“I knew that I didn’t want to be in charge of anything,” said Atkinson, long known as the “Real, Live, Preacher” to those who read his intensely personal online journal (reallivepreacher.com).

“Preachers talk and talk and I wanted to get away from that. I didn’t want to be a worship tourist, but I thought it would be refreshing to worship in some places where I was the person in the room who knew the least about what was going on.”

It helps to know that Atkinson leads an unusual Baptist flock, a “contemplative Christian community” that holds spiritual retreats based on the writings of St. Francis of Assisi and men’s fellowship meetings over beer and pizza. Covenant’s belief statement stresses that the “fullness of the gospel cannot be contained in any one church.”

While proud of his Baptist heritage, Atkinson said the “glory days” when “moderate” and “conservative” Baptists fought to control the old corporate machinery are long gone. Now, many congregations are experimenting with “emerging,” “post-denominational” and “postmodern” identities and forms of worship.

Thus, Atkinson began his sabbatical by visiting the radical stillness of a Quaker gathering, a tradition that asks believers to remain silent until God inspires someone to speak. For 30 minutes, every cough, sneeze or stomach growl was audible.

“You have to lose a lot of your shame when you sit in silence with people,” he wrote. “These sounds are not disturbing to the time of worship. Not at all. They are the delightful sounds of humans trying to be quiet. And we cannot. … So even the sounds of people trying to be quiet are a part of the lesson.”

A few Sundays later, Atkinson found himself swimming in words and symbols when his family visited an Eastern Orthodox sanctuary.

“It was like they were ripping raw chunks of theology out of ancient creeds and throwing them by the handfuls into the congregation,” he wrote. “I heard words and phrases I had not heard since seminary. Theotokos, begotten not made, Cherubim and Seraphim borne on their pinions, supplications and oblations.”

The experience, he concluded, was an “ADD kid’s nightmare,” with the “robes, scary art, smoking incense, secret doors in the Iconostas popping open and little robed boys coming out with golden candlesticks, chants and singing from a small choir that rolled across the curved ceiling. … There was so much going on I couldn’t keep up with all the things I couldn’t pay attention to.”

His family struggled, but Atkinson had tears in his eyes by the end of the nearly two-hour liturgy. After years of focusing on user-friendly ways to attract people to church, he was stunned to attend a service that — much like the Quaker meeting — placed intense demands on all the participants.

It was, he concluded, as if visitors were being told: “You don’t know what Theotokos means? Get a book and read about it. You have a hard time standing for two hours? Do some sit ups and get yourself into worship shape. It is the Lord our God we worship here, mortal. … THIS IS BIGGER THAN YOU ARE.”

Atkinson was intrigued and eventually attended Russian, Greek and Antiochian Orthodox churches.

Nevertheless, by the end of his sabbatical this liberal Baptist preacher knew he had a problem. While Atkinson appreciated the symbols, rituals and sacraments he encountered, he also knew that he couldn’t accept the doctrines that defined the worship, especially the Orthodox rites.

Simply stated, his views on sin, sexuality, salvation, heaven and hell were too modern. There was “no wiggle room” in the ancient doctrines and, Atkinson concluded, “I just couldn’t buy all of it.”

Now he is returning to his Baptist pulpit, while hearing choirs of voices arguing in his head representing many different eras of church history.

“What I don’t know how to do is rank all of these voices and decide who has authority,” he said. “Who is right and who is wrong? … And I want to know, where does Gordon Atkinson fit into this whole picture? I know that I can’t go back to the old Protestant, evangelical way that I was, but I don’t know where I’m supposed to go now. This is a problem.”

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Low-church Episcopalians called it the “Fond du Lac Circus” because of all the ornate vestments. Not only was Bishop Charles Chapman Grafton, who presided, wearing a cope and mitre, but so were the other bishops. Then there were was the exotic visitor on the edge of the photograph — Bishop Tikhon of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Imagine the outrage if Tikhon had, as discussed beforehand, decided to take part in the laying on of hands at the moment of consecration. After years of service in America, the missionary later hailed as St. Tikhon of Moscow returned home and became patriarch, dying in 1925 after years of tensions with the new Communist regime.

