Metropolitan Jonah goes to Washington By Julia Duin, Sunday, March 20, 11:13 AM They appeared at the edge of the crowd on the Mall, a group of men seemingly out of a distant century. Their heads were crowned with klobuks, the distinctive headgear of Orthodox clergy. Sporting black cassocks and untrimmed gray beards, with golden icons dangling from their necks on long chains, these visitors stood out among the crowd clad in jeans and winter coats. The man in their center carried a bejeweled walking stick.

Metropolitan Jonah, 51, leads the Orthodox Church in America, the second-largest Eastern Orthodox body in the United States. He was there to rally the huddled masses waiting in the freezing air to begin the March for Life, the annual demonstration protesting the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion nationwide. His aim was to boost Orthodox participation in political issues. But his efforts to change the OCA would spark a ferocious reaction from his own bishops one month later. At issue is the very nature of Orthodoxy in the New World.

The tensions began with Jonah’s surprise election as head (or “metropolitan”) of the OCA in late 2008. The new leader, who is the first native-born convert to head the church, wasted little time instituting change. He put word out to his bishops and seminarians that their presence was expected at the March for Life, held every January. It was time, he would later tell a reporter, for the Orthodox “to step out in the public square” on a number of social concerns, including abortion. To encourage such stepping out, Jonah also decided to move the offices of the OCA from its isolated Syosset, N.Y., chancery to St. Nicholas Cathedral in Northwest Washington.

On the morning of the march, Jonah preached an uncompromising Gospel at the cathedral. “We need to see and call things what they are and not in some disguised politically correct language,” he said, dressed in resplendent gold brocade vestments, his salt-and-pepper beard making him appear like an Old Testament prophet. “Abortion is the taking of human life.”

Jonah continued: “So often, people think that if we name sin for what it is, that we’re judging people. No, we’re just pointing out reality. It is not a matter of judgment to say abortion is a sin. It is not a matter of judgment to say that homosexual activity is a sin. It is a matter of simply stating the truth of the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ.”

A few hours later at the march — while 80 Orthodox seminarians from New York and Pennsylvania stood, shivering, underneath a large “Orthodox Christians for Life” sign — Jonah told his listeners to stand firm against “the plague of abortion.” He received a rousing ovation. As he swept away down the steps, various clergy kissed his hand, and Washington’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl came up to greet him.

“He is energetic and anxious to move quickly,” said the Rev. Chad Hatfield, chancellor of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary who had accompanied several dozen students to the rally. “Jonah is not as cautious as some people would like him to be. He is bold, forthright and speaks his mind.

“Sometimes that can be messy.”

As Metropolitan Jonah already has found out.

***

Jonah’s move to Washington strikes at the core of the traditional Eastern Orthodox reluctance to be on the front lines of the culture wars, much less political conflicts. The religion’s 1 million American adherents, who remain split into 20 separate ethnic groups, are more likely known to the general public as sponsors of bazaars featuring Slavic or Mediterranean food, crafts and dancing than as societal firebrands.

“Orthodox Christianity tends to be heavily theological and more concerned with matters of doctrine, liturgy and belief than evangelical Protestants and certainly the conservative Christian right,” said Rabbi Niles Goldstein, a senior fellow at the Utah-based Foundation for Interreligious Diplomacy. “They’re wrestling with how to find this balance between Christianity and activism, which makes it difficult for them to speak with a unified voice on social policy and foreign affairs.”

But Jonah sees American Orthodoxy at a crossroads where the choice is either to remain in ethnic enclaves and be irrelevant or jump into the stream of culture and politics and make a difference. He dreams of Orthodox Americans speaking out “as a conscience for the culture.” They would have clout in Congress, advocating for persecuted Orthodox around the world, such as the Egyptian Copts. They would stand equal with evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics in opposing abortion, same-sex marriage, cloning and euthanasia. St. Nicholas would be a hive of missionary work and outreach.

Jonah’s insistence that his church address the pressing issues of the day is a gauntlet thrown down before the feet of his fellow Orthodox leaders, and it has not sat well with the OCA’s governing bodies. In the last week of February, Jonah faced a revolt among his own bishops at a conclave in Santa Fe, N.M. According to an OCA news release, Jonah kept his job but was relieved of several duties and sent on a two-month retreat during Lent.

