By Elizabeth Condra
In elementary school I was friends with a girl whose mother clearly did not like me.
Having beef with a fourth grader is wild in any context, but even now I struggle to understand her very apparent dislike of me. My priorities were High School Musical, Rick Riordan books, and homework, in that order. I was good friends with her daughter, which necessitated some amount of politeness. We shared sleepovers and after-school snacks. We paired up for every group project, including an ill-fated, all-female production of West Side Story. We played with American Girl Dolls (she had all of them) and watched Journey to the Center of the Earth hiding under a duvet. They had a large, bony golden doodle (a rarity then) who had unsettling eyes and spinal problems and always popped out of dark corners.
In grade school it’s common to become fixtures at your friends’ houses, but I never felt welcome there. I felt like a disturbance and I was afraid if I asked for anything as simple as going to the bathroom or a glass of water, I’d be upsetting the delicate balance of some unseen scale. I rarely saw her dad and it was always her mom who picked us up from school or dropped us off. I knew somehow that the reason she didn’t like me had to do with the church I went to.
My friend assuaged my doubts. Of course she likes you! This wasn’t true, and the disparity in how I was treated compared to the other girls in the class was transparent, even to a ten-year-old. Field trips and game days and other social interactions could quickly turn awkward when we were paired all together. I think my own mother could feel it too. Once, my friend revealed that her dad was an ex-Catholic who had left the church. “You’re Catholic, aren’t you?” she said, almost accusingly. “No,” I said, and left it there.
With hindsight, I feel that her mother probably disliked me because she either felt I might have some undue Papist influence on her daughter, or what’s more likely, felt insecure about having her daughter’s closest playmate not belong to the PCUSA, as they did, and rather to the dangerous froufrou cult her own husband was raised in. In any case, I’ve never been Catholic, but there was no motivation in that household to sincerely distinguish, even on a superficial level, between Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
Growing up Orthodox in the South where there’s an evangelical church on nearly every corner was a social and theological firewalk. The majority of the schools I attended were faith-affiliated—I went to a Presbyterian school, a classical Christian school, a Catholic school. My parents had high standards for education and tried to find the right fit for each child. This meant that 100% of the time I was the odd one out.
Though there was more commonality with my classmates at the Catholic school, it wasn’t without its challenges. I didn’t understand the Pope or adoration or the Sacred Heart, or a visiting Vatican II-avowed priest who told us Jesus was “madly in love with us.” But I sparred well with my religion teacher, a Dominican sister who I believe had a subdued respect for my (at times) subversive questions. Getting an extra ten holy days of obligation off every year didn’t hurt either. I look back on that school fondly. You haven’t been properly disciplined until it’s by someone in a habit.
I know the South has not been welcoming to Catholics either. I’m reminded of Father James Coyle, the Irish-born rector of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Birmingham who was murdered by a Methodist preacher in 1921. Father James had married the man’s daughter to a Puerto Rican Catholic mere hours earlier. As Father James prayed the evening office on the porch of his rectory, the murderer bounded up the steps and shot him, killing him instantly. The murderer had a team of Klan-connected attorneys who swiftly secured his acquittal. The defense pulled down the window shades in the courtroom to make the Puerto Rican husband appear darker than he actually was, but as most Hispanics were deemed white by the Census in those days, it was clear that Catholicism was the prevailing factor.
Similar examples of bigotry and distrust are prolific throughout Southern history. But for centuries the South maintained Catholic strongholds like Mobile and New Orleans. Even if Catholicism wasn’t understood it was somewhat tolerated by virtue of the commerce these cities generated. Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon, all Catholic, also shifted the cultural tide—arguably more so after their deaths than during their lives.
The writer William Faulkner said that to understand the world you must first understand a place like Mississippi. I would argue that to understand the world you must understand the South, though many don’t and never will. As another writer said, we are always viewed in terms of our sins and never our struggles.
