be possible that marital union could be a sacrament because for him it always necessitated some degree of sin. He says that city of God and I'm just using as an example to say no this is misunderstanding that in the orthodox metaphysic there are multiple goods right creation is good it's not the highest good but it's still a good and the the fact that it's not the highest good doesn't make it an evil right so that's right yes there can be application of these principles to economics economics itself is not evil but it's not the highest good uh philosophy right can be done right can be done well there were countless famous Byzantine philosopher ers uh you know some of the greatest saints in the Orthodox church like St. uh Vodius they were the most learned men in in their times in Bzantium. So there's nothing inherently wrong with academia or scholasticism or economics or whatever.

[00:06:02]Um I think that in my my view that there's a lot of insights that Austrian economics has. It's there's some positives there also have some criticisms there. Uh I am a promoter. I do believe Bitcoin is good. I think it's ethical money. Uh but I wouldn't say that that's necessarily right like tied to my orthodox faith. I don't judge a person, you know, they don't believe in Bitcoin or whatever. But um and I'm not at all a socialist or a communist or a Marxist, but I do think there should be kind of kind of critique or a limit on uh where Austrian economics could go crazy with with with I I think it could lead to um a form of monopoly capitalism. I know that most of them would say it it doesn't, but I I think that it potentially could. So there's got to be some relationship between limitations in in regard to an authority or a state versus the freedom of the market. Otherwise, you get rampant, you know, corporatism and just sort of corporate control of all society, which is really not a whole lot different from a top- down sort of communist control.

[00:07:02]So, you know, I had a debate, it's funny you said that, I won't keep yapping, but I had a debate with Tim P, the the the the uh live stream host a month ago, and this was exactly the topic we debated.

[00:07:14]He said, um, company towns, there's nothing wrong with that, right? There's nothing there's no slavery. You're free to to come or go. Well, none of that's actually true. In a company town, you have to use the company tokens and the company bucks, right? And so, I'm just using a company town as an example of where capitalism could conceivably be almost like kind of a communist dictator. So I think that there has to be uh checks and balances on any of these you know post-enlightenment systems and that's that includes capitalism, libertarianism or socialism and Marxism.

[00:07:47]>> In 2006 I had occasion to visit Mount Aos in uh northeastern Greece u for for those of our viewers who don't know about Mount Aos, it's a monastic community. It's exempt from many of the the laws and regulations um of the European Union in that it's a place that that houses 31 monasteries. Women are not permitted. When female animals are found, they're actually removed from the mountain. And um you're only allowed to go for up to four days and three nights.

[00:08:22]You're only allowed to spend one night at each of the monasteries where you elect to stay. And it's it's tough to get there. They allow 100 Orthodox Christians and 10 non-Orthodox Christians per day. You have to get a religious visa um in uh in the town of Uronopoli, which is right outside uh the u the the border of the the Holy Mountain. Anyway, my point here is that as recently as 50 years ago, Manathos was a dying area. Many of the monasteries were abandoned. They had fallen into disuse. And and I'm talking about monasteries that go back to the 10th century.

[00:09:03]Now, Mount Aos is flourishing. And it's it's not just, you know, Greek. I would say it's not even majority Greek. It's maybe a plurality, but there are Russians and Serbs and Romanians and Bulgarians and Syrians and Americans and Orthodox from from every nation that has Orthodox. What do you attribute this success to? Why is monasticism becoming so much more popular now than it was just as recently as a half a century ago?

[00:09:35]>> Uh probably a lot of factors. Um I know that probably amongst young men and I've met many young men who are interested in and are moving into and have gone into monasticism over the last uh six or seven years of you know kind of me being out here doing stuff. and and that would probably be attributable to uh a lot of wild things going on in the modern world in terms of what's being promoted uh sort of extreme levels of degeneracy not just being out there. We've always had trans people and this kind of stuff but not really from it being promoted from the top down at least not in the modern era. So I think those things shock people they probably motivate people to want to take uh you know their Christianity and their devotion to the next level. Um, and I think a lot of guys, and this this might be a big one that's that's really difficult to deal with. A lot of guys are having a hard time in the male female department. Uh, everything right now is really weird.

