The fundamental liberal principle in politics is the secular state—the separation of religious institutions from state institutions, with equality for all citizens regardless of faith. Left-liberal democracy assumes that laws reflect the will of the majority while simultaneously protecting the rights of minorities, and that public policies are supposedly created through rational debate within institutions. The Orthodox historical experience is different: for centuries, the Church and the state in Byzantine and successor traditions cooperated according to the model of “symphony”—the authorities offered protective support to the Church, while the Church provided spiritual legitimization to the authorities. Even today, in many Orthodox countries, remnants of that model remain: states provide material support to the dominant Church and take its views into account on social issues. At the same time, in Western democracies the prevailing view is that religion should be a private matter. The European Union, as a supranational entity, operates on secular foundations, without any formal role for religious institutions in its governance; the Orthodox Churches have, by their own admission, had to find a new approach, since they could not apply their Byzantine ideal of unity between Church and state in this context. Although some critics have questioned the ability of Orthodox societies to develop liberal democracy, the Orthodox states have nonetheless chosen democratic constitutions.
CHURCH AND DEMOCRACY
The Orthodox Church does not oppose the democratic form of governance—on the contrary, the official documents of the local Churches emphasize their support for the principles of freedom and equality, with the expectation that within a democratic framework the Church will be able to witness its values in public dialogue. However, tensions arise when democratically elected authorities adopt laws that church dignitaries consider morally unacceptable (such as the legalization of “same-sex marriage” or the liberalization of abortion), which raises the question of the place of religious argumentation in the public sphere. In such cases, Orthodox hierarchs often call on believers and politicians to place God’s law above human laws, while “the liberal side” responds by invoking respect for the secular character of the state. The challenge remains how to achieve fruitful cooperation between the state and the Church within a secular democracy, without undermining either the basic principles of democracy or the Church’s right to act publicly.
LIBERAL VALUES AND ORTHODOX ETHICS
The liberal European values related to the economy are reflected in the acceptance of the capitalist market system, private property, and entrepreneurship as drivers of economic growth. The EU promotes a single market, competition, and the free movement of goods, services, capital, and people, along with a certain level of social security (the so-called “social market”). Orthodox ethics, although it does not develop a separate economic model, has a strong tradition of teaching about the moral aspects of economic life. Since the time of the Holy Fathers, Christians have been taught that wealth entails responsibility—the obligation of almsgiving, the sinfulness of greed, and the call to moderation have been repeatedly emphasized. During the communist era, the Church was marginalized in the economic sphere, but after 1990 it began once again to speak about social justice—for example, in the Russian Orthodox Church’s document “The Bases of the Social Concept” (2000), criticism is expressed both of neoliberal capitalism and of former atheistic collectivism, along with an affirmation of a society of solidarity and care for the weak.
In practice, Orthodox countries today are generally market economies, but the Church strives to be a voice of conscience: it often calls for the state’s social responsibility, the protection of the poor, ethical business practices, etc. This is an area where no direct dogmatic clash occurs with left-liberal values—the Church recognizes the legitimacy of private property and the market, but seeks to instill a more humane spirit into capitalism by insisting on ethical norms, similar to what other traditions do (one should not forget the social doctrine of Roman Catholicism).
VIEW OF THE WORLD
The liberal view of the world is predominantly oriented toward the earthly realm—humanity is observed within the boundaries of history and nature, without reference to supernatural goals. The advancement of science, technology, and social institutions is understood as the path toward improving human life within this world. By contrast, Orthodox Christianity draws a clear distinction between the transience of this world and the eternal Kingdom of God. The primary concern of the Church is not to perfect society within history, but to lead the faithful to salvation and eternal life. As authors point out, Orthodoxy directs the human being toward immortality and deification as the ultimate goal, while liberalism is focused on immanent social aims such as freedom, material well-being, and human rights. These different orientations often lead to what some describe as a “passing by each other”: liberal philosophy frequently assumes that human society can be perfected through continual progress, whereas the Orthodox faith holds that full justice and perfection will be realized only beyond the bounds of history, in communion with God. Thus, liberalism is sometimes criticized for a certain utopian tendency—its inclination to overlook the real imperfection of the world in pursuit of an ideal order—while Christianity is reproached for its “orientation toward the heavenly,” which may lead to passivity toward earthly problems.
Yet it should be noted that both approaches possess a certain eschatological note: liberalism believes in the possibility of a future society of freedom and well-being (a kind of “paradise on earth”), while Orthodoxy strives for the heavenly order; in this sense, despite their differences, both value systems are driven by hope for a better condition of humanity, whether within history or beyond it.
WHAT DIFFERS
Based on the preceding analysis, several key points of divergence can be identified between modern liberalism and the Orthodox worldview. One of the most striking is the different understanding of individuality and community: liberalism begins with the autonomous individual who realizes his or her rights and freedoms, whereas the Orthodox tradition places emphasis on the community (the Church) and the readiness to sacrifice personal interest for the good of others. Thus, unlike liberal culture, which promotes self-realization and insistence on one’s own rights, the Orthodox ascetic ethos highlights humility and self-denial—the individual is called, when necessary, to renounce “his right” out of love for another.