St. Tikhon had “a vision, a vision of unity,” said Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America, during recent events marking the birth of an alternative, conservative Anglican province in America. Early in the 20th century, some Orthodox leaders were willing to accept the “validity of Anglican orders,” meaning they believed that Anglican clergy were truly priests and bishops in the ancient, traditional meanings of those words.

“It fell apart. It fell apart on the Anglican side, with the affirmation more of a Protestant identity than a Catholic identity,” said Jonah, at the inaugural assembly of the Anglican Church in North America, held in Bedford, Texas.

“We need to pick up where they left off. The question has been: Does that Anglican church, which came so close to being declared by the other Orthodox churches a fellow Orthodox church, does that still exist?”

A voice in the crowd shouted, “It does!”

“Here, it does,” agreed Metropolitan Jonah, stressing the word “here.”

Thus, the Orthodox leader announced that he is willing to walk in St. Tikhon’s footsteps by opening an ecumenical dialogue with this new body of conservative Anglicans, years after similar talks collapsed after the decision by Episcopalians to ordain women as priests and then as bishops.

The Orthodox and modern Episcopalians disagree on many other issues, from the authority of scripture to the ordination of non-celibate homosexuals as priests and bishops. These are the same issues that caused the creation of the conservative Anglican Church in North America, which has been recognized by many Anglican traditionalists in the Third World, but not by the hierarchy of the Church of England.

However, Jonah also focused attention on doctrinal issues that continue to cause tensions among the very conservatives he faced in Texas.

“I’m afraid my talk will have something to offend just about everybody,” said the former Episcopalian, who was raised in an Anglo-Catholic parish before converting to Orthodoxy.

For example, “Calvinism is a condemned heresy,” he said, and there are “other heresies that came in through the Reformation which have to be rejected” — words that strike at the heart of the vital, growing Protestant wing of global Anglicanism. Jonah also stressed that, “For a full restoration and intercommunion of the Anglican Church with the Orthodox Church, the issue of ordination of women has to be resolved.” The Anglican Church in North America has agreed to allow its dioceses to reach their own conclusions on this issue.

The tension in the room was real, but so was the appreciation for this gesture by the man who, literally, is the successor of St. Tikhon, said the Rev. George Conger, a Calvinist Anglican and correspondent for The Church of England Newspaper.

“What made much of what Metropolitan Jonah said palatable to the ACNA convocation was his transparent good will, and wry sense of humor,” said Conger. “The phrase ‘hard words said in love’ is often trite, but Jonah’s remarks … were given and heard in this vein.”

One the other side of this dialogue, Orthodox leaders are more than aware of the obstacles created by decades of tumultuous change in the Anglican Communion, said Father Alexander Golubov, academic dean of St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in South Canaan, Pa.

“Metropolitan Jonah will be trying to walk a thin line, but it is the same line that St. Tikhon tried to walk long ago,” said Golubov. “Some of the issues he will face are the same. But there are issues he will face today that I do not believe anyone could have ever anticipated. We live in strange times.”

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This is where the secret police of Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin buried 100,000 of their victims between 1937 and 1941 in a mass grave northeast of Kiev. President Victor Yushchenko did not mince words during his recent speech there, on Ukraine’s Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression.

“Here, at Bykivnya, Stalin and his monstrous hangmen killed the bloom of Ukraine. There is no forgiveness and there will be none,” he told several thousand mourners and, of course, Ukrainian journalists.

The mourners wept, while processing through the site behind Orthodox clergy who carried liturgical banners containing iconic images of Jesus and Mary.

“Because of the national symbolism of this ceremony, the priests there may not be important,” said Victor Yelensky, a sociologist of religion associated with the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences. “But the priests have to be there because this is Ukraine and this is a ceremony that is about a great tragedy in the history of Ukraine.

“So the priests are there. It is part … of a civil religion.”

This is where the story gets complicated. In the Ukrainian media, photographs and video images showed the clergy, with their dramatic banners and colorful vestments. However, in their reporting, journalists never mentioned what the clergy said or did.

Media reports also failed to mention which Orthodoxy body or bodies were represented. This is an important gap, because of the tense and complicated nature of the religious marketplace in this historically Eastern Orthodox culture.

