by Katherine Kelaidis, a research fellow at the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge and the author of The Fourth Reformation and Holy Russia? Holy War?
(an excerpt from her new book,The Fourth Reformation: Gender, Sexuality, and the Struggle for the Future of Faith, Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)
The ecumenical dialogue between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Anglican churches is one of the oldest in the Christian world, arguably predating the notion of “ecumenical dialogue” proper. As one of the manifestations of this long friendship, Greek immigrants in early twentieth-century America were often encouraged to seek out Episcopal Churches and priests when an Orthodox church was not nearby. This was the advice in operation in 1957, when my late mother was born in Emporia, Kansas, with a life-threatening medical condition. Doctors recommended surgery when she was only two days old. My pious Greek Orthodox grandparents would not dream of allowing their deathly ill infant daughter to face surgery without the benefit of baptism and so began to search for a priest. Despite the fact that they were in a Catholic hospital, it was the vicar of Emporia’s St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church that was summoned to do the deed.
For this reason, the closeness between the Orthodox and Anglican churches remained a central part of my family’s lore, to the point that we may have overlooked just how much that relationship had cooled for many, particularly after the ordination of women in the late 1970s. This was the case even though the official dialogue between the Anglican Communion and the Orthodox churches, which began in 1973, has continued.
So, I was nothing short of shocked when, in 2012, the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), a Russian-tradition Orthodox body whose independence remains contested, entered into formal dialogue with the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). The ACNA is largely made up of conservative Episcopalians who broke away from the Episcopal Church in 2009. It is not part of the Anglican Communion and is not recognized as canonical—in this case, meaning in formal communion—by the See of Canterbury or by the Episcopal Church. That is to say, they are schismatics—and in the Orthodox faith of my childhood, there was nothing worse than being schismatics.
Yet it seemed the bishops of the OCA were more than willing to overlook this, because they shared with those bishops (many of them mainline Protestant converts to Orthodoxy) the same views on the ordination of women, abortion, and the inclusion of LGBT people in the life of the Christian church. The OCA bishops were willing to ignore one of the core requirements of Eastern Orthodox Christianity—apostolic legitimacy—because they agreed with these people about, ultimately, women priests and gay sex. It was, of course, telling that other Orthodox churches in America (particularly those who answered to powers back in “the old country,” and so had wider geopolitical concerns at stake) did not join in, but nonetheless, the OCA-ACNA dialogue alerted me for the first time to the brave new world of what being in communion looks like.
The OCA is, by the way, not the only ecumenical interlocutor of the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). The breakaway church also has a formal dialogue with the Lutheran Church of North America (NALC), the conservative faction that broke from the progressive Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ECLA). This dialogue is not particularly surprising, two reactionary factions within mainline Protestantism finding common ground with one another. What is rather shocking, once again, if one is clinging to old standards as to what constitutes legitimacy within the Christian context, is that the ANCA has engaged in ecumenical dialogue with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB), the official conference of Catholic bishops in America.
This is, even more than its dialogue with the OCA (which is shrouded in its own questions of legitimacy dating from the Soviet Period), a sign of legitimacy being offered to a Christian body that in previous eras would not have been given such respect. Yet, in the current climate, it might be surmised that the ANCA is seen by America’s Catholic bishops (who tend to be among the most conservative in the Catholic world) as a legitimate (and one might wonder perhaps more legitimate) ecumenical partner than the Episcopal Church, the official Anglican province in the United States, precisely because of the differing views on the cultural issues that drove the Episcopal Church and the ACNA apart.
Not that the Episcopal Church, nor its leaders in charge of ecumenical dialogue, are likely losing a lot of sleep over this. The Episcopal Church is now in full communion with the ECLA, part of an agreement which also brought them into full union with the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht.¹? These new friendships have been formed with no doctrinal changes on anyone’s part and are forged, in no small part, from a shared ethic around (you guessed it) gender and sexuality.
One might dismiss these particular friendships as simply an extension of the old dream of Christian unity. The modern ecumenical movement is, after all, roughly a hundred years old.
But things become more fascinating when we turn to interreligious dialogue. Bartholomew, Patriarch of Constantinople, and Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow—the two most visible and powerful bishops in the Eastern Orthodox world—have not met since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. Not only that, but the churches they lead are in what can only be described as a “soft schism.” Clergy are no longer permitted to co-celebrate the Eucharist, and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has moved quickly to establish outposts in territories where the bishops are historically loyal to the Ecumenical Patriarchate (this, by the way, has also been a boon for the Russian state, but that is another matter). Moreover, the Moscow-based leader of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) issues encyclicals calling Bartholomew a heretic and an atheist, and the Greek Patriarch denounces his Russian counterpart as an ethno-nationalist.
In the midst of this feud, in May of 2025, the Patriarch of Moscow met with Sheikh ul-Islam Allahshukur Pashazade, Chairman of the Caucasus Muslims’ Board, the most recent of a series of encounters between high-ranking Russian Church officials and Muslim leaders, usually from Russia’s Muslim-majority regions, but also from Saudi Arabia. Eastern Orthodox Christian identity was largely created in the Early Modern period around opposition to the two co-equal threats of Catholicism to the West and Islam to the East. All of the modern majority-Orthodox Christian nation-states were created out of rebellion against an Islamic empire, fights for independence infused with religious symbolism, whether the casting out of the Mongols from Russia or the Ottomans from Greece and the rest of the Balkans. Such dialogues would have long been unthinkable, particularly as Orthodox bishops quarrel. Yet, Kirill justifies these dialogues because of these issues of gender and sexuality, telling the gathered assembly such dialogue is good and necessary:
Because our fundamental values are alike. Orthodox Christians and Muslims strive to act according to God’s will. It is an essential principle of our life. We are conservative in a good way, for Orthodox Christians and Muslims resolutely reject any attempts to make sin a social norm. For us the unnatural confusion of the sexes and the so-called LGBT ideology are absolutely unacceptable. We seek to preserve traditional, God-commanded form of family. Whatever is used to justify the egoistic attitude to people and to the world, it is evident that it substitutes serving God for serving one’s passions, which turns a person into a prisoner of his or her own vices. [1]
In short, the controversies surrounding issues of gender and sexuality have not only caused more than a few bitter divorces. They have also led to some very strange, quite unnatural, one might say, bedfellows.
