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Feel free- I was born and grew up in the effing USSR, and thus I have the first hand experience of the "Orthodox civ". Just remember - I judge the trees [religions] by their fruit - the corresponding Huntingtonian civilizations, i.e. the societies they tend to produce and promote. In my framework the "filioque" is utterly irrelevant, but the fact that out of the Orthodox civ people tend to vote with their feet to the West, while in the opposite direction there is barely a trickle - is highly relevant.

"Please forgive me though I ask some Orthodox FRiends to respond to this. From where I see things it may not be an unfair question, given the "ethnic" element often attributed to Orthodox churches (might we someday see an "American Orthodox" church")..."

A religion for despots? Not one for "free people"? Well, it certainly has been the religion of despots, but then again, so has Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism and some would say, Anglicanism. As for it being a religion for free people, well, I will tell you that the average Greek has a much greater sense of a defensible personal freedom than the average American and Greece is 98% Orthodox. Couple that with the Orthodox practice and doctrine that nothing is established in the area of dogma or praxis without the ultimate approval of the laity across The Church and I'd say it is the perfect religion for free people. Now if what is meant by free people is a Rousseauian/Enlightenment idea of freedom, then Orthodoxy's tenet that we are saved, virtually all of us at least, within and as part of a liturgical community, likely that will run afoul of such Western notions as "every man a pope" and "rugged individualism" which have lead ineluctably to the despair, depravity and spiritual wreckage of modern Western society, a disaster not unlike the perverse effect of heretical Donatism on The Church of North Africa which so weakened that society that it fell easily to the Mohammedans in the 7th-8th centuries. And of course, there's a lesson there. Western notions of "freedom" have lead us into fantasies like believing that Mustapha Adams and Mohammad Jefferson would spring out of the Iraqi desert or Kosovan slums if only given the chance. Orthodoxy doesn't delude itself about human nature or evil for that matter. In fact, unlike the West, Orthodoxy doesn't really have a problem with evil and moving beyond it into holiness. It is not, for us, a stumbling block to theosis.

As for the ethnicity seen in Orthodoxy, well that's a product of the same forces which gave birth to high tea drinking Episcopalians in the 50s, and the familiar Irish Catholic, Polish Catholic, French Catholic and Italian Catholic parishes found throughout this country until very recently (and the Spanish Catholic parishes to this day).

Otherwise, Martin Tell answered the question just fine.

I spoke with Sam Huntington earlier this year, about the Christian East and West actually being the two halves of the same civilization that need to be reunited. He said that he did not know much about or understand Orthodoxy or its culture, and never did. Therefore, by his own admission, his statements on the Orthodox civilization in "Clash of Civilizations" are based on ignorance, and may be dicounted.

As for Soviet despotism, it really was conceived in the West (Marx, Engels, etc.), not the Orthodox East. In Russia and other Eastern countries, communism was born out of rejection of Orthodox Christianity, and the desire to exterminate it.

As for Orthodoxy and despotism in medieval times, Western feudalism was even more despotic than the Eastern Roman Empire, and nowhere near as civilized. Neither Orthodox Serbia nor Greece in modern times could be called despotic, in the case of Serbia not until its communist conquest by Tito.

God only became a junior partner to Caesar in Czarist Russia under the Western Enlightenment-oriented Peter the First, who abolished the Patriarchate and put the church under the state. Catherine the Second, another Western Enlightenment-oriented Russian ruler, was also a gross despot. I hope that the next time we try to unite East and West, we will do it right, based on the undivided faith of the Christian Church, not some atheistic ideology.

As for the Anglicans (or us Lutherans) uniting with Orthodox Christianity, as we should, it won't happen until we reverse our revisionist, liberal protestant drift. For example, Jefferts-Schori and "Selfish Gene" Robinson have got to go.