When I interviewed the Orthodox convert (from Catholicism) Hugh O’Beirne for my book Crunchy Cons, I was struck by something he said about the difference between the church he left and the one he had embraced. He said that one of the first things the Catholic notices when embracing Orthodoxy is that parish life ceases to be a culture-war/ideological battlefield between liberals and conservatives. Years later, when I followed him into Orthodoxy, I found that to be true, and very, very refreshing. Of course, I am a theological conservative, so naturally I would find comfort in that.
But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any liberals within American Orthodoxy. It only means that there isn’t any strong basis for them to get a foothold and advocate for the kind of modernization that they would like to see. For Americans, Orthodox Christianity, an import from the East that never dealt with the Reformation and the Enlightenment, is a lot like the medieval city of Siena: it was too poor to tear down all the beautiful medieval buildings during the Renaissance, which is why now it is much lovelier than cities like Florence, which destroyed a goodly portion of its heritage as it modernized.
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