It would have been big news, for example, if clergy from the giant Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) — with direct ties to Moscow — had taken part in a ceremony that featured Yushchenko, who, as usual, aimed angry words to the north.

But what if the clergy were exclusively from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kiev Patriarchate), born after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 and linked to declarations of Ukrainian independence? What if there were also clergy from a third body, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, born early in the 20th century?

A rite featuring clergy from one or both of these newer churches also would have been symbolic. After all, these days almost anything can create tensions between Ukraine and Russia, from natural gas prices to efforts to emphasize the Ukrainian language, from exhibits of uniquely Ukrainian art to decisions about which statues are torn down (almost anything Soviet) or which statues are erected (such as one of Ivan Mazepa, labeled a traitor by Russia after his 18th century efforts to boost Ukrainian independence).

But it’s hard for Ukrainian journalists to ask these kinds of questions and print what they learn when people answer them, according to a circle of journalists — secular and religious — at a Kiev forum last week focusing on trends in religion news in their nation. I was one of the speakers, along with another colleague from the Oxford Centre for Religion & Public Life.

As in America, Ukrainian journalists often assume that politics is the only faith that matters in life. The journalists in Kiev also said that they struggle to escape unwritten Soviet-era rules stating that religion was bad, irrelevant or, at best, merely private. Many journalists lack historical knowledge required to do accurate coverage of religion, while others simply do not care, because they shun organized religion.

“Many would say that, if we do not play the violin, we really should not attempt to comment on how others play the violin,” said Yuri Makarov, editor in chief of Ukrainian Week, speaking through a translator.

This blind spot is unfortunate, because Ukrainian journalists may have missed a crucial piece of the Bykivnya story, said Yelensky. It’s hard to understand the soul of Ukraine without grasping the power of religion.

“For many Orthodox people in western Ukraine, it is simply unacceptable to live in any way under the leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate. At the same time, for many Orthodox in eastern Ukraine, it is simply unacceptable to not to be associated and in communion with the Moscow Patriarchate. In the middle are places like Kiev. …

“This is a division that is inside Ukrainian society. Is it based on religion? No. Is religion right there in the heart of it? Yes.”

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Investigators knew exactly where they thought they would find former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the man accused of masterminding the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.

After his July 21 arrest, most media reports echoed vague statements in The New York Times in which unidentified voices said Karadzic “eluded arrest so long by shaving his swoopy gray hair and disguising himself as a Serbian Orthodox priest. He reportedly hid out in caves in the mountains of eastern Bosnia and in monasteries.”

“Of course they were wrong,” said Metropolitan Christopher, leader of the Serbian Orthodox Church in North and South America. “It was not true, to say that the Serbian church was hiding him. It appears that he was living right there in clear view, practicing alternative forms of medicine in front of everybody.”

The Times updated its first report, adding that for “some of those years” the fugitive lived under an assumed name in Belgrade. A second-day report conceded that Karadzic “was not in a distant monastery or a dark cave when caught at last, but living in Serbia’s capital.”

Instead of shaving his photogenic silver hair and pretending to be a priest, the former president of the Bosnian Serb mini-state had built a new identity based on his career as a psychologist — becoming Dr. Dragan David Dabic, expert on meditation, unorthodox therapy techniques and herbal treatments from the East. He was, observers said, a self-made guru with dashes of Freud, a Bohemian poet who resembled Santa Claus, complete with a bushy white beard and long hair, including a ponytail. He published journal articles, gave public lectures and lived with a young mistress.

Blend all that together and, according to ABC News, what you get is an “Orthodox mystic.”

“It’s like that old saying that you can’t fight city hall,” said Metropolitan Christopher, in frustration. Journalists and outsiders “want to link all of this to the Serbian Orthodox Church. And they want to say that all Serbs, everywhere, are guilty of the actions of these violent men and that, most of all, the Serbs are the only people who have ever done these terrible things to their neighbors. …

“They forget that men like Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic were enemies of the church and used violence against the Orthodox, too. Our bishops were jailed and beaten for opposing the regime behind this violence.”

