A TRADITION OF CHOICE : What it means to be an American - U.S. Orthodox Christianity - Brief Article

Commonweal, August 13, 1999 by John Garvey

To be a Serb is to be Orthodox." This remark, made in the context of the current horrors in Kosovo, made me think about what tradition itself has come to mean, and what America has made of it.

The remark no doubt has its truth, as it might also be true to say that to be Polish is to be Catholic. There are nations and nationalities where religion and ethnicity are nearly congruent-this is true of Jews, for example, or Armenians. Memories are long: Serbs see themselves as perpetually at war with the Turks; I know Irish-Americans who think it is a matter of honor to hate the Brits. Your nationality gives you a kind of ready-made identity, complete with a religion, and some hatreds you are allowed to treat as honorable.

A Serb would find it much easier to understand a nonbelieving Serb than, say, a Catholic or Mormon Serb. The nonbeliever has rejected God and religion; but if he had a religion it would have to be Orthodoxy, since that goes with the territory of being Serbian.

America has changed all that for many millions of people. Although we make too much of choice, having too frequently dumbed the idea down to the notion that all choices are equal and all ideas equally valid, in fact, the sense that you are free to pursue what you believe to be right and true, and that this freedom is more important than the fact that you are born into a particular ethnic group, is very much in our blood. And it cannot but affect even the way we hold on to a tradition.

I was born into an Irish Catholic family, became interested in Eastern Orthodoxy when I was in college, and married a woman from the Philippines who became Orthodox six years after I did. I went to the seminary some years after becoming Orthodox, and following ordination I was assigned to a parish which is largely Albanian but has members and visitors who are Greek, Arab, Irish, Eritrean, and others who prefer to attend an English liturgy. This strikes me as being very American.

Even if we try to see beyond the obvious limitations of the individualism which marks so much of American thought, even as we see the problem with making choice a primary virtue, we choose, individually, to belong to traditional religions, or to persist as members. A person who moves from mainstream Protestantism to Catholicism, or from Catholicism to Orthodoxy, or from Reform Judaism to Orthodox Judaism, has done something very American, in the sense that the tradition is seen as offering a relationship to something true and real; but it does not have an automatic claim on you based on anything other than its truth, and this is true both of the tradition which you leave and the one which you embrace.

The way in which the statement "to be a Serb is to be Orthodox" differs from this is profound. The tradition is seen as having a more or less automatic claim, and it has little to do with whether it is true or not. It is simply a fact of national life, like a form of national music, or a particular kind of sausage. It matters less that Orthodoxy is true than that it is part of the national identity. When this is used as a justification for murder, the land and the nation-and the religion-become false gods, no better than Baal. What is upheld here is not the beginning of a relationship with "the way, the truth, and the life," but something which, far from transforming us, freezes us into a preconceived identity.

There are dangers in the American approach as well. To make your choice of a religious tradition important to your sense of who you are can be to make much too much of yourself, and too little of the tradition. I have noticed (as a lot of priests have, including convert priests like me) that the convert can think of himself as someone who has arrived at something long sought, a home, a final resting place; but to enter a tradition is in fact only to come to a beginning, to the start of a journey. One thing that the old-world sense of tradition offers is true to this extent: The tradition is bigger than you are. It makes claims on you more than you have any right to make claims on it. This sense of the authoritative is alien to the American grain, but it should not be.

Orthodox Christianity in America has, in recent years, gone through something of a crisis. Without going into great detail, the problem at the international level is that the old-world churches regard American Orthodox as people living in a diaspora; we regard ourselves as fully here. (My own bishop has said of the Aleuts in Alaska, a tribe which is predominant ly Orthodox, "Where are they in diaspora from?") There are political reasons for much of this crisis, but there is also a difference which has a lot to do with the fact mentioned above: The way in which Americans regard tradition is quite different from the ways in which it is seen by people formed entirely by the experience of Europe, Eastern Europe especially. And even within America there is a serious split between Orthodox who see the need to understand tradition as something that can be adapted pastorally to the needs of modern people, and those who see the church's role as reproducing the piety common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, or on Mount Athos, with no concession to modernity. Ecumenism is distrusted here, where it is not loathed.