by D. Sergio Glăjar
Using the Weberian framework of ‘charisma’ along with other methodologies to understand religion, this article studies the marked influence that Romanian fascism from the 1930s has had on contemporary far-right movements & ideation in the United States.
On August 12th, 2017, hundreds of extreme far-right agitators and white nationalists representing a variety of fascist movements from across the United States descended on the city of Charlottesville, Virginia. Ostensibly, they were there to protest the removal of a Confederate statue. However, it also represented an attempt to unify their disparate movements. Accordingly, they called it the Unite the Right rally.[1] What ultimately transpired was chaos and violence in the streets as right-wing agitators came to blows with both counter-protestors and the police, as the rally was in fact an unlawful demonstration.[2] One of the neo-Nazis in attendance, James Alex Fields Jr., used his car to plow through a crowd of people, causing the death of Heather Heyer.[3] Among the many chants that could be heard issuing from the protestors, perhaps the loudest and most consistent was “Jews will not replace us!”[4]
For some observers, one of the most surprising results of the Unite the Right rally was the emergence of Matthew Heimbach in the public spotlight. At the time, Heimbach was the leader of the so-called Traditionalist Worker Party and co-founder of the Traditionalist Youth Network; he was also one of the rally’s main organizers.[5] In particular, it was a t-shirt that Heimbach wore to the court hearing for the driver that killed Heather Heyer. The shirt that Heimbach wore on that occasion featured the face of a man who is largely unfamiliar to Western eyes, but whose visage would be instantly recognizable to virtually any Romanian. It was that of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the founder and undisputed Căpitan of the mass interwar Romanian mystical fascist movement, the Legion of the Archangel Michael (also known as the Iron Guard). As seen in the photograph below, Heimbach’s shirt features Codreanu’s face emblazoned with a kind of radiating halo, accompanied by the symbol of the Iron Guard, the triple cross (meant to represent prison bars and therefore martyrdom), and the Romanian word prezent, which refers to a Legionary call-and-response ritual in which each individual would invoke the eternal metaphysical “presence” of martyrs in the movement. By wearing this particular shirt to court, Heimbach’s message was clear: C.Z. Codreanu is, at least in the twisted hearts of some, still very much prezent.
Founded in 1927 after Codreanu’s split from another rabidly anti-Semitic movement, Liga Apărării Naţionale Creştine (The National Christian Defense League), the Legion of the Archangel Michael was distinct from both “Hitlerism” (i.e., National Socialism) and Mussolini’s brand of fascism in that the Legion placed Romanian Orthodoxy (and the spiritual rejuvenation of the nation) at the center of its ideology. It also developed an extensive martyrology of its own—distinct from that of Romanian Orthodoxy—and even significant elements of a death cult. In 1935, Codreanu wrote Pentru Legionari (commonly translated as For My Legionaries), a kind of manifesto or political program that was explicitly modeled after Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The following passage exemplifies the kinds of pernicious notions found in the book: per Codreanu, “[t]he greatest danger is the fact that the Jews deformed our racial structure and produced a different human type: a moral failure, the politician, who has nothing to do with our noble race, who destroys our honor and kills us progressively.”[6]
Codreanu’s meteoric rise from Moldovan law student to supreme leader of a mass mystico-fascist movement can be understood both in terms of a Weberian charisma that seemed to inhere in Codreanu’s personas well as in terms of an inchoate striving towards the establishment of a Christo-fascist state with Codreanu at the helm as a divinized, charismatic king. Indeed, through his oratory, mass demonstrations, and public acts of violence, Codreanu successfully cultivated for himself precisely the Weberian image of bearing “specific gifts of the mind and body” that are “believed to be supernatural, [and] not accessible to everybody.”[7] With his charismatic cult well-established by the early 1930s, Codreanu was even able to style himself directly as a divine king, having spread, for example, a tale of a supposedly prophetic vision he had in which an angel placed a crown on his head, declaring the crown his.[8] Very fortunately, none of Codreanu’s contemporary spiritual successors have been able to come close to replicating virtually any of the charismatic influence or kingly pretensions that were so effectively employed by the so-called Captain of the Iron Guard.
