Shortly before the recent US presidential election, an online publication of the Orthodox Studies Center at Fordham University featured a lead article that announced: “A Vote for Trump is a Vote against the Ecumenical Patriarchate.”
The clickbait headline showed why some fear the Ukraine war will split the Orthodox Christian world along political lines: Trump-supporting Russians versus Harris-supporting Greeks, a division related directly to the Ukraine conflict. Yet, from a longer historical view, and with a lot more nuance, panic about the demise of Orthodox unity may be greatly exaggerated. That’s because the decentralized nature of the Orthodox Church, from a Western perspective, involves a history of divisions whose shocks have been absorbed in a flexible framework across centuries. Also, many adherents on the ground take any political dividing lines less seriously in relation to their spiritual lives.
Orthodox history indicates to many adherents that fierce divisions in the past have not overwhelmed the tradition. A bit of history can help with this.
Fraught with Conflict
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Sign up and get our daily essays sent straight to your inbox.The Ukraine conflict has exacerbated a longstanding rift between the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Greek Orthodoxy based in “Constantinople” (Istanbul), and the Moscow Patriarchate of Russian Orthodoxy. But beneath generations of hot and cold differences lies a fact of demographics. After World War I, most of the Greek population of Turkey fled or was killed after unsuccessfully trying to seize a section of Asia Minor. Constantinople lost its name, and most of its local constituents had already dwindled over the centuries since the fall of Byzantium.
Since the 1920s and with the collapse of Imperial Russia, Orthodox Constantinople became increasingly reliant on its relation to what became the well-resourced and large Greek Archdiocese of America, and thus the West. It also led the way in bringing a segment of the Orthodox Christian world onto the Western Gregorian calendar, while “Moscow” and others remain on the Julian or Eastern calendar.
In recent decades and since its post-communist renewal, the Russian Orthodox Church reemerged as the largest Orthodox Church in the world, dwarfing Constantinople in size and potential influence. Meanwhile, in Ukraine itself, trouble had brewed for some time ecclesiologically between the two Orthodox hierarchies, before the open military conflict in the region.
The canonical and Moscow-related Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), led by Metropolitan Onuphry, found itself challenged in 2019 by a new denomination created with support from Constantinople, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The latter included leaders who had previously been defrocked by Moscow and was more nationalistically Ukrainian. The older UOC was mainly autonomous but still under the Moscow Patriarchate.
Present Challenges
With the eruption of the military conflict, the Ukrainian government has moved against the UOC in various ways, by favoring the new national Orthodox denomination supported by Constantinople against Moscow. The ecclesiastical conflict includes government seizure of some of the UOC’s most important churches and monasteries, and restricting worship services and clergy, while accusing it of being a “fifth column” for Russia. Metropolitan Onuphry, for his part, had condemned the Russian invasion and severed ties with Moscow early in the conflict.
In the Orthodox world, accusations have flown that Constantinople in supporting the new Ukrainian denomination acted not only uncanonically, but was following the direction of Western influencers and security agencies, who wanted to divide the Orthodox Church as part of a religious hybrid war against Russia. Constantinople has denied this, amid allegations that the new denomination has faced persecution in the Russian-occupied zone, but Western support for the ecclesiastical changes in Ukraine remains in evidence.
Strong supporters of Constantinople have shown a generally pro-Western bent politically, which goes back at least to the Cold War when President Harry Truman supplied a plane to transport a pro-American Greek bishop to Istanbul to become the new post-World-War-II patriarch of Constantinople, presumably in hopes of holding off Soviet-backed insurgency in the Balkans and Turkey while earning points with Greek-American voters.
The Russian Orthodox Church, because of the earlier Ukraine religious schism, has told bishops and clergy not to concelebrate or take communion with those under Constantinople. But away from the neighborhood of the war zone, this is not prominently noticed by laypeople. In the US, Russian-related clergy honor those restrictions, but there is little or no apparent acrimony or hostility between Greek and Slavic-origin communities and among American converts.
For example, I am a priest in America in a parish of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, although my views here are my own as a professor and chaplain at an American university. Our jurisdiction began in 1920 as a refugee-exile Synod in the Russian Civil War, which since after World War II has been headquartered in New York City. Although it re-established communion with Moscow in 2007, more than a decade after the fall of communism, and is under the Moscow Patriarchate now, it is essentially autonomous. In secular terms this is distantly analogous to the relation of Canada’s government to the English monarchy.