Connected to this is the difference in moral norms: the liberal approach is “flexible and secular”—morality is grounded in social consensus and personal choice as long as one does not violate another person’s freedom, whereas Orthodoxy upholds objective, absolute moral principles rooted in divine revelation. This is why issues such as abortion, marriage, sexuality, or so-called gender roles lead to conflict: liberal culture tends to view them in the light of individual rights and freedom of choice, while the Church maintains traditional positions and considers certain kinds of behavior to be in conflict with God’s moral law.
There is also the opposition between secular and religious authority: liberalism insists that state policy must not rely on a single religious doctrine, which sometimes unsettles the Church because its teaching does not receive a privileged status in a society where the majority of people are nominally Orthodox.
On the anthropological level, it has already been emphasized that liberal philosophy has a more optimistic image of the human being because it believes in the possibility of a rationally ordered society and progress, whereas the Orthodox tradition more strongly highlights the tragic side of human nature (the inclination toward sin) and the necessity of divine grace for the true perfection of man. Liberalism often projects a kind of ideal society into the future (a “utopian” vision of continual progress), while Orthodoxy looks with suspicion on such projects and warns about the limitations of the fallen world. These differences sometimes lead to mutual misunderstanding and even to the perception of the other side as a threat: secular liberals may view the Church as a backward or intolerant force seeking to restrict individual freedoms, while Orthodox believers may experience the liberal world as aggressively secularist and morally relativistic.
LIBERALISM LEADS TO THE MEGALOPOLIS
Priest and theologian Dr. Darko Đogo, in his book Covenant or Denial, examines the life of the Church in the age of the Megalopolis (a term introduced into our cultural criticism by Dr. Slobodan Vladušić). The “Megalopolis” is not a geographical reality, but a mode of concentrating biopolitical power in which a supranational elite produces human beings as interchangeable “biomass,” regardless of passport or formal state affiliation. This is why the Megalopolis can attempt to shape Serbs, Russians, Chinese, and Americans as equally adaptable material—because the object of governance is not the nation, neither mystical nor state-forming, but the human being as a resource within a cultural-political matrix that defines the meaning of life, values, and the very measure of what is considered “normal.”
In the Megalopolis, which uses liberal rhetoric, everything is directed against Christ and Christian values: womb-centered child-murder is named “a woman’s right to decide about her own body” (even though the fetus is not the woman’s body), the killing of a gravely ill patient becomes “euthanasia” (a good death), the restriction of religious freedoms is called “the fight for a secular state,” the teaching that biological sex is irrelevant and that only our feelings matter is labeled “gender theory,” and the mutilation of children through surgeries and hormonal manipulation is framed as their “right” to choose their gender. Multinational corporations, for the sake of ever-greater profit, dismantle the liberal world and turn it into a whirlpool of illusions, using the state (“the postmodern state,” as they say) as a tool to disguise themselves as “human rights and democracy.” For if the state presupposes some minimum of shared values, it cannot be “postmodern” in the sense of radical relativization and the denial of enduring values.
Orthodox Christians cannot accept this: although the state does not exist to turn the world into a paradise, it is there to prevent the world from becoming hell. And hell is a world without values, a chaos after which comes the satanic “order” of the Antichrist.
THE NAIVETY OF THE ORTHODOX
Orthodox peoples, in principle, relate to other people and nations with a sense of trust. And for that reason they are very often naïve—not only in personal relations, but also in political, geopolitical, and international affairs. In 2014, when NATO launched a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the Russian people once again realized that all the Western talk about peace, human rights, and democracy had been a deception preparing the ground for a new war. Had Russia forgotten Napoleon, the Crimean War (when the West supported the Turks), the Russo-Japanese War (when American bankers incited Japan against Russia), the treacherous attack by Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914, the Bolshevik Revolution funded from the City and Wall Street, Hitler and his murderous soldiery, or the American Cold War?
And Serbia?
Has Serbia—whom the West destroyed three times in the 20th century—still not awakened, but instead believes in “Euro-Atlantic integration”? In our lands, the First World War was waged against Serbia by the Germans and Austrians; the Second World War again brought German and Austrian aggression (and it also brought the bloody bombings conducted by our Anglo-American “allies” in 1943 and 1944, even on Easter, in which almost no Wehrmacht soldiers died, but rather civilians in Belgrade, Podgorica, Leskovac, and Niš); and in 1995 and 1999 the West, led by America, showered Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Serbia with tons of bombs containing depleted uranium.
Why do we continue to pay with blood for our trust in the West?
MYSTICISM AND POLITICS
From the perspective of the Revelation given to humanity, the Orthodox Church is the New Israel, gathering into itself all peoples willing to respond to God’s call in Christ. Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Russians (of Little, White, and Great Russia), Georgians, baptized Arabs and Syrians—all form one people: the People of God. This people, according to God’s will, has the task of bearing witness to Christ’s Resurrection before all other nations on the face of the earth, while carefully preserving the awareness of what they are called to be. As long as Orthodox peoples and their leaders built their state and social life upon this calling, divine grace accompanied them. With the meekness of Christ, they prevailed—not through force or violence.