As the Serbian Orthodox bishops proclaimed, at one of the worst moments in the fighting, the “way of non-violence and cooperation is the only way blessed by God in agreement with human and divine moral law and experience.”

There was also an interfaith appeal for peace in 1999, signed by Orthodox Patriarch Pavle, Catholic Archbishop Franc Perko, Mufti Hamdija Jusufspahic and Rabbi Isak Asiel. It called for a total ceasefire and the return of all refuges — Serbs, Albanians and Croats — to their homes.

“Even as evil cannot be overcome by evil, so peace and harmony cannot be attained by war,” said that statement from Belgrade. “To be a peacemaker is the greatest duty and most noble obligation of every man. That is why we are not afraid to be the first to extend the hand of peace to one another.”

Hardly anyone was listening.

Truth is, Orthodox Christianity does play a major role in defining the history and identity of the Serbs. It is also true that Orthodox leaders have opposed the break up of their homeland and, in particular, the loss of Kosovo — a state containing more than 1,000 historic churches and monasteries. Serbs have pled with Western officials to intervene and stop the destruction of many priceless sanctuaries.

The lines between faith and ethnicity are often blurred in the Balkans. In this violent, splintered and ravaged region, Karadzic — who remains a hero to Serb radicals — may have found refuge for some period of time with the help of some priests or monks, acting on their own.

“We hear accusations against Orthodox people, but we never seem to hear who, what, when and where,” said Metropolitan Christopher. “If it’s true, we need to know facts. But it is wrong for the media to keep making vague accusations against our whole church in this way, which only makes things worse for those who have endured so much.”

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This year, the gap between the two Easter dates was so large — five weeks — that the leftover chocolate eggs had been cleaned out by April 27 and the great Orthodox feast called Pascha (Greek for “Passover”).

“It’s true that when the Easters are not together, we don’t have to deal with the whole Hallmark Card, Easter bunny side of things,” said Father Alexander Rentel, professor of Byzantine Studies at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Crestwood, N.Y. “That we’re on a different schedule can make it easier to for us to concentrate on what we’re supposed to be concentrating on — which is what the season means in the first place.”

Why are the dates for Easter and Pascha usually different? The short answer is that all the Eastern Orthodox churches use the ancient Julian calendar when calculating the date for this season, while the Western church began using the Gregorian calendar in the 16th century. A more complex answer is to say that, for the Orthodox, Pascha is the first Sunday after the first full moon that comes after the vernal equinox and after the Jewish Passover.

The bottom line, however, is that the Julian and Gregorian calendars are about 13 days apart and this gap will continue growing at the rate of about a week per millennium.

All of that can be hard to explain, noted Rentel, when a child at school hands another child an invitation to an Easter party.

“One kid says, ‘Happy Easter!’ and then your kid says, ‘Actually, we haven’t celebrated Easter yet.’ Then the other kid says, ‘Why not?’ and then that leads off into all kinds of conversations that can either be good or bad, depending on how comfortable your children are when they’re talking about what they believe and why.”

In other words, he said, answering questions about why your church celebrates Easter on a different Sunday is similar to answering questions about why your family fasts from meat and dairy for long periods of time, or why you go to confession, or why you make the sign of the cross and pray before eating lunch in the school cafeteria. Any strong belief that clashes with the surrounding culture is going to lead to questions.

“These are questions about who we really are,” said Rentel.

Identity questions can be especially complex for the Orthodox in North America. There are 250 million Orthodox believers worldwide — the second largest Christian church — but only 5 million in the United States. The Orthodox flock in the “new world” remains divided into a dozen jurisdictions, each with ethnic and historical ties to a mother church abroad.

Thus, there are times when it’s hard to draw a line between ethnic traditions and Orthodox traditions. It’s easy for the rites of Holy Pascha to turn into My Big Fat Greek — or Russian, or Lebanese, or Bulgarian — Easter. Someday, the parishes founded by converts into Orthodoxy (like my own near Baltimore) may be tempted to celebrate My Big Fat Ex-Evangelical Protestant Easter. It could happen.

What the Orthodox call the “small t” traditions are important, said Rentel. The family baskets packed with holiday foods, the blood-red eggs, the joyous dances and the other ties that bind are important. But what cannot be sacrificed are the “Big T” traditions found in the 500-plus pages of prayers, scriptures and rituals that guide the spiritual journey from Palm Sunday to Holy Pascha.