In reporting on the Santa Fe meeting, the news Web site Orthodox Christians for Accountability — an opposition voice against Jonah — assailed Jonah’s “leadership style, decisions, practices or actions.” Although many of the decisions in question had to do with internal church matters, the first one listed was Jonah’s move to Washington.

In an earlier interview, Web site editor Mark Stokoe, who is also a member of the church’s Metropolitan Council, or executive body, spoke out against the move. He called it “a major decision that should be considered carefully in the context of the finances and the strategic plan by the entire church. To play the game in Washington takes a lot of money, and the OCA is not a wealthy church.”

And Jonah says his mind is made up. The church’s drafty Syosset headquarters building, originally a summer cottage, is racking up enormous utility bills. And Washington, he adds, is the perfect home base for “a united Orthodox voice speaking out against iniquity or advocating good things.”

But just as not everyone believes the Orthodox should be speaking out, not everyone believes they need to be united.

***

The world’s Christians generally were united during their first millennium. The first break came in 1054, when medieval Christianity split in two over theological and papal issues. From then on, its western — or Latin — branch would be led by the bishop of Rome, otherwise known as the pope. Its eastern — or Greek — branch would fall under the bishop, or patriarch, of Constantinople, whose distant successor is Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul.

These two expressions of world Christianity have vastly different rites and some diverging doctrines and practices. They disagree on the wording of the Nicene Creed, the major Christian profession of faith. The Orthodox allow married men to be priests; Catholics do not. Catholics believe in papal infallibility and primacy of the pope among the world’s bishops. The Orthodox do not.

Worldwide, there are 250 million Orthodox to 1 billion Roman Catholics. In the United States, the 1 million Orthodox are vastly outnumbered by about 68 million Catholics. The Orthodox took longer to anchor themselves in America than Catholics did, with multiple countries establishing their own national Orthodox churches on American soil, none of them wishing to merge.

In 1970, the Russians made their daughter church independent, naming it the Orthodox Church in America in the hope that other Orthodox bodies would unite under that title. The move infuriated several other Orthodox churches, especially the Greeks, the largest of America’s Orthodox branches at 477,000 members.

Of the top American Orthodox branches, the OCA, with about 85,000 members, has the highest percentage of Sunday service attenders at 40 percent weekly and has grown the most in the past decade, at 21 percent. Much of the growth has come from converts — evangelical Protestant ones at that — whose presence has helped steer the OCA in a more conservative direction.

***

Born in 1959 as James Paffhausen, Jonah was a church acolyte as a boy, says younger sister Laurie Paffhausen. Her brother was a tease, she remembers, who loved to cook and once served her octopus as a joke when they were teenagers. Even though their family roots were German, he was fascinated with Russian culture early on and painted icons in the family garage in La Jolla, Calif. “He is not the typical brother,” she said. “He’s got an amazing sense of humor. He’s driven.”

The Episcopal Church’s decision in 1976 to ordain women turned Jonah away from his denomination, she said, and he converted to Orthodoxy in 1978 as a college student at the University of California at San Diego. He got two master’s degrees from St. Vladimir’s, then began work on a doctorate. In 1993, after he turned 34, he took a year off from his job as a vice president of his father’s San Diego mortgage company to go to Russia.

At the time, Jonah had a girlfriend. If an Orthodox candidate for the priesthood wishes to marry, he must do so before ordination. Then, if his wife dies, he cannot remarry.

Jonah spent several months pondering his future at Valaam Monastery, north of St. Petersburg, where he was introduced to a venerable Orthodox elder known as Kyrill. “Should I get married, or should I become a monk?” he recalls asking Kyrill.

“Become a priest-monk,” the old man said.

Jonah was torn. “You count the cost and look to see if I could do this or not, and I decided yes, with God’s grace,” he says now. “Did I like the idea? Not particularly. I liked the world. I did want to get married and have a family. But I realized I had another path. The whole point of Christian practice of asceticism is you deny yourself what is good for what is better for you.”

As for the girlfriend?

“She did not react well.”

Jonah’s sojourn in Russia proved to be a smart career move. His contacts with the motherland, his reputation as an astute speaker at Orthodox spiritual retreats and his expertise as the founding abbot at St. John of San Francisco monastery in Manton, Calif., caught the eye of several dioceses. On Nov. 1, 2008, he was made bishop of Fort Worth.