For his part, Heimbach, who converted to Antiochian Orthodoxy sometime around 2013 only to be excommunicated on the basis of phyletism the following year,[9] declared in a 2015 interview that “Codreanu is my largest inspiration. The Legion’s mission was to save souls through the revitalization of the Orthodox Church in Romania.”[10] Heimbach’s old Traditionalist Youth Network website (which is no longer active) had featured an advertisement for the English translation of For My Legionaries as well as a summary of its key points.[11] As Ana Maria Touma reported for Balkan Insight in 2017, Heimbach’s summaries “mark[ed] the qualities that make a ‘good white nationalist’ according to Codreanu’s teachings—physical fitness, going to church, praying and fasting.”[12] Heimbach has also stated to Romanian news station Antena 3 that “Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, having been a dedicated traditionalist, is an infinite inspiration for me! He left behind him incredible ideas about Christianity, about how we should live our lives and about what a truly Christian society should look like.”[13] Alarmingly, he also claimed to his Romanian interviewer that For My Legionaries is a source of inspiration for thousands of American nationalists.[14] Indeed, if one visits the book’s “Goodreads” page, one might be surprised to see that the English translation of For My Legionaries currently enjoys a rating of 4.19 out of 5, with 466 total reviews having been given.[15] One Anglophone reviewer states that “Codreanu will never die […] Codreanu was one of the greatest men of history, from what I can tell in this book, and he deserves at the minimum recognition within the Orthodox Church.”[16]
Yet Matthew Heimbach is just one example—albeit a particularly illustrative one—of American Orthodoxy’s larger far-right problem. Fortunately, this issue has recently begun to attract critical scholarly and academic attention. For example, Aram Sarkisian’s 2021 piece for Fordham University’s Orthodox Studies Center, aptly entitled “Orthodox America Has a Lost Cause Problem,” astutely investigates the almost bizarre intersection of Orthodoxy in the US and neoconfederate ideology.[17] Similarly, Sarah Riccardi-Swartz’s 2022 book Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia constitutes an important and unique anthropological analysis of the manner in which Orthodoxy has been received by certain elements of the US south.[18] With more scholars critically addressing this deeply unsettling phenomenon, and with the mystico-fascist ideologies held by many contemporary American neo-Nazis and white nationalists becoming more and more a matter of public knowledge, one does have some reasons to hope that American Orthodoxy can rid itself of this strong fascistic element. Notwithstanding, I would not hold my breath for the salvation of “Orthodox Dixie.”[19]
[1] CBS News, Nicole Sganga “What to know about the civil trial over Charlottesville’s deadly ‘Unite the Right’ rally” (Nov. 19, 2021). (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/charlottesville-unite-the-right-rally-trial-what-to-know/)
[2] Time, “Clashes over a show of white nationalism in Charlottesville turn deadly.” (https://time.com/charlottesville-white-nationalist-rally-clashes/)
[3] See supra, note1.
[4] See supra, note 2.
[5] Balkan Insight, Ana Maria Touma, “Charlottesville Nationalist Leader Inspired by Romanian Fascism” (08/15/2017). (https://balkaninsight.com/2017/08/15/romanian-fascism-inspires-us-white-nationalists-08-15-2017/)
[6] Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Pentru Legionari (Sibiu: Totul Pentru Ţară, 1936), 87. Accessed via https://www.academia.edu/30102249/CORNELIU_ZELEA_CODREANU_PENTRU_LEGIONARI
[7] Max Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1968), 18-19.
[8] Cruciada românismului, anul I, nr. 34, 1 August 1935, 4.
[9] The incident that led to Heimbach’s excommunication involved him striking a protestor at a 2014 “SlutWalk” demonstration at the University of Indiana with a large eight-pointed Orthodox cross.
[10] Orthodox in the District: Living the Ancient Faith in the Nation’s Capital, Ryan Hunter, “My Interview with Matthew Heimbach” (June 26, 2015). https://ryanphunter.wordpress.com/2015/06/26/my-interview-with-matthew-heimbach/
[11] See supra, note 5.
[12] Id.
[13] Libertatea, Petre Dobrescu, “Matthew Heimbach, unul din initiatorii marsului rasist din Charlottesville, admirator al lui Corneliu Zelea Codreanu” (Aug. 16, 2017). https://www.libertatea.ro/stiri/matthew-heimbach-unul-din-initiatorii-marsului-rasist-din-charlottesville-inspirat-de-corneliu-selea-co-1937786
[14] Id.
[15] See https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3203449-for-my-legionaries
[16] Id.
[17] Public Orthodoxy, Aram Sarkisian, “Orthodox America has a Lost Cause Problem” (Dec. 3, 2021). (https://fordhamorthodoxy.org/orthodox-lost-cause/)
[18] Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia (Fordham UP: 2022).
[19] See supra, note 16.
About the Author
Sergio Glajar is currently working towards his master’s degree at UT’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. His research focuses on the intellectual history of far-right Orthodox Christian ideation in Eastern Europe, particularly in Romania and Russia. His master’s thesis explores the phenomenology of religion of Nae Ionescu, a major Romanian fascist ideologue from the interwar period and mentor to Mircea Eliade. Before graduate school, Sergio earned his J.D. from Emory University School of Law and worked as an attorney in Philadelphia.