The final sermon is always the same — year after year, century after century — no matter where Pascha services are held. All Orthodox priests, by tradition, read the Easter sermon of St. John Chrysostom, which dates to about 400 AD. As the sermon ends, the preacher called “the golden mouthed” summed everything up:

“O death, where is thy sting? O hell, where is thy victory?

“Christ is risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!

“Christ is risen, and the evil ones are cast down!

“Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice!

“Christ is risen, and life is liberated!

“Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead;?for Christ having risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.”

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But this life, on this world, is just the beginning. Consider this glimpse into eternity, drawn from a funeral eulogy for President Spencer W. Kimball in 1985.

“In the Colorado Rockies, I asked President Kimball a searching question,” recalled Barbara B. Smith, the 10th general president of the church’s Relief Society. “‘When you create a world of your own, what will you have in it?’ He looked around at those mountains for a few minutes before he answered and then he said, ‘I’ll have everything just like this world because I love this world and everything in it.’ “

After all, added Smith: “What is our greatest potential? Is it not to achieve godhood ourselves?”

This is the question that will not die when Mormons face the leaders of traditional Christian groups to discuss that blunt question: “Are Mormons Christians?”

A fussy feud over doctrinal details? Ask Mitt Romney about that.

This concept of devout Mormons achieving godhood and creating worlds “is not an idea that would be foreign to Mormons today, but it is also not a concept we hear a lot about,” said religion professor Robert Millet of Brigham Young University, a veteran of many interfaith dialogues.

Still, it’s clear that this belief — called “exaltation” — is something that remains “conceivable to Mormons, while it is absolutely inconceivable to traditional Christians.” But for modern Mormons, he stressed, there is little or no difference between talking about “exaltation” and talking about salvation and “eternal life.”

When it comes to the very nature of God, Mormons have radically different beliefs than traditional Christians. For starters, Mormons reject Trinitarian Christianity and believe that the Father God of this world is a former man who, like Jesus, has a physical, perfected body. This Heavenly Father is married to a Heavenly Mother, creating a celestial family that is the cornerstone of Mormon teachings about family and eternity.

Most debates about these topic begin with a 1844 sermon by Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, in which he stated: “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted Man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. That is the great secret. ? I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity, I will refute that idea.”

Note that if Mormons can achieve godhood and create new worlds, this implies there are other gods ruling their own worlds. For the many critics of Mormonism, this mystery can be captured in one word — “polytheism.”

“I think ‘polytheism’ is used … to describe the multiple gods of, say, the Greeks and the Romans,” Boyd K. Packer, now acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, told me in a 1986 interview. “We are talking about something entirely different, and that word conjures up ideas that are not accurate.

“I suppose that technically, it means ‘many gods.’ Technically, the word is all right. … It carries a lot of baggage.”

These issues loomed overhead as Romney delivered his recent “Faith in America” address. Thus, he risked this profession: “What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church’s beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history.”

Romney was in a tough spot, said Millet, who attended the speech. It was a classic “danged if you do and danged if you don’t” situation as the candidate affirmed his heritage while reaching out to the conservative Protestants and Catholics who are so crucial in Republican races today.

It’s crucial to understand, said Millet, that Mormons are determined to retain their unique beliefs, while striving to clarify the differences between the actual “doctrines of the church and what you might call a kind of Mormon folklore.”

The results will pacify few hostile outsiders. But the trend is clear.

“Throughout the church,” he said, “our faith is much more Christocentric — more centered on the redemptive work of Jesus Christ — than the Mormonism that I knew as a boy in the 1950s. That has affected everything that we say and do.”

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It’s Ramadan. Will your devout Muslim parents smile if you serve dinner several hours before sundown?

It’s Good Friday. Will the Catholic college cafeteria serve hamburgers?

It’s Thanksgiving. Can you predict the foods that will be on your mother’s table? Will the German grandmothers bake Christmas cookies at the Lutheran church? Is the tuna casserole served at potluck dinners at rural Minnesota churches truly a sacrament?

