ovde - vera znanje mir

Jovana Vurdelja
Does the West have an Orthodox problem
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
by Joshua Keating FP Passport - blogging on global news, politics, economics, and ideas — last
modified Feb 21, 2008
ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP/Getty Images
The scenes on CNN today of Serbian political and religious leaders holding candles at a vigil to
protest Kosovo’s independence, as well as the rogue protesters setting fire to the U.S. embassy in
Belgrade, bring to mind Graham Fuller’s January/February FP cover story, “A World Without
Islam.” In the piece, Fuller cautions Islam’s critics not to assume that a Middle East dominated by
Orthodox Christianity would be any more accepting of Western influence than today’s Middle
East. With Serbian Christians now fighting to retain what they they view as their religious
homeland, maybe he was on to something:
The culture of the Orthodox Church differs sharply from the Western post-Enlightenment ethos,
which emphasizes secularism, capitalism, and the primacy of the individual. It still maintains
residual fears about the West that parallel in many ways current Muslim insecurities: fears of
Western missionary proselytism, a tendency to perceive religion as a key vehicle for the protection
and preservation of their own communities and culture, and a suspicion of the “corrupted” and
imperial character of the West. Indeed, in an Orthodox Christian Middle East, Moscow would
enjoy special influence, even today, as the last major center of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Orthodox
world would have remained a key geopolitical arena of East-West rivalry in the Cold War. Samuel
Huntington, after all, included the Orthodox Christian world among several civilizations
embroiled in a cultural clash with the West.
Whatever you think of Fuller’s characterization, it certainly seems noteworthy that the United
States and the EU are about to go the mat with Russia for a Muslim country at the expense of a
Christian one. If the rift between an increasingly religious Russia and the West continues to grow,