Three reasons why I converted to Orthodox Christianity

22 Jun 2025 — Lucas Galdino

From modern Protestantism to ancient Orthodoxy

It's been now more than a year now since I was received by chrismation into the Orthodox Church. Since then, I've had many friends ask me what made me make the switch. It was a pretty wild experience, going from playing pop-rock inspired worship songs with the church band to standing upright for hours straight, listening to a liturgy where I could only understand half of what was being said. For outsiders, the Orthodox church might seem strange, mystical, and austere. Thus, I decided to share a bit of my conversion experience, focusing on the three core arguments that convinced me the most: it's historicity, focus on practice, and salvation theology.

Please note that I am not an authority in this subject, so I'll be approaching them from the subjective perspective of how they impacted my own way of thinking. For a more thorough introduction to Orthodox Christianity, I recommend the "Orthodox Faith" series, by Father Anthony Hopko, which is available online for free.

Discovering the Orthodox Church

It seems that, at some point or another, every believer is bound to go through some event that will make them question the tradition they were raised in. In my case, this happened when I was about 20 years old, and was faced with some personal circumstances that made me address very seriously, for the first time, important existential questions such as the meaning of life, suffering, and death; the fundamental unfairness of life; the blood-curdling horrors of disease and even more disgusting terrors of evil and malice, even from loved ones.

The first place I looked for answers was my own understanding of the Bible. Unfortunately, the more I was honest with myself, the more I couldn't see how these stories from over two thousand years ago applied to the 21st centuries realities of my life. Asking the pastor was no help. In fact, it only left me more confused. My local church often hinted at the idea that prayer, and a firm blind belief in the supernatural and miraculous would lead to material blessings; and that every misfortune was part of God's plans to strengthen me, or, a symptom of my lack of faith. Needless to say, this was entirely antithetical to my experience. The explanations for suffering from Buddhism, Stoicism, and psychologists like Lacan and Carl Jung, which I was reading at the time, seemed much more sensible. I experimented with visiting other churches, always Protestant, where I did find richer and more satisfying explanations for my existential problems, but in doing so, I found out that they would vary immensely depending on which Church I visited, and most importantly, they were almost always based on the personal experience of the pastor as interpreter of the Bible, and maybe a handful of books, mostly recent. You would be lucky to get a bit of C. S. Lewis; never mind Calvin or Luther.

After a short period of practically rejecting my religion in it's entirety, I stumbled onto the YouTube channel of the Orthodox icon-carver Jonathan Pageau. I was mostly interested in his symbolic explanations of myths and fables, until I found, with keen surprise, that he was Christian. Never before had I heard a Christian person speak with such depth and respect about writings and teachings from other religions and cultures. I knew then that it was time for another rabbit hole. This brings me to the first major point that won me over to Orthodoxy: it's rich historical depth.

Wonderful depths of history

The history of the Christian Church is deeply anchored in the lives of its Saints. Regardless of your denomination, if you stop for a second to ask yourself where your beliefs and your Bible truly come from, you'll discover the stories of amazing people who fought for their faith under the risk of torture and death; and perhaps even more wonderfully, the details about their beliefs and practices, which are not a secret in any way. We still have in our hands the very texts that were used to celebrate the liturgies back then. The liturgy of St. Basil, celebrated in certain special Sundays of the Orthodox Church, was mostly written in the 4th century, merely 300 years after Pentecost. St. John Chrysostom's homilies, which are basically teachings and commentaries on parts of the Bible, were also written during that period. This was before the Bible, as the collection of books we know today, even existed.

Many protestants, including myself at the time, believe that the original Christian teachings began to be corrupted and mixed with paganism after the reign of St. Emperor Constantine. This becomes problematic as soon as you ask the question: if the Catholic and Orthodox churches are so wrong, then, what happened to the Christian faith between the council of Nicea in 325 and the Protest Reformation staring in 1517? Did God abandon His Church for 1200 years? What happened to "the Gates of Hades shall not prevail"? This is one of the main reasons why many Catholic and Orthodox converts begin their journey with a study of Church history. At the very least, studying just a little bit about the history of the Church will hopefully make you more appreciative of the sacrifice, heroism, and intellect of Christians throughout history.

A beautiful consequence of the long age of the Orthodox Church is the fact that there are many more Saints you can learn about than you could ever count; each of them with a unique perspective of life and path towards Christ. You can find find monks, nuns, and married couples; children and elderly, bishops and laymen, surgeons and soldiers, peasants and emperors. I am yet to find a struggle I've been through that hasn't been lived by a Saint.

Until now, I haven't written about the differences that set apart Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Both Catholics and Orthodox, through their apostolic succession, could claim to be the original, unchanged, original Catholic church (keep in mind that the word Catholic simply means whole, all-encompassing, universal). But big differences between the two groups mean that both can't simultaneously be fully right. There are two ways to explain their differences. The proper way, so to say, would be addressing the historical conflicts and disagreements that caused the division between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Church (mostly concerning the authority of the pope of Rome). The improper, but perhaps more practical way, would be to consider the actual experienced difference between the Catholic and Orthodox spiritual life and practices. Besides, there are already hours and hours of content available online explaining the historical and theological differences of the two Apostolic churches.