When it comes to the rhythms and symbols of faith, it’s easy to see the role that food plays, especially in the intense and emotional final months of the religious calendar.

“Food is all about the stories that define our lives,” said Daniel Sack of the University of Chicago Divinity School, author of the book “Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture.”

“I’m not just talking about religious rituals that involve food. ? For many church people, what happens in the social hall week after week is more important than what happens in the sanctuary. They come for Communion, but also for community.”

Sack said food traditions — with a big “T,” as well as with a small “t” — demonstrate why it’s almost impossible to draw a line showing where religion ends and culture begins. Food is one of the basic building blocks of life and, thus, is one of the “passions” that religious believers have always struggled to keep under control.

Change what people eat and you change their lives. However, there are times when the religious significance of food is obvious and there are times when it is not. While studying this subject, Sack said he began sorting the different kinds of food traditions into four groups.

* Sometimes, the food becomes a holy object in and of itself. One example is when a Buddhist takes a food offering to a temple. In other cases, ordinary food becomes sacred as part of an intricate ritual that is defined by prayers and scripture — such as the bread and wine in a Catholic Mass.

“What is crucial is that this sacramental understanding of food seeps into other parts of life,” said Sack. “And we’re not just talking about Christianity. If you start talking about bread and wine, it’s hard to take that symbolism out of there.”

* Most religious traditions, to varying degrees, claim some right to control the role that food plays in daily life. This is most obvious in faiths such as Judaism, with its “kosher” traditions, and in Islamic laws to establish what is and what is not “halal.” In other faiths, believers fast from eating certain foods at different times of the week or year.

* In many cases, these sacred laws and traditions then begin to shape the festivals and the cuisine of a particular culture or ethnic group. At this point the line between Greek cooking and Greek Orthodox cooking starts to blur. What role does faith play in the menus of Ethiopian, Italian, Lebanese, Indian or Swedish restaurants?

* Food also reflects what people believe about family and community life. It would be strange to see conservative Evangelical leaders serve the same food at a men’s dinner that they serve a luncheon for the women’s group. Foods reflect social roles, too.

Sack said that every community, every family, cannot help but develop informal rituals linked to meals, because meals are such symbolic times of fellowship. And when the times change, so do the meals.

Consider the food served at youth-group meetings. Once, parents organized these meetings and prepared the food, helping to maintain a sense of watch-care and protection from the outside world. Today, most churches hire professional youth pastors who plan multi-media programs and — naturally — send out for pizza.

“When we assimilate at the level of the table, we have truly assimilated to the world around us,” said Sack. “When you take this view of life, those parents are not just sending out for pizza — they are sending a symbolic signal of acceptance of the surrounding youth culture. ?

“You see the same thing happening when people start lining up those fast-food boxes at church potluck dinners. Some megachurches even have food courts, these days. Who has the time to prepare those special dishes that people used to take to church?”

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Many people disagree, saying that it’s impossible to defend basic human rights without a religious or at philosophical commitment to moral absolutes.

It’s easy to tell who is who when they speak out.

Consider this voice: “Freedom on the one hand is for the sake of truth and on the other hand it cannot be perfected except by means of truth. … There is no freedom without truth.”

That was the young Polish bishop who would become Pope John Paul II, arguing for a tight connection between truth and freedom at Vatican II.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins disagrees, to put it mildly: “To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Don’t be surprised if they are used.”

While it’s easy to find examples of religion being used to justify great evils, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson finds it hard to grasp how Dawkins and company can study history and say things like that. It’s no surprise that Gerson feels this way, since he is best known as the White House scribe who wove faith-based images into so many speeches for President George W. Bush.

“This anti-religious viewpoint claims too much. Do its advocates really intend to lump the Grand Inquisitor with the Amish? To say there is no difference between radical Salafists and Sufis?”, asked Gerson, speaking at a global conference entitled “Fact vs. Rumor: Journalism in the 21st Century.” This gathering in Istanbul was organized by my colleagues at the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life.

“Surely the content of religion makes some difference,” added Gerson. “But the central problem with this anti-religious attitude is this: It would remove the main source of reform — the main source of passion for justice and change — in American history.”

