Orthodox Social Teaching
Some Initial Thoughts
Emerging out of the challenges of the Enlightenment, the spread of democracy, and the Industrial Revolution, there arose different schools of Catholic and Protestant Christian social thought that sought to bring the light of the Gospel to the various moral and practical concerns of daily life. In this, Orthodox social teaching is no different. How do we as Orthodox Christians not only respond in justice and love to the needs we see around us but identify and understand what these needs actually are?
Recently, the Orthodox Church has issued two, magisterial statements on social teaching: The Basis of Orthodox Social Thought (2000) by the Moscow Patriarchate1 and For the Life of the World: Toward an Orthodox Social Ethos (2020) written by a committee of primarily American academics and subsequently revised and expanded by the synod of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.2 The goal in this series of essays is to offer an appreciative but nevertheless critical analysis of For the Life of the World (hereafter, FLW). Where helpful, I will refer to The Basis of Orthodox Social Thought (hereafter, Basis). My rationale here is straightforward. While FLW breaks some new ground, it is primarily a response to Basis. Broadly, I would characterize Basis as the more politically and culturally “conservative” document to which FLW offers a more “progressive” alternative.3
One sympathetic commentator on FLW has highlighted the document’s politically progressive character. Fr Cyril Hovorun has written that FLW “aligns with many points of what can be called the political theology of the 1960s.” He goes on to say that FLW is “closer to the ideals … of Christian Democracy” than, for example, those Orthodox schools of political theology that
…concentrated on criticizing modernity and its assumed corruption of mores. They promoted what we now call traditional values, and some of them overtly aligned with the national-socialist ideology of their time. I would call this line of thinking the political theology of the 1930s because it expressed the totalitarian spirit of that decade.
In contrast then to these earlier approaches to social questions, FLW is more aligned with those who advocate “for the full applicability of modern democratic values in the traditional Orthodox milieux.”
Russia’s recent invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine, to say nothing of the theological justification offered by his Holiness, Kyrill, Patriarch of Moscow of Putin’s war might lead us to think that the realignment of OST with the ideals of Christian Democracy is fundamentally a good thing. And yes, given a choice between European progressivism and Kyrill’s shrill assertion that Russia is now engaged in a war “that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance.” He goes on to say that
…unfortunately, Orthodox people, believers, choosing the path of least resistance in this war, do not reflect on everything that we are thinking about today, but humbly follow the path that the powers that be show them.
While he takes care to say that he does not “condemn anyone” he is likewise explicit in his call to punish those who “violations” the law of love and justice and by so doing blurr “the line between holiness and sin” and so “promote sin as an example or as one of the models of human behavior.”4
While Kirill’s words are horrifying, neither the sentiments in his sermon nor the unwise alignment of OST with right-leaning ideologies in the past (or present5) justifies the uncritical acceptance of the progressive alignment of FLW.
Both on practical and moral grounds good intentions alone are an insufficient, and indeed dangerous, foundation for OST. We should not let an appeal to traditional values seduces us to accepting the national-socialist ideology of the 1930’s anymore than our love for the poor should cause us to adopt socialist policies that have been tried and failed in any number of natural—if humanly costly—experiments of the post-World War II era.
Available online: https://mospat.ru/en/documents/social-concepts.
Available online: https://www.goarch.org/social-ethos.
The terms “conservative” and “progressive” are inadequate but there what we’ve got.
Patriarchal Sermon on Cheesefare Week after the Liturgy at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/5906442.html, accessed 3/12/2022, Google translation.
See the forthcoming, Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia (Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought) by Sarah Riccardi-Swartz.