[00:10:37]And I was single and in the dating world 10 years ago, and even then it was getting pretty crazy. And nowadays when I talk to young guys and who are in that world and when you see stuff, you know, online, it just seems to be completely insane. It's just we we've never really seen in the modern world this kind of a breakdown of just kind of basic guy girl stuff. And even when I talk to older people, you know, boomer generation people or even Gen X people, and I'm on that cusp of millennial and Gen X, so I can kind of bridge this gap. It's very difficult to explain to them that it's it's not like it was, you know, you know, in the 1980s '7s. You go out, you court a girl, you ask her out. It's way different now. A lot of the younger girls have been completely brainwashed.

[00:11:23]They're they have Tik Tok brain rot. And so it you can't form a pair bond of a possible future family, which many guys want. But also, the guys have been sort of stunted into a kind of arrested development. They're stuck in neotony.

[00:11:37]Uh they don't want to grow up. There's a lot of things going on and I would guess that that's probably a huge factor. I don't know about aos, but I would guess in America a lot of guys probably think well you know in Orthodox they have the path of being married or have the path of monasticism. There's not a whole lot of tradition or push for people just sort of remaining single. I'm sure that that's happened at some point but most people are are sort of counseledled to enter married life or to enter monasticism. And my guess would be that the insanity of what's going on between men and women, a lot of which I think is by design, a lot of it's the effect of the internet, there's a lot of different factors, but I would say that's probably a big indicator as to why guys in America might be considering and choosing monasticism.

[00:12:19]>> I want to hit on a couple of other topics uh that that are important in the contemporary Orthodox Church. One of the things that the Greek Orthodox are especially proud of um is the position of ecumenical patriarch Bartholomew on environmental issues to the point where for decades he's been known as the the green patriarch. Um what role do you think Orthodox Christianity has in environmental protection and do you see it as being universal across the churches?

[00:12:54]John, you're really good at these nuanced tough questions.

[00:12:58]No easy questions from John Kurak. Um, uh, which is good for an interview. So, I I tend to be pretty critical of the green movement and the green agenda because, uh, there's a good book I read some years back by a woman named Rosa Corey, and she she's a little out there, but she has some really good, I think, critiques of this perspective. I think that again there's got to be some kinds of ethical uh and legal limitations on what corporations can do because you know for one if we really cared about this is similar to the hypocrisy with Saudi Arabia like if we really cared about the environment and we cared about uh you know health then we wouldn't have had GMOs we would have listened to the type of critiques that RFK Jr. makes now about our terrible food supply a long time ago and the green agenda maybe at times and early on like they might have had some of those types of critiques but nowadays it's not that I think it's pretty much a corporate agenda it's on board with uh a lot of the you know United Nations world world economic form types of agendas which I think are ultimately tied into a kind of depopulation ethos it's about austerity it's about corporate control it's not about the environment enironment. I think that if it was about the environment and health, we would have had similar ideas about food that Europe has. Like give me I give you an anecdotal example. Like I can't eat American dairy or pasta. I mean it just ruins my stomach. But I spent uh two weeks in Italy on a Orthodox pilgrimage.

[00:14:31]I could eat anything I wanted. So I don't know about the bureaucracy. I'm not a fan of the EU.

[00:14:37]like they have at least an idea that food should actually be food. Okay, in America we have corporate just processed nonsense which destroys the gut. And I'm not trying to get off into health stuff, but that's an example to me of well if the green agenda was really about the environment and about health. It would be about that. It would have a pro-human attitude. It would not have an anti-natalist perspective and it's almost always wrapped up with antiatalism. So I would say that to me that suggests that unfortunately patriarch Bartholomew has a lot of other interests that he answers to probably other than um putting theology first.

[00:15:15]>> Uh and I know that's probably true for a lot of bishops and patriarchs. They have to deal with the politics of the church.

[00:15:20]They have to deal with the state. It's complex. It's nuanced. Uh but I really feel like and I mean you can make similar criticisms of patriarchal too in certain ways. But I think that when it comes to the green agenda, I definitely think it's a corporate scam in my view.