Meanwhile, the OCA seemed bent on writing its own obituary. Scandalous news began leaking out in 2005: Its highest officials were accused of using at least $4.5 million in donations to cover personal credit card bills, pay sexual blackmail and support family members. By fall 2008, the church’s reigning leader, Metropolitan Herman, then 76 and in office for six years, had been forced out, a chancellor had been defrocked and many staff members in Syosset had been removed.

In November, shortly after Jonah’s appointment to Fort Worth, a council of stunned OCA leaders met in Pittsburgh to elect Herman’s successor. On Nov. 11, the little-known, newly appointed junior bishop gave an electrifying 31-minute speech calling for reform and talking bluntly about “corrupt” leaders who had “raped” the OCA and created a culture of “fear and intimidation” throughout the church.

“He was wildly received,” Metropolitan Council member Stokoe remembers. “Jonah clearly stood out after his speech the night before the election. At the end of the day, here was a fresh-faced bishop who had no involvement in the scandal.”

The next day, Nov. 12, more than two dozen names, including Jonah’s, were on the first ballot to elect a new metropolitan. The council gave Jonah a majority on the second ballot; he was elected in a final vote in which only the OCA bishops were allowed to cast ballots. When the waiting crowd saw its new metropolitan, vested in a light blue cape and white klobuk, it applauded passionately.

That evening, Jonah called his family to break the news. He seemed so ebullient that his sister remembers asking, “Are you tripping?”

“This is the biggest trip on the planet,” he told her.

***

Within months, Jonah was making waves inside and outside the church. At an Orthodox gathering at St. Seraphim Cathedral in Dallas in April 2009, Jonah called the leadership of Patriarch Bartholomew “a foreign patriarchate . . . under Islamic domination.”

Jonah said of his plan to unite Orthodox Americans, “I think we have a better solution.”

His remarks went viral, and criticism poured in; two days later, he apologized for his “uncharitable” statements. OCA leaders would continue to fume over Jonah’s lack of tact.

Last May, another controversial communication ended up on the Internet: a letter to the U.S. Armed Forces Chaplains Board about the proposed end to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Jonah threatened to pull his 26 OCA clergymen (more than half the total number of Orthodox chaplains) out of the military if they were forced to officiate at same-sex unions or to condone homosexual behavior. An Orthodox priest would minister to a gay person by calling on him or her “to repent, to change his or her lifestyle, to renounce the ‘gay identity’ and to embrace a Christian lifestyle of chastity, . . .” Jonah wrote. “The Orthodox Church firmly opposes the validation of homosexuality in any form.”

No other Orthodox leaders spoke up alongside him. He stood alone until the Rabbinical Alliance of America, an Orthodox Jewish group, issued a similar statement, as did Catholic Military Archbishop Timothy Broglio. To date, Jonah has not pulled any chaplains out of the military.

Not everyone agreed with his approach. “Many were embarrassed by it, for its overstatement,” Stokoe said of Jonah’s letter. “It is one thing to affirm a position, quite another to say, ‘It will be the end!’ when clearly, it will not be.”

Others said it was about time the head of a Christian denomination took a stand on this issue. “The word in OCA circles is that Jonah has angered some of the old guard by his outspokenness on hot-button culture-war issues like abortion and gay marriage,” said former Beliefnet.com columnist Rod Dreher, an Orthodox Christian from Philadelphia. “The teaching of the Orthodox Church on these points is crystal clear, and thank God, Jonah is making himself seen and heard. Where are the other Orthodox hierarchs? Christian witness in the public square requires more than showing up for kebabs and folk dancing.”

Added Dreher: “Jonah is not perfect, but he’s the leader we need right now.”

Hatfield, the seminary chancellor, thinks the “don’t ask, don’t tell” letter was merely Jonah’s opening salvo. “Jonah is coming to terms with a vision where he wants to take the church,” he said, “and it involves being high-profile in the vexing issues of the 21st century.”

But being high-profile has become a vexing issue for the OCA, some of whose members see Jonah as an inexperienced leader who has moved too fast and has made major miscalculations in trying to change his church. Their new metropolitan is not expected to make any further moves until the end of April, when his Lenten rest comes to an end.

