Orthodox Church and Contemporary Laicisms - a Dialogue

The Orthodox Church today exists in a completely new cultural and social environment. Eastern Christian societies now accept the political, educational, cultural, technological, and moral models and values produced by Western civilization. The contemporary civilization of Europe is laical, secular. Contemporary laicisms have essentially different metaphysical, anthropological and value principles, which call into question all traditional Eastern Christian fundamental principles. All types of contemporary laicisms - separatist, authoritarian, anti-clerical, laicism of belief in civil values, laicism of recognition, cooperative laicism, religious laicism, they all see the human individual as the highest value and the criterion of the good and the truth. Relativism is the new religion, a mandatory standard. Freedom is not connected to any notion of goodness or truth. To be "laical" in the widest sense of the word today means to belong to the ideological current of Enlightenment. Laicism denotes a freedom that is deprived of any religious content and excludes all Christian values from public (social) life. The dimensions of faith and morality are banished into the spheres of the "private" and the "subjective". The dichotomy of religious and laical is not only conditioned by the anomalies of Christian societies. It is in a certain way immanent in the Church.