If it’s hard to maintain a demilitarized zone between religion and politics in America, it’s even harder to do so in a land like Turkey, where many politicians insist that they have created a “secular Muslim state.”

Many other Turks have severe doubts about the success of that project, especially those in the nation’s shrinking Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish minorities. Ask the Armenians if trying to separate “truth” from “rumor” raises tolerance issues in modern Turkey.

While Gerson discussed a wide range of issues in an off-the-record dialogue session, including the Iraq war, his keynote address focused on the big picture — his conviction that in “every culture, standing for truth against lies and conspiracy theories is essential to tolerance.”

At the very least, he stressed, tolerance requires a belief in at least one absolute truth, a belief in human dignity. And without some kind of doctrine of human equality — that, for example, all men are created equal and in God’s image — it is hard to defend universal standards of human rights and social justice.

In American history, said Gerson, the source of that moral truth has often been found in the prophetic voices of religious believers.

Thus, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote these words in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” A truly “just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”

Moral relativism, on the other hand, forces leaders to root their decisions in power and power alone, said Gerson. The result is “the rule of the strong — the rule of those who can seek their wants and impose their will most effectively.”

Thus, as a contrast to King, consider this voice from the bloody 20th Century.

“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition — if relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth. … From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.”

The speaker? That would be Italian fascist Benito Mussolini.

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Somewhere in each church stood an icon of a dignified Arab wearing the rich liturgical vestments of an Eastern Orthodox bishop. The worshippers took turns kissing the icon and chanters gave thanks to God for the work of the new saint whose name still causes smiles — St. Raphael of Brooklyn.

“It isn’t every day that you hear the word ‘Brooklyn’ used in a Divine Liturgy,” said Father Gregory Mathewes-Green, the priest in my own parish near Baltimore. “St. Raphael is important not only because he lived a remarkable life, but because of where he came from and who he was. He is a wonderful symbol for Orthodox unity in America. …

“Our church was unified in his day and we pray it can be unified again.”

Father Raphael Hawaweeny came to the United States in 1895 and became the first Eastern Orthodox bishop consecrated in this land. He was known as the “Good Shepherd of the Lost Sheep in America.”

St. Raphael was canonized in 2000 by the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), which has Russian roots, in cooperation with the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, with its ancient ties to the Middle East. The OCA celebrates St. Raphael’s feast day on Feb. 27, the date of his death.

This monk, priest, diplomat, scholar, missionary and bishop traveled a risky and complicated road on the way to Brooklyn, a fact noted by chanters during the rites last weekend. One of the prayers said: “Arab by birth, Greek by education, American by residence, Russian at heart and Slav in soul, thou didst minister to all, teaching the Orthodox in the New World to proclaim with one voice: Alleluia.”

In other words, each Orthodox flock can lay some claim to this particular saint. There are about 5 million Eastern Orthodox Christians in the United States and 250 million worldwide. While the church has grown in America, primarily through converts from evangelical and mainline Protestant pews, the Orthodox map here remains a crazy quilt of overlapping ethnic jurisdictions.

But there are signs of unity in combined programs for foreign missions, relief efforts and education. And last month, Father Thomas Hopko, one of America’s most respected Orthodox scholars, dared to produce a rough-draft of a plan for unity. While Hopko is an OCA priest, his essay was published by the Antiochian archdiocese.

Both of these churches now worship in English and include large numbers of converts at their altars and in their sanctuaries. Their most vital parishes are becoming more and more alike, he noted.

“The seven Antiochian bishops include three born in America, one of whom is a convert to Orthodoxy,” wrote Hopko, dean emeritus of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, N.Y. The OCA offers “nine bishops born in the USA, one born in Canada, one in Mexico, one in Bulgaria and one in Romania. Eight of the 13 OCA bishops are converts to Orthodoxy. …

“What an impressive synod these bishops could form to govern a unified Orthodox Church in North America!”

Any attempt to accomplish this would lead to an outbreak of Byzantine politics, especially in Greece, Turkey and Syria. Hopko admitted that it would take years to handle issues of assets, property, diocesan borders and lines of authority.