The freshly chastened Jonah does not seem to be abandoning his principles, however. He appeared before worshipers at St. Nicholas Cathedral on the last Sunday in February, just after his disastrous meeting in New Mexico. Clutching his crosier in his left hand, his eyes cast down, he read from a statement denying “inaccurate reporting on the Internet stating that I had been deposed, that I had resigned or that I am on a leave of absence.” He would be going on retreat, he said, but this would be no hideout in an isolated monastery. Instead, he would be spending time with family and attending and celebrating liturgies at his Washington cathedral, the place he had made his new home.

“I am still your metropolitan,” he said. “I am still your diocesan bishop. I am still the active primate of the Orthodox Church of America. . . . l I love you. . . .” He then paused as he battled tears. “I thank you for your continued support and prayers. . . . Now, let us forget about what lies behind and push forward to what lies ahead.”



Julia Duin, whose most recent book is “Days of Fire and Glory,” is a religion writer living in Maryland. She can be reached at [email protected].

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A religious test all our political candidates should take
By Damon Linker
Sunday, September 19, 2010; B01




Fifty years ago, in the midst of his presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, Sen. John F. Kennedy gave a speech to ease voters' concerns about his Catholic faith. Speaking in Houston, Kennedy emphasized that Article VI of the Constitution maintains that no "religious test" may keep a candidate from aspiring to political office. He went further, implying that his Catholicism should be off limits to public scrutiny. To treat a politician's religious beliefs as politically relevant was an affront to America's noblest civic traditions, he declared.

The speech was a huge success -- and not only because it helped Kennedy win. Its most enduring legacy was to persuade journalists, critics and citizens at large not to question the political implications of candidates' religious beliefs. While it was still acceptable to assess the dangers of generic "religion" in public life, evaluating particular faiths came to be viewed as bigotry.

No longer. Since the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s, traditionalist believers have actively injected faith into the political realm, pushing public figures to place their religious convictions at the core of their civic identities and political campaigns. From Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, U.S. presidents have made overt -- and largely innocuous -- gestures toward satisfying this expectation.

Today, President Obama's religious beliefs are at the forefront of public debate. While Fox News personality Glenn Beck decries Obama's alleged left-leaning Christianity as "liberation theology," nearly a fifth of the country believes, mistakenly, that the president is a Muslim. It is tempting to stick with the old Kennedy argument and respond that the president's faith is irrelevant as well as off limits. But it is neither.

The battles over an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan and a Florida pastor's threat to burn the Koran on Sept. 11 underscore the relevance of political leaders' views on faith -- their own as well as others'. Instead of attempting the impossible task of abolishing faith from the political conversation, we need a new kind of religious test for our leaders. Unlike the tests proscribed by the Constitution, this one would not threaten to formally bar members of specific traditions from public office. But religious convictions do not always harmonize with the practice of democratic government, and allowing voters to explore the dissonance is legitimate.

Every religion is radically particular, with its own distinctive beliefs about God, human history and the world. These are specific, concrete claims -- about the status of the religious community in relation to other groups and to the nation as a whole, about the character of political and divine authority, about the place of prophecy in religious and political life, about the scope of human knowledge, about the providential role of God in human history, and about the moral and legal status of sex. Depending on where believers come down on such issues, their faith may or may not clash with the requirements of democratic politics. To help us make that determination, all candidates for high office should have to take the religious test, which would include the following questions:

How might the doctrines and practices of your religion conflict with the fulfillment of your official duties?

This question would be especially pertinent for evangelical Protestant candidates -- such as Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister -- who belong to faith traditions that emphasize transforming the world in the image of their beliefs. The Southern Baptist confession of faith asserts, for instance, that "all Christians are under obligation to seek to make the will of Christ supreme . . . in human society." What would this mean for a Southern Baptist seeking to lead a nation that includes many millions of non-Christians?

Muslim candidates, meanwhile, should be asked to discuss their view of the proper place of sharia law in a religiously pluralistic society. Jewish candidates, too, should be questioned about their faith, as Sen. Joe Lieberman was during his 2000 campaign for the vice presidency, when he was asked to explain how he would negotiate the inevitable tension between the laws of religious observance (including the Sabbath) and serving the nation at its highest level.

How would you respond if your church issued an edict that clashed with the duties of your office?