Orthodoxy's emphasis on practice

"Do your prayers first. Try it. Experiment it. Then, read as much as you want about it." This was roughly the words of my priest following my first confession. I think they perfectly summarizes the core difference between the Orthodox and Catholic spiritual life. Compared to Catholicism, Orthodoxy cares less about asserting dogmas and specifics, and a whole lot more about the real, tangible, visible, audible, olfactory, and even palatable experience of spiritual practice. I mean this literally. The wine served for communion is a specific type of sweet wine, warmed with boiling water to represent the sweetness and warmth of Christ. Most services will make you stand in respect and bow to the ground like you would instinctively due at the sight of God (though there are also pews available for those who need it). After the service is done, the priest blesses you with perfumed oils. The churches are covered wall-to-wall in painted icons and decorative patterns, and psalms are sung in ancient melodies. Even though you might find yourself in a small parish where no one speaks your language, you can participate in the liturgy beyond mere spoken words (besides, there are translations of the liturgical services as well as calendars with the daily readings available on the internet).

In my experience, having tried to practice both faiths before making a choice, the Orthodox have a much thorough support for the practical living of Christianity. The Catholic church does determine a certain set of obligations, such as weekly attendance of Mass and fasting on certain days of Lent, as well as daily prayers such as the Liturgy of the Hours. The Orthodox Church, however, offers a very thorough and rather standardized list of common practices which serve as a guideline. These include eating a vegan diet for practically half the year, maintaining a consistent prayer rule with a very big list of possible prayers for different situations, and much more. Rather then being strictly obligatory, they represent an ideal. It is normally up to the individual and their confessor to work together on a personal routine. Although the comparison may be simplistic, I think the equivalent in fitness would be to have a thorough workout plan, including mobility, cardio, and resistance training, as well as a nutrition plan, all discussed regularly with a personal trainer. In every parish I've been, the priests would actively encourage me to try different methods of fasting and sets of prayer, depending on what I was struggling the most with.

This set of practices belonging to the faith, known also as praxis, offer a form of spirituality that makes good use of matter, and physicality, instead of outright rejecting them as evil, and recognizes that man is much more than a just thinking mind, calling into participation the whole of the body and its senses. This acknowledgement of the mind-body connection allowed me to really understand that there is no separation between my mundane life and spiritual practice. Eating and sleeping well allowed me to focus better on prayer, which helped me have a clearer view of life and participate in daily activities, such as my studies, with keener focus, meaning, and intent.

Theosis: Salvation as participation in God

One of the things which surprised me the most as I converted to Orthodox Christianity is the concept of Theosis. The word Theosis means something like "becoming one with God". It is the core explanation for the meaning of Life and Being in the Orthodox Church, and defines what it truly means to be fully human. It's a subject so profound that no amount of academic books could cover the totality of it's meaning, (although, paradoxically, a child could grasp it by living it). I am not well placed to talk too much about it, so here are some words from the Saints who actually lived it:

God became man so that man might become god [...] becoming by grace what God is by nature

Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

It is crucial to note that this "becoming god" does not, in any means, entail becoming identical or equal to him. It is the idea that through practice, repentance, and spiritual growth, any person may fulfill what it truly means to be the image of God, and in the perfection of their imitation of Christ, they become partakers of Christ's life, and partakers of His Eternity. A metaphor that helps me personally understand this better is to see how each individual cell of yours, despite being a form of life absurdly different than your own, participates entirely in your body and your life. Some might find this notion similar to the Hindu concept of the return of the Atman (soul) to the Brahman (universal primordial consciousness), but there's a fundamental difference: Theosis does not mean a destruction of the individual Self as a consequence of union with the Divine. Rather, this letting go of the self is precisely what allows you to fulfill what it truly means to be yourself. "He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." One analogy that is often used is that of the sword and the fire. If you throw a sword into the fire, it will glow red and hot, and thus take the fundamental attributes of the fire, but it will never, in its essence, be the fire.

This has drastic consequences on the understanding of afterlife. Rather than an infinite succession of moments, like we experience here on Earth, but filled with only pleasures and no pains (which, let's be honest, would become terribly boring after a while), the Orthodox understanding of Heaven is one of experiencing God's timelessness, not past, nor future, but something entirely different, transcendent, and inconceivable. It also affects the understanding of sin as something much more profound than the simple breaking of an arbitrary rule: to sin is to act in opposition to this human purpose. To take the fitness analogy once again, if the end goal is looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, to sin would be to do whatever would drive you away from this goal. If we understand Theosis to be the ideal state of the human spirit and health to the be the ideal state of the human body, sin and the passions behind them are much like physical illness. Just like we have exercise and nutrition guidelines to help us live more healthy lives, the Orthodox Church offers all resources you could ever need to take care of your spiritual health, no matter your specific situation.

You have to try it for yourself

I tried here to convey the main reasons why I converted to Orthodox Christianity in a small set of three arguments, with the intent of sharing some casual thoughts with you that might perhaps spark some curiosity and interest into learning more about it by yourself. For a proper small introduction to the spirituality, teaching, history, and practices of the Orthodox Church, I recommend once again the Orthodox Faith series by Fr. Anthony Hopko. Keep in mind, though, that no amount of reading about it will be equivalent to actually visiting an Orthodox Liturgy, reading the prayers, and living out its practices.