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"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 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.'
Based on the Greeks I know and on what I know about modern Greek history, on the predominance in Greece of socialist and nationalist parties [and let us add to it the ambiguity about the '48 civil war with the communists], on the proclivity to affiliation with the likes of the Serbs and Mid-Easterners - I reject your argument root, branches, trunk and leaves. And add the bark there, too.