[00:15:33]>> And and what about media, especially global media or homogenization of media?

[00:15:39]What do you think the orthodox response should be to that?

[00:15:42]>> You know, I have some friends uh that are starting up some some Orthodox outlets. Logos uh media is a new thing that's popping up.

[00:15:50]>> Yes.

[00:15:50]>> I didn't expect doing this sort of stuff on a YouTube channel that we would have the effect that we've had over the last eight years. So this is all kind of blossoming and burgeoning uh as a snowball kind of unexpected. I think there's a thirst for it, Jay. There's a thirst for it. That's why we need people like you talking about these issues.

[00:16:09]People are flocking to you because they believe that you have the answer to these questions. They they need to hear what you have to say.

[00:16:17]>> And all I have to do is just give a confident, assertive appearance of knowing the answers. And no, I'm joking.

[00:16:23]>> There you go.

[00:16:24]>> I don't know the answers. I know some answers perhaps, but you know what all I'm saying there is just that, you know, we began really just kind of doing debates for fun and and you know, doing silly stuff on YouTube for fun and it sort of turned into something that we didn't expect. So, I think the more orthodox content creators should come about, I'd like to see that. I'd like to see them doing it on their own. I don't think the future is the legacy system or going back to some sort of network style. People can do that if they want.

[00:16:51]They can mimic it or whatever, but the the future is what we're doing right here. This is the future is now. This is what what is the f we're doing it. This is it. So, absolutely. And by the way, in 2018 1718 when we really started doing debates and talking about a lot of theology, there were hardly any orthodox YouTube channels or orthodox priests or content creators. There was a handful. I think Petric Nectar was around. There was Father Peter Herses, >> but that was there was not many. Okay.

[00:17:17]And then we started talking about it on the side for fun. And now it's everywhere. So, and by the way, I've seen in the last month probably 5 to 10 YouTube uh channels of Protestants saying I'm going to Orthodoxy. So, this is really having an effect. And I think the key is to not fall into thinking that it needs to be a corporate thing because I was talking to Father Moses the other day. His channel, Moses McFersonson out of Austin. His channel's blown up to 200,000 subscribers within a couple years that they just sit in the back of of his house or in the back of the church and they just just have a little, you know, interview. And techn is cheap now. You can do this on your own. So that's the future is doing what we're doing.

[00:17:55]>> Wow. I want to ask you too about artificial intelligence. Does the Orthodox Church have a position on AI?

[00:18:02]Should the Orthodox Church have a position on AI? Or maybe even a better way to to ask it would be, is there a way for the Orthodox Church to use AI? I remember once I'm not a huge fan of Alex father Alexander Schmean, but I remember one time I read a thing of him saying that he was tempted by thinking that maybe the Amish were right, that electricity was demonic. I always thought that was funny. But uh I would say probably something similar. I think that in time we begin to recognize and receive the idea that well, you know, it's kind of omnipresent and it seems like it's it's here to stay. So I don't think it's the devil's creation. Um, I mean AI is a complex one because there are potentialities that it could ruin society. Uh, I'm not an expert in this area. I can give just my opinions. Uh, I think that it could be a dangerous thing. It's going to replace a lot of people's jobs obviously, but also I wonder if if it might also partly be a fad because a lot of the art, a lot of the stuff that it does, it's kind of it's kind of slob. You know, everybody calls it AI slob.

[00:19:05]>> Yes. So, I feel like people will always want real human musicians, real human art. I don't think they're going to want to just see the same, you know, easily reproducible AI materials because really for me, and I think even at most people at this stage, and maybe the Pentagon has something 10 times crazier that's 20 years ahead of us, I don't know. But what we have right now is really just a kind of a a search engine that talks back to you and gets half of the things wrong. So, like it doesn't it's not that impressive so far. or it could be in the future it could be something dangerous.

[00:19:37]But I would say that it's just perhaps potentially a more efficient search engine at this point. I don't think the AI itself would be in any way inherently evil, per