Saint Nikolaj of Žiča taught that the fact that Russians possess one-sixth of the earth’s landmass is the greatest proof of Christ’s words: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
But too often the Orthodox forgot their purpose and, instead of remaining turned toward the East—toward Christ, the Sun of Righteousness—they moved toward the darkness of the West, bowing before its idols disguised as progress and civilization. Their saints and elders warned them, but many times no one wished to listen, and so their delusions, as we have seen, were paid for in blood.
THE EXPERIENCE OF THE PEOPLE
The Serbian people have preserved in their epic poetry a verse that stands as an eternal warning: “The Latins are ancient deceivers.” As Dr. Duško Babić notes, “Serbian folk epic poetry, in its shadowed depths, carries within it the centuries-old antagonism between Eastern and Western Christianity. Beginning long before the historical schism of 1054, this conflict was multilayered and comprehensive—ritual, dogmatic, political, and cultural. The Serbian people, viewed as a whole, always had enough strength within themselves to resist these pressures.”
The Russian people also knew who the Latins were, even from the Middle Ages. When Pope Innocent III, in 1204, sent his legates to Prince Roman of Galicia to offer him a royal crown and military aid—together, of course, with submission to the pope—the prince drew his sword and said to the uninvited guests: “Does the pope have one like this? As long as I carry it on my belt, I need no foreign sword, following the example of my forefathers, who raised up the Russian land…”
Of course, whenever Western idolaters appeared in Serbia and Russia—those alienated from their own people—these inherited wisdoms were forgotten, and the path of falsehood was taken instead.
SERBIAN SAINTS AND RUSSIAN SAINTS
Long ago, Bishop Nikolaj emphasized that Western Europe is an enemy of Serbian freedom and that “all the paths of Western Europe are mercilessness and lies.” He added: “Serbia is a neighbor of Europe, but Serbia is not Europe. Let her help Europe if she wishes and is able, but let her not pour herself into Europe and lose herself in Europe.”
Saint Justin of Ćelije bore witness: “European culture has stripped man of his soul and mechanized him. It reminds me of a monstrous machine that swallows people and turns them into objects.”
Both Bishop Nikolaj and Father Justin begged the Serbs not to follow the man-eating Europe without Christ, which Nikolaj called the White Demon.
Russian saints also warned their people not to rush toward the West. Saint Theophan the Recluse said: “God punished us through the West, and He will punish us again, but we do not care. We are up to our ears in Western mud, and everything seems just fine to us. We have eyes and do not see, we have ears and do not hear, nor do we understand with our hearts. Lord, have mercy on us! Send us Your light and Your truth.”
Saint Ignatius (Brianchaninov) spoke in the same vein, foretelling waves of a worldwide deluge coming from the godless West, whose goal is to “eradicate faith in Christ, destroy His Kingdom on earth, suffocate His teaching, ruin morality, mute and annihilate conscience, and establish the rule of the all-evil prince of this world.”
Saint John of Kronstadt also raised his voice. The Optina Elders rang the bells of warning…
Russia, like Serbia, did not listen. And she paid the price.
RUSSIAN THINKERS AND EUROPE
In the 1860s, the Slavophiles wrote to the Serbs from Moscow: “Do not delude yourselves with the idea of becoming Europeans (…) They use the word ‘Europeans’ as a convenient lure for the Slavs, in order to lead them into spiritual slavery; and unfortunately, we still allow ourselves to fall for their deceptions. (…) Do not limit your intellectual freedom with the gaudy dog collars that bear the inscription ‘Europe’.”
Dostoevsky, who claimed that Europe was as dear to him as Russia, could not restrain himself from telling the domestic “Westernizers”: “Yes, your Europe stands on the brink of collapse, on the very eve of a universal fall everywhere. An anthill long ago built without Christ and without the Church, which has lost everything universal and everything absolute—this anthill is completely undermined.”
Danilevsky was equally insightful: “Hatred toward Slavdom has so clouded every sense of truth and justice in Europe that Europe not only closed its eyes to the sufferings of Christians under the Turks—who have the misfortune of being Slavs and Orthodox—but even kindled within itself a love for the Turks, in whom it sees the only element capable of imparting to the East the principles of ‘true’ European civilization.” Leontiev called the average European “the ideal and instrument of universal destruction.”
Reviewing Vasily Zenkovsky’s book Russian Thinkers and Europe, Saint Justin of Ćelije wrote prophetically in 1923 that “Europe, by all the currents of its life, is entering its Apocalypse,” and that “therefore it is in delirium, therefore it rushes from catastrophe into catastrophe. If you pose the apocalyptic question: how will Europe end?—Russian thinkers will answer: if not with Christ, then with death without resurrection.”
If we know all this (and only he who refuses to know, does not know), then it becomes clear: the fate of the Serbian Church within the European Union—an EU sinking into the nihilism of the latter days—would be tragic in every sense. The Brussels “deep state” is disturbed by the Serbian Church precisely because it is the last institution that unites all Serbs everywhere, and it will work in every possible way to break the unity of the SOC.
The time has come to abandon illusions and to embark on a path of mystical and political sobriety.
