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To which I would add just a couple things. Some sects baptize by immersion and use Trinitarian language but have no sacramental intent. Baptists are generally an excellent example of this.

I agree, but the "intent" is there. The power to invoke sacraments is not. Who do Portestants represent? Certainly not the apostolic inheritors of the authority to loosen and bind. The death knoll of Luther's reformation was the fact that not a single bishop joined him. There is no apostolic succession and there is no real clergy, nor can there be sacrements, the way we understand them for the last 2,000 years or so. They are reduced to rituals, arrogating the authority as they arrogate the "authority" to interpret the scripture individually.

This is not an insult or attack on Protestants, nor doubt as to their their faith. But we, as Orthodox Christians, can only speak from the perspective of the One Holy Catholic and Apostlic Church.

The Church must never bend the rules for political correctness. The fact that OCA accepts some Protestant baptism (I suspect Anglican) is their economt, but then the OCA is so largely ex-Protestant one must woder if we a conflict of interest here.

Amen.

Just as an FYI the OCA's guidelines on who they receive by economy and who they receive by baptism are those contained in the Russian Church's Great Book of Needs. They are over a hundred years old. The Anglicans (and other mainline Protestants) have long since jumped off a theological cliff. Time to update IMO.

"...then the OCA is so largely ex-Protestant one must woder if we a conflict of interest here."

Actually, it is Protestant converts who have the least beef about being baptized into Orthodoxy. There is more resistance amongst cradle Orthodox in the OCA to the practice, even though it doesn't affect them.

The root of this bias in the OCA is not the presence of Protestant converts, but is far more likely to be the heavily *Uniate* background of the OCA, with its attendant Catholic theological and ecclesiological baggage. Part of this is manifested by holding to certain Catholic theological/ecclesiological thought-forms, such as the idea of "valid" Baptisms outside the Church (Catholicism accepts *all* Protestant Trinitarian baptisms, and would consider baptizing any such person to be a sin).

Part of it is manifested by a reaction *against* other things "Western" that are simply Christian, but not expressed in Eastern form. Much of this stems from the fact that writers like Schmemann used the distinctiveness of Orthodoxy to gain academic recognition on the American scene.

Don't ask me to explain how each is arrived at...