Ben Christenson was raised Anglican — church every Sunday, a religious school, and Christian camp every summer. But Christenson, 27 of Fairfax, Virginia, always found himself longing for a more traditional faith.
“The hard thing about growing up in my church is that there was a lot of change even in my lifetime,” he told The Post. “I realized that there really was no way to stop the change.”
He watched as traditions went by the wayside: The robed choir was swapped out for a worship band, lines were blurred on female ordination, and long-held stances on LGBT issues shifted.
“All of that stuff was basically fungible, which gave me a sense that the theological commitments are kind of fungible, too,” he said.
So Christenson began exploring other denominations in college and landed on perhaps the most traditional of all: Orthodox Christianity. In 2022, at the age of 25, he converted.
“It seems to me like the mainline denominations are hemorrhaging people,” he said. “If you still are serious about being a Christian now that there isn’t really as much social status tied up in it, and you want something that has some heft to it, there’s more of an awareness of Orthodoxy than there used to be.”