This would all be very confusing to virtually every believer, of any stripe, who lived before approximately 1750. For most of history, the principal ecclesiastical concern was not right behavior, but orthodoxy, the Greek word meaning “correct belief,” with respect to issues such as the nature of God, the universe, sin, salvation, and human beings’ ultimate purpose and destiny. And it was the answers to these questions that united and divided believers, who seldom made significant fodder of ethical questions or other such practical, one might even say worldly, matters.
It is a fact evident in Christianity’s first great showdown at the Council of Nicaea. In 325 C.E., the bishops of the newly legalized faith gathered by the order of the emperor. Constantine had demanded that they decide what exactly it took to qualify as a Christian. This seemed important if Christianity was to be the religion of the empire. The document the bishops at Nicaea produced is known as the Nicene Creed, and it is still recited in churches and by the faithful in private prayer around the world. It is what believers in many Christian traditions, including the oldest, must recite (or have recited for them in the case of an infant) before baptism. The Nicene Creed covers a lot of ground: the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the dead, the mission and nature of the Church, and the coming Kingdom of God. It has a lot to say about how a Christian ought to believe. It has very little to say about how a Christian ought to behave. Ethics was an entirely different matter than theology.
This way of viewing ethics’ role, or lack thereof, in religion was not unique to Christians. Islam, for example, a religion with robust legal, political, and ethical systems, does not make adherence to these systems a necessary component of actually being a Muslim. A Muslim, by Islam’s own definition, is someone who believes and recites the shahada, the Islamic profession of faith: “There is no God but God and Mohammed is His Prophet.” Judaism, which, is however, not a creedal religion like Christianity and Islam, but instead the religious practices of a tribe, continues to the present to make the distinction between observant and non-observant Jews, all of whom are, significantly, still Jewish. Likewise, Buddhists traditionally believe the Four Noble Truths; actually doing anything in response to that knowledge is optional.
This is all to say that, for most of human history, ethics was considered a largely separate proposition from religion, which was a metaphysical exercise that had little or nothing to do with mundane worldly matters, least of all those matters related to sex, gender, and marriage. Sexual behavior and norms were, in pre-industrial societies, largely determined by economic demands.
Marriage was a wholly economic matter, having arisen as an institution to assure paternity in societies in which status, power, and property were passed along the father’s line and reliable paternity testing was thousands of years away. This same desire to ensure that everyone knew his father created the demand for virginity before marriage and chastity within marriage for women from the property-holding classes. All men and nearly all women from the unpropertied ranks of society were not held to any particular sexual ethics. Women from the propertied classes, on the other hand, were expected to only have sex with their husbands during their fertile years (though we know other women were not exactly off-limits), but no one demanded their husbands return the favor, as long as other propertied men’s wives were not implicated. Even in religious traditions such as Christianity and Buddhism, in which sexual chastity is frequently employed as an ascetic discipline, the focus was, for most of history, on the discipline, not on the sex. Remember, food, sleep deprivation, and intentional poverty were used to fulfil the same purpose. Sex was certainly understood to be among the pleasures of life, and even to rank among the necessities of life, but it was not seen as particularly dangerous, problematic, or sinful.
But then all the old economic and social norms that had once held our sexual norms in place began to shift when the Industrial Revolution changed how people made their livelihoods in a way unseen since settled agriculture. This, in turn, utterly reshaped the intimate lives of people across the socio-economic spectrum. This transformation has been so extensive that, should a time traveler arrive from, let’s say, the Renaissance, he would not be scandalized so much as extremely confused.
The meaning and limits of these changing norms were articulated by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, the philosophical movement that grew up in response to industrialization. For men like Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, the individual was not just economically free in the way industrialization and nascent capitalism was increasingly allowing him to be, but absolutely free—Free to do and be as each person saw fit. The dignity of the individual person and that person’s happiness was the highest moral good. Governments, they posited, existed only to protect that freedom. Freedom was the end and goal of human life.
Freedom is a strange thing to us mortals. We simultaneously crave it and fear it. When every sexual norm within a society is transformed or disappears entirely in the course of a few generations, our first reaction will not be to celebrate our newfound freedom. We will be afraid. Our very modern obsession with sex is without a doubt the product of how quickly the millennia-old status quo surrounding sex and gender has been snatched away. If it seems like we cannot stop talking about sex, it is because we have not quite figured out what to make of sex, gender, and all that both entail in this new world in which we find ourselves.
The rapid scientific and technological advancements of industrialization and its companion, the Scientific Revolution, that great child of the Enlightenment, have largely managed to displace religion from its former domain as explicator of the natural world and mediator between humanity and the powerful forces that control it. This left humanity’s own desires, passions, and identity as the only mighty force with which it had to do battle. Thus, it made a strange sort of sense for religion to move into the sexual ethics business–which today often appears to be the only business religious people and institutions have any interest in.
Reference:
[1] Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, “Address by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia at the Meeting of Russia-Islam Strategic Vision Group” (Kazan, May 19, 2023), Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, https://mospat.ru/en/news/90360/
Order Katherine Kelaidis, The Fourth Reformation: Gender, Sexuality, and the Struggle for the Future of Faith, from Bloomsbury