What would the Greeks do? Who would make the first move? How would a united synod select a patriarch? On this question, Hopko suggested that each church select one candidate and the primate would be “chosen by lot,” with a senior priest picking “his name from a chalice after an All-night Vigil, Divine Liturgy and Service of Prayer.”

The key is to regain the vision briefly seen in the work of the first Orthodox missionaries to North America — like St. Raphael.

“All Orthodox churches in the United States, Canada and Mexico would be invited to join in the common work of the new church,” wrote Hopko. “No Orthodox would be excluded. All Orthodox would be welcome.

This could take place by 2008, according to Hopko.

It would take sacrifice and cooperation and a shepherd who can command the trust of the Arabs, Greeks, Russians, Slavs and the Americans.

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Last week’s 47th convention of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America passed a resolution that addressed both sexuality and the Iraqi war. But this time the lofty words led to an historic change.

The assembly voted to oppose “divisive and dangerous” positions taken by “left-wing” and “right-wing” groups. To be specific, it rejected “support for same-sex marriage, support for abortion, support for ordination of women to Holy Orders, support for the concept of war that is ‘pre-emptive’ or ‘justifiable’ and the labeling of other faiths and their leaders with hateful terminology.”

The archdiocese — a blend of Arab-Americans and many converts — vowed to avoid groups that “promulgate these extreme positions” and renewed its commitment to seek Orthodox unity in North America.

Then the delegates cheered as Metropolitan Philip Saliba announced his decision to withdraw from the National Council of Churches USA.

The archdiocese joined the old Federated Council of Churches in the 1940s and had been active in the ecumenical movement ever since, said Father Olof Scott, of the church’s interfaith relations office. But recent decades have been tough.

The Orthodox believe “we’re getting further and further away from the primary goal of looking to bring Christianity back into a unified fold,” he told AncientFaithRadio.com. Now, the “churches of the mainline Protestant world really don’t want to hear our message. It is with that frustration that we felt that we can put our efforts to better use elsewhere.”

The national council has not responded to the departure of one of its 36 churches, said the Rev. Leslie Thune, its spokesperson in Washington. General Secretary Bob Edgar — a former Democratic congressman — is currently out of the office, but has promised to meet with Metropolitan Philip as soon as possible to discuss his concerns.

“We did not even know that this was in the works,” said Thune.

However, she noted the council’s oft-repeated stance that it does not take stands on divisive doctrinal issues, since many of its member churches have clashing beliefs on such matters.

Nevertheless, Scott said the Antiochian archdiocese quit the council, in large part, because of what he called an “almost a politicized agenda” under Edgar — with a strong emphasis on sexual liberation and opposition to conservative Christianity.

A turning point came in 2000 when Edgar removed his signature from “A Christian Declaration on Marriage,” a statement signed by representatives of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Southern Baptist Convention and the National Association of Evangelicals. The text defined marriage as between man and a woman.

After speaking at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Breakfast during an NCC general assembly, Edgar issued an apology and affirmed his support for same-sex unions. He told Presbyterian News Service: “I support marriage, and I support more than marriage the love between two people, and I don’t differentiate whether it is between a man and a woman or a woman and a woman or a man and a man or whatever. We need fidelity and care in relationships.”

There have been many signs of tension. Two years ago, the Russian Orthodox Church cut all ties with the U.S. Episcopal Church following the consecration of the openly gay Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. Russian Patriarch Alexy II recently said he was worried about the leadership role that churches offering a “free interpretation” of sexual morality hold in the World Council of Churches.

Last month, the Orthodox Church in America — which has Russian roots — studied a document that said the “most advisable course” for its ecumenical work “would be eventually to withdraw from the NCC and the WCC.” After all, said this “Orthodox Relations” text, there are more Protestant and Pentecostal Christians outside of these councils than there are inside and neither includes the Roman Catholic Church.

The Antiochian archdiocese agrees. Decades ago, said Scott, Orthodoxy needed a seat in the National Council of Churches in order to “put a face” on its often mysterious rites and parishes. But now the momentum is toward work with more conservative believers.

“We don’t need the NCC,” he said, “for the identity of Orthodoxy in the new world. People know who we are. We are strong. We are vibrant. We are growing.”

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