This would apply primarily to candidates who belong to churches that make strong claims about the divine authority of their leaders. The Roman Catholic hierarchy, for example, has frequently asserted that the authority of the pope and bishops is binding in matters of faith and morals. As Sen. John F. Kerry learned during his 2004 presidential campaign, members of the hierarchy have begun to demand that Catholic politicians not only refrain from having abortions and encouraging women to procure them, but also work to outlaw the procedure -- even though the Supreme Court has declared it a constitutionally protected right, and even if the candidate's constituents are overwhelmingly pro-choice.

The dilemma faced by devout Mormon candidates is potentially greater. Mormons believe that the head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a prophet of God, which seems to give his statements far greater weight than those of any earthly authority, including the president of the United States. In his campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney skirted questions related to his Mormonism by playing down its theological distinctiveness. "The values that I have are the same values you will find in faiths across this country," Romney said in one debate. If he (or another Mormon) runs for the presidency in 2012 or beyond, he should explain how he would respond to a prophetic pronouncement that conflicted with his presidential duties.

What do you believe human beings can know about nature and history?

Many evangelical Protestants and Pentecostals believe in biblical inerrancy, which leads them to treat the findings of natural science (especially those of evolutionary biology) with suspicion. Many of these Christians also believe that God regularly intervenes in history, directing global events, guiding U.S. actions in the world for the sake of divine ends and perhaps even leading humanity toward an apocalyptic conflagration in the Middle East. Potential candidates who belong to churches associated with such thinking, such as the Pentecostal Sarah Palin, owe it to their fellow citizens to elaborate on their views of modern science and the U.S. role in the unfolding of the end times. Given the ominous implications of a person with strong eschatological convictions becoming the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth, it would be profoundly irresponsible not to ask tough questions about the topic.

Do you believe the law should be used to impose and enforce religious views of sexual morality?

America's traditional religious consensus on sexual morality -- which supported laws against abortion and all forms of non-procreative sex, from masturbation to oral and anal sex, whether practiced by members of the same or different genders, inside or outside of marriage -- began to break down in the 1960s. The nation today is sharply divided between those whose views of sex are still grounded in the norms and customs of traditionalist religion and those who no longer feel bound by those norms and customs. Given this lack of consensus, the law has understandably retreated from enforcing religiously grounded views, leaving it up to individuals to decide how to regulate their sexual conduct.

The religious right hopes to reverse this retreat. That opens the troubling prospect of the state seeking to impose the sexual morals of some Americans on the nation as a whole. All candidates -- especially those who court the support of the religious right -- need to clarify where they stand on the issue. Above all, they need to indicate whether they believe it is possible or desirable to use the force of law to uphold a sexual morality affirmed by a fraction of the people.

Asking candidates about their faith should not be taken as a sign of anti-religious animus. On the contrary, this sort of questioning takes faith seriously -- certainly more seriously than most of our politicians and news media currently do. Candidates think they benefit from making a show of their faith, and journalists, aiming to avoid uncomfortable confrontations, usually allow them to leave their pronouncements at the level of platitudes. We need to go further.

Pastor Rick Warren's conversation with John McCain and Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign was a move in the right direction, though Warren was such an anodyne interviewer that the candidates were permitted to speak mainly in bromides. Better, perhaps, would be a special presidential debate devoted to faith and morality, in which journalists and religious leaders would pose pointed questions about candidates' beliefs.

It matters quite a lot if, in the end, a politician's faith is merely an ecumenical expression of American civil religion -- or if, when taking the religious test, he forthrightly declares (as Kennedy did) that in the event of a clash between his spiritual and political allegiances, the Constitution would always come first. Those are the easy cases. In others -- when a politician denies the need to choose or explain, insisting simply that it's possible to marry his or her religious beliefs with democratic rule in a pluralistic society -- we need to dig deeper, to determine as best we can how the candidate is likely to think and act when the divergent demands of those two realms collide, as they inevitably will.

Obama's 2008 speech on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his own Christian faith and its complicated intersection with the wrenching story of race in America stands as a particularly eloquent example of how to take -- and pass -- the religious test. Obama resisted giving the speech, but many Americans learned something important about the man and his mind as they listened to him talk through some of life's deepest moral, political and spiritual questions. A political process that compelled candidates to engage regularly in such thinking about the tensions and links between faith and governance just might foster increased religious understanding -- which, these days, feels in short supply.

[email protected]

Damon Linker, a contributing editor at the New Republic and a senior writing fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of "The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders."

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