Our mission parish, which is made up mainly of American converts such as myself, doesn’t take sides on Ukraine, or advocate for ecclesiastical divisions. We include a family of Ukrainian refugees as valued members and recently baptized their new child. Our new building includes their gift of some Ukrainian icons. A number of our members regularly visit a nearby Greek monastery, which ultimately is under Constantinople. My own long-time father-confessor is a monastery priest under Greek jurisdiction.
While Orthodoxy’s “multipolar” context arguably can foster temporary frictions, across centuries it has also lent itself to an oddly flexible resilience, not always easily legible to Western perspectives.
Cultural Differences and Divisions
If anything, there arguably is a general cultural difference between a somewhat more “liberal” religious culture in the top levels of the ecclesiastical world of Constantinople and a more “traditional” or conservative culture in the Moscow network. This is probably a source of more cultural friction among Orthodox around the world than the Ukraine conflict, although that friction is still muted.
For example, when the Greek Archbishop of America baptized the baby of a same-sex couple in a ceremony in which critics alleged secular LGBTQ optics were prominent, the event caused consternation among many Orthodox Christians. Such action would have been unlikely among churches related to Moscow. Indeed, some liberal academics identifying as Orthodox in the West found an affinity with the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s views long before the Ukraine military conflict.
That said, there are many traditional Orthodox believers in Greece and America, especially among monastic communities with lay followings, who are very much in sync with traditional elements across jurisdictional boundaries. Likewise, more religiously liberal Orthodox academics can be found across jurisdictional lines, too.
While tempers generally don’t flare among American Orthodox Christians over Ukraine, there is a shared deep regret for the horror of the conflict, and efforts to try to help with relief aid. Without endorsing the conflict, there is also often sympathy for Russian concerns about the expansion of NATO and the EU, and Western secular ideologies of sex and family, into the Orthodox cultural zone of the East.
There also is a complex history of Orthodox views of war, different from the West, that is not always well understood by those outside the tradition. Orthodoxy generally never developed a “just war” tradition like the West, akin to the Crusades, instead hewing culturally to a view of “necessary war.” The latter could involve a sense of necessary sin, for example, in resisting a perceived Western incursion into a putative core neighborhood of Russia, Ukraine.
Under this Byzantine ethos of war, a conflict could be viewed as paradoxically not righteous, as all war is evil, but “holy” in necessity in a sense. This perhaps could be partly analogous historically to the Monroe Doctrine, as a perceived necessary defensive doctrine to safeguard the US experiment of a “city on a hill” in the older generic Protestant sensibility of America.
Meanwhile, in the global “orthosphere” online, there are very vociferous critics of the Moscow Patriarchate for its perceived support of the Russian government, and likewise outspoken supporters of Moscow.
But even with such differing views and loyalties about the conflict, the Orthodox world remains “decentralized” in governance and inclinations, by contrast with Catholicism. Even the ecumenical world of much of institutional Protestantism in the West arguably has developed through its ecumenism a more consistent if elastic type of consensus-building, reflected in loose frameworks such as the World Council of Churches.
But while Orthodoxy’s “multipolar” context arguably can foster temporary frictions, across centuries it has also lent itself to an oddly flexible resilience, not always easily legible to Western perspectives.
Orthodox regard their governance as both mystically hierarchical and conciliar, emerging in their view from five original patriarchates of the early Church, from which Rome has been subtracted since, with a few others, notably Moscow, added.
The inspiration of the Holy Spirit in Church Councils is regarded as the highest authority, together with inspired tradition and Scripture, and the spiritual illumination of saints, holy elders, and Fathers of the Church. Worldwide, certain practices such as the Divine Liturgy, monasticism, ascetic discipline in the world, and hesychastic prayer remain amazingly akin in details across jurisdictions, as seen in continued pilgrimages worldwide to places such as Mount Athos and Orthodox monasteries and churches of the Holy Land. Natural law is regarded mystically more as “the spark of God’s love in the human heart” than a legalistic framework, arguably somewhat defusing surface conflicts in the long run.
As a bumper sticker on my old minivan proclaims: “The Orthodox Church: The Finest in Disorganized Religion.” Some Orthodox friends have taken issue with the humor. But the alleged disorganization involves a persevering tradition in the face of huge persecutions across centuries, all seen as an enduring organic spiritual cohesion of the Church as the Body of Christ, not an organization per se. Through many crises, Orthodoxy has weathered millennia of potential divisions and threatened exterminations, while seeking God’s grace unto the ages.
All views are the author’s own.
Image by predrag and licensed via Adobe Stock.