Fr Jonathan’s primer on Orthodoxy and politics

Over at the excellent WordPress blog Second Terrace, Fr Jonathan Tobias of ACROD has put together a neat piece summarising the core commitments of an Orthodox political stance and how that reflects (or fails to reflect) the present political reality in this country. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here are some of the good parts:

It’s hard to put the Orthodox Church on a political spectrum. If asked whether Orthodoxy is Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Liberal, an Orthodox Christian would (or should) say “None of these.”

To be sure, the Orthodox Church has always taught what is commonly called “traditional morality.” This includes a high view of family life; sex within a heterosexual marriage; rejection of abortion and euthanasia.

It is lamentable that these traditional affirmations are often taken as a “rightwing” affiliation, and that Orthodoxy — just because it is traditional — is lumped in with partisan politics.

This should not be the case, because there is a lot of Orthodox traditional morality that will not fit nicely into a partisan agenda…

Gregory [of Nyssa], along with many other Fathers of the Church, also condemned “usury,” which is the charging of interest. And thus, the Church has long harbored deep unease about the possibility of “money making money,” and has protested the modern habit of affixing a commercial value to everything in nature. The Church has never signed on to an economics based on centralized industrial profit-making…

We should persist in our longstanding opposition to various social ills, but we should be “equal opportunity” in our criticism all along the political spectrum. We cannot attack a politician personally, but we can and should criticize political policies according to the whole Orthodox Tradition. This means that while we as “Pro-Life” continue our opposition to abortion, we must be completely Pro-Life in advocating for all children — unborn and born — and for the poor, and for the earth. Just like the Fathers did.

This is a good place to start when thinking about Orthodox politics, because there are still a lot of Orthodox people who think that the beginning and end of political involvement is the issue of the preborn. It’s true that on one side, the Orthodox Church is quite emphatic that there are only two genders tethered to biology; that family life lies at the root of the human œcology; that sex is blessed only within the confines of heterosexual, monogamous marriage; and that abortion is equivalent to murder.

But Fr Jonathan is absolutely right that the witness of the Church does not always fall on the ‘right’ side of the American political spectrum. There are issues on which it falls emphatically on the ‘left’. The Church also has very strong things to say about money and about usury. He is absolutely right that the witness of the Church has very strong things to say about care for œcology and the natural environment. And he is absolutely right that the witness of the Church has very strong things to say about how we treat poor people. In fact, I would go further than Fr Jonathan. Historically, the Orthodox Church – and the Russian Church in particular – has had strong things to say about the inherent dignity and worth of indigenous people and indigenous cultures that the Western churches simply have not done until quite recently, after the 1970’s or so.

The deeper question of how the Orthodox laity, not just priests and monks and bishops, are to engage politically is still very much an open one. There are some, unfortunately, who call for an ‘Essene option’. And at the other extreme, there are those who believe that the Orthodox faith can be subordinated to loyalty to one of the two major political parties in the United States. I have never held with either the extremist Essene politics of Reynolds Wood, nor with the politics of Giacomo Sanfilippo or Fr Josiah Trenham, who in their willingness to compromise with one or the other Janus-face of King Herod are actually far more like unto each other than either of them realise, despite being on opposite sides of the American party-line divide. At the same time, I do take some issue with the political minimalism of Fr Stanley Harakas when he says that the most an Orthodox Christian can faithfully do would be to engage on one or two issues of overriding political importance in the modern climate. I have my doubts that such ‘narrowing of bandwidth’ is either healthy or faithful in the long run; some level of direct political engagement (not just voting!) is necessary on a number of issues.

At any rate, Fr Jonathan’s post here is a highly-worthwhile ‘primer’ for anyone looking to understand the basic political commitments of Orthodox Christianity. Suffice it to say that, like our Latin brothers and sisters, we cannot be boiled down to a simple cliché within the existing political culture. We share a ‘both-and’ mentality that is rooted deep in the Patristics. And we also happen to share the position of being comfortable on neither side of the party divide.