(Religion & Liberty) The Orthodox Church is mostly known in the United States for its rich liturgical life, its adherence to ancient calendars for major Christian feast-days and, perhaps most of all, the many food and ethnic festivals offered by its multiethnic parishes. Social activism and moral witness in the public square, not so much. That has begun to change with the rise of Metropolitan Jonah, the primate of the Orthodox Church in America. This youthful bishop, born James Paffhausen in Chicago and raised in Southern California before entering monastic life in Russia, was elected to lead the OCA in November 2008. Since then, he has perhaps been the most widely quoted and covered Orthodox bishop in the United States, speaking out on social issues and traveling widely to speak to ecumenical gatherings. He delivered one of the keynote addresses at Acton University in June 2011. Religion & LibertyExecutive Editor John Couretas spoke with Metropolitan Jonah about his talk.

R&L: In your Acton University address, “Asceticism and the Consumer Society,” you explained how the consumerist impulse was really an addictive impulse, something that compels us fill a void where God should be. And we so frequently attempt to fill that empty spot with the wrong things.

Metropolitan Jonah: I think the void occurs because we’re basically distracted from God, and we don’t let God fill that void. We don’t have that focus and that perpetual intuitive awareness of God for which we were created, and so we let other things get in the way. And for many people, it’s pain and disappointment, discouragement, anger, bitterness, all of the passions. For others, it could be the pain that follows from having been abused in some way. And so this becomes a kind of a preoccupation and we look for things to mute that pain, to distract us from it. We look for a salve.

R&L: Would you say that these passions, these addictions, have a similar cause?

Metropolitan Jonah: All addictive behaviors are the same, essentially. They are rooted in the same kind of phenomenon, this avoidance of inner pain. It could be consumerism and a constant preoccupation with acquisition of things, as if more stuff could make us happy. Or it could be the resort to abusing alcohol or drugs or sex in the same way.

R&L: In your talk, you offered some reflection on how this distraction not only pulls us away from God, but reduces us to something less than fully human. What is the key to living out our full humanity as Christians in this highly secularized world?

Metropolitan Jonah: I believe the real key is that whole complex of relationships that we find, first and foremost, in the family and then in the broader community. But our relationship with God, of course, takes primacy even before the family. All of our other relationships find their place within that relationship with God, because it’s precisely that which actualizes our personhood. We can be autonomous individuals but that doesn’t mean that we’re authentically persons, in the sense of having that real meaning and vision of our lives rooted in God and rooted in the other. Without God, our personhood becomes a kind of a self definition.

At AU 2011, Metropolitan Jonah talks with R&L Executive Editor John Couretas.

R&L: And self-definition also promotes the idea of self-sufficiency, does it not?

Metropolitan Jonah: Yes, it’s a delusion of self-sufficiency and a delusion of complete autonomy. And none of us is autonomous, ultimately. We don’t come into being simply by ourselves, nor can we live simply by ourselves. Which opens the way to sin and depersonalization. That’s what sin does to us. It’s what these addictive behaviors do, because they isolate us.

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R&L: You referred to Father Alexander Schmemann’s famous definition of secularism as the negation of worship, as the negation of man as a worshipping being. Could you tell us how Schmemann’s insights will help us navigate the high secular world we live in now?

Metropolitan Jonah: Well, the way I explain what Father Schmemann taught about secularism is compartmentalization. And by that I mean the compartmentalization of our lives and to a great degree, it’s about the compartmentalization of God into a little box where we can access Him when we care to, but really most of the time we ignore him. We’re trying to put God into a place where we can control Him. What that does is fundamentally distort the intuitive reality, or the intuitive awareness of God, Who is present at all times and everywhere. This is how we understood Him in our original state, the state in which we were created to be and from which we fell. This secularization is basically rooted in a kind of dualism of excluding or separating God from His creation, the material world. And it’s precisely in the reality of God’s presence in every aspect of the material world and that intuitive awareness of Him shining forth in and through the creation that’s the real core of the whole sacramental vision of reality.

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R&L: In your talk, you also touched on the rise of Christianophobia, which describes the process of pushing the faith witness out of the public square. This has been going on for some time. It seems though that even some Christians have absorbed this view, preferring to keep faith a private matter. What do you make of this?

Metropolitan Jonah: That’s precisely compartmentalization. And it’s the compartmentalization of the Church and its witness into simply one more interest group, another lobbying entity, with all views of equal weight and simply a matter of opinion. Now obviously I’m not arguing for some kind of a unified church-state with a single official view. That can also take you to a very secularized place, as a matter of fact. But people of faith are informed by not simply doctrines and dogmas, but by that living consciousness that God is and that our lives are dependent on Him. And that changes one’s entire worldview and stands in sharp contrast to the views of those who believe there is no God or He is not present and our lives are not dependent on Him. That’s the fundamental difference. And so while an authentic faith witness is not going to come out in any kind of great official pronouncements from some kind of central authority, we can work toward a common vision that is arrived at by people of a common mind.

R&L: You’re talking about an ethic, a culture that you live it out. It’s not just talking about these things, but it’s embodied and experienced in relationship to Christ.

Metropolitan Jonah: And I would also say more broadly that I’m talking about people of faith, who are also Jews and who are Muslims. Not just Christians. They have a witness to share, too, and in our society I think we can mix common cause with them in many areas. Because it’s a matter of a living perception of God. Now, we can disagree about some of the specifics. For Christians, our perception of God is always in terms of Jesus Christ. For a Jew or a Muslim, their perception of God is not through Christ. Yet, they still have a very powerful perception of God. With Christians, they would share a belief that God informs all of their moral and ethical decisions.

Read the whole interview here: Asceticism and the Consumer Society: An Interview with Metropolitan Jonah.