Religion: An American Orthodoxy?

Eastern Orthodoxy is America's "fourth faith"—and perhaps its most thoroughly fragmented. The 3,000,000 Orthodox Christians in the U.S. are mostly second-or third-generation immigrants, and their churches have developed as daughter colonies of ancient sees in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Theoretically, nothing would make more sense than to link these assorted Russians, Greeks, Serbs, Syrians, Ukrainians and others—all of whom share a common faith—into one American Orthodox Church. That dream has now reached the talking stage, only to become embroiled in the kind of old-world intra-church rivalry that has plagued Orthodoxy for centuries.

The first concrete step toward creating an independent...