David Bentley Hart: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s the reason for that failure? Why isn’t it strong enough or — For any number of reasons. One, there’s been a huge influx of former evangelicals into American Orthodoxy, but the problem is Orthodoxy doesn’t have . . . most of the communions, unlike the Catholic Church, doesn’t have a protocol for receiving converts that’s very clear. You come to the liturgy, you ask questions, and after a year or so, you’re chrismated or something. The result is that many who come into the church come with presuppositions formed in a very radically different tradition. Fundamentalist evangelicalism is a much narrower understanding of how much speculation is possible. They’re not really prepared to look at a 2,000-year history and see all the varieties — this is the Patristic period, here’s the scholastic, and the Russian religious philosophers of the 19th century were very different — and be able to recognize that a huge variety of views is . . . Instead, they tend to think in terms of a faith statement of the sort that an evangelical church would have. To be honest, that’s become such a dominant faction in so much American Orthodoxy that much of American Orthodoxy is intellectually and temperamentally and socially and culturally just American evangelicalism plus saints and incense. The only way in which the Orthodox communities have successfully resisted this is also the degrees to which many of them have remained redoubts of ethnic identity, and that’s not much better. I would say, on the whole, the jury is still out. I think Orthodoxy in America may very well just be another American religion at the end of the day. Another generation or two, and the only distinctions will be in liturgical form. If one draws a line down the middle of Europe with Orthodoxy to the right of that line, those nations seem to be much less democratic, or democratic for shorter periods of time. Is there something causal going on there? Or is that just historical accident?…

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