The South possesses an inherent mysticism that can be mined either for good or for evil. You see this in the echoes of voodoo and hoodoo and, even now, roadside dwellings advertising tarot readings and palmistry and mediums. What’s interesting to me is that the South has always keenly embraced devotion of a religious flavor. Practices like tent revivals or multi-day altar calls or thousand-seat megachurches are but the tip of the iceberg. Yet this zeal can turn malevolent on a dime. The itinerant Lake Martin preacher and serial killer Rev. Willie Maxwell comes to mind, as does Glenn Summerford, a Scottsboro preacher who was convicted of attempting to murder his wife. His weapon of choice was his church’s rattlesnakes.
A faith as strange and intriguing as Orthodoxy, ripe for flowering in the country’s most strange and intriguing corner, has not always been afforded the same credence. Speaking in tongues and snake-handling—good. Icons and incense—bad. As niche as the former may apparently be, it is still more of a cultural fixture here than the latter.
Evangelical fervor being what it is, it’s common for perfect strangers to walk up and ask where you go to church, or if you’re saved. I was working at a friend’s small business earlier this summer when this happened, and fortunately we were prepared in Sunday school on how to reply. If someone asks what you believe, you recite the Creed. If they ask if you’re saved, you say “I have been saved, I am being saved, and I will be saved.” The elderly woman on the other end looked puzzled. Did I go to a Bible-believing, spirit-filled church? I had no idea what any of that meant.
Living in the Bible Belt means that to some extent, you have to be an anthropological bystander to the trappings of evangelicalism. I’ve heard “Reckless Love” and old hymns like “Nearer My God to Thee,” if only from Titanic. I know what it means to be slain in the spirit, or the terms “sin nature” or “convicted” or “sermon series.” I believe that my husband was born to be Orthodox because he too was raised in a tradition which doesn’t use instruments, though this didn’t prevent someone from his family from calling our marriage “the weirdest wedding” they’d ever been to. I’ve seen the Hillsong documentary. I still cringe internally when a local church fundraises for their mission trip to Romania or Bulgaria or Serbia. As an outsider you learn to go along to get along.
From a young age—especially when it came to my friend with the prickly mother and the lapsed Catholic dad—I had the sense that most people here would prefer if you didn’t go to church at all rather than belong to a minority they make no effort to understand or even acknowledge. When it wasn’t regarded with confusion (“you’re not Jewish?”) it was with derision. I remember checking out of class on Holy Friday in high school—by this time, I’d made it to public school—when my geometry teacher, a self-avowed atheist, rolled his eyes. “Didn’t we have Easter like three weeks ago?”
I was never taught to distrust or criticize anyone of a different denomination, but I don’t think evangelicals acknowledge, even now, that their practices and beliefs are just as foreign to some as ours are to them. The hegemonic dominance they maintain in the region means they don’t have to.
I love the Orthodox adults in my life dearly. Because of their efforts and encouragement, I am still in the church, and I married someone who loves the church. Our children are baptized and we all receive the sacraments together weekly. But I don’t know if they appreciate how profoundly difficult it is to be raised belonging to two seemingly disparate identities. I also noticed the discomfort which inevitably follows loving your faith but being too immature or tongue-tied to answer the challenging theological questions that other adults expect you to answer, and why those adults usually react with an apathy or ridicule you did nothing to deserve. The majority of my cradle friends did not have cradle parents. We are the first of our kind.
We may be the first but we are not the last. This discomfort was challenging when churches were sparse and attendance was low, something my children will never experience.
I remember going to the All-American Council over ten years ago and meeting kids my age from the North and from New England. Centuries of immigration from Eastern Europe meant the faith is more practiced or at least more widely known there. The New Yorkers bragged about how many churches they had in a fifty-mile radius. I could barely contain my envy.
But things are changing. My kids will never want for a large church family or for playmates who know not to schedule birthday parties or barbecues on Saturday evenings or Sunday mornings or Wednesdays or Fridays. I don’t anticipate they will have the same difficulties I did. That alone makes it all worth it.
Elizabeth Condra is a cradle Orthodox Christian and an Alabamian. A former social worker, she now writes full-time. She and her family attend St. Symeon Orthodox Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Be sure to check out Elizabeth’s Substack Signs and Wonders (where this essay was originally published on September 3, 2026), as well as her other previously published SouthernOrthodox essay below.
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