Eastern Orthodoxy in America
Eastern Orthodoxy is a sacramental and iconic form of Christianity that diverged from Roman Catholicism in late antiquity and was centered in Eastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean basin.
It became a major presence in America with the “new” immigration. During the decades after 1880, about a million Eastern Orthodox from Russia, Greece, Ukraine, Albania, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Syria and other countries moved through New York (which became their major population center) to the Pennsylvania coal fields, the industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast, and, in smaller numbers, the West Coast. In the Old World a decentralized “family” of separate national churches, tied to varying languages, cultures, and political systems, Eastern Orthodox churches remained diverse in America. Their members formed tight ethnic communities, coexisted uneasily, and formed a kaleidoscopic array of bodies.The Russians were the most significant early Orthodox presence, colonizing Alaska during the late 18th century and then, during the 19th, converting more than 10,000 natives (perhaps a sixth of Alaska’s population) and establishing a diocese in Sitka. The Russian presence—though not the natives’ Russian Orthodoxy—yielded to a growing American Protestant presence after the 1867 sale of Alaska to the United States. In 1872 the Russian Orthodox church transferred the diocese southward to San Francisco to serve the growing city’s Russian, Greek, Serbian, and Syrian Orthodox. Orthodox immigration to the Northeast and Midwest after 1880 revitalized Russian Orthodoxy in America and shifted its focus eastward. Under Archbishop Tikhon Belavin (1865–1925), the Russian church established dominance over American Orthodoxy, the Diocese of the Aleutians and Alaska became the Diocese of the Aleutians and North America, the Church of St. Nicholas was erected in New York in 1901, and the diocese was moved to New York in 1905—making Orthodoxy the only Christian tradition in America whose center of gravity moved from west to east.
The Russian Orthodox cathedral dedicated to St Michael, built in Sitka, Alaska in 1848, seen in this photograph taken around 1900.
Seeking a “pan-Orthodox” American church under Russian jurisdiction and English liturgy, the Russian church expanded by 1916 to 100,000 members by attracting Syrians, Serbs, Bulgarians, and “Uniates” (eastern European Christians loyal to Rome but alienated from the American Catholic hierarchy after arriving from Russia and Ukraine) in addition to the Slavs and native Alaskans who remained its primary constituents. But the nationalist impulses of World War I and the 1917 rise of communism in Russia shattered this developing arrangement into separate ethnic churches resistant to Moscow. Romanians separated from the Russian church in 1918 and formed a church in 1921, followed by Serbs, Albanians, Syrians, Bulgarians, and Ukrainians. After World War II, these churches grew under renewed immigration and consolidated into such current bodies as the Antiochian (Syrian) Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America (250,000 members), the Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox Church (105,000), the Serbian Eastern Orthodox Church (50,000), and the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate of America (40,000). Other, smaller churches represented Albanians, Egyptians, Armenians, Ukrainians, former Uniates, and several other groups. In addition to spinning off these ethnically defined churches, the Russian church itself split into three separate organizations—all with American headquarters in or near New York City—over the question of allegiance to Moscow in the wake of the Russian Revolution. The largest of these maintained a tense connection with Russia until achieving independence in 1970 as the Orthodox Church of America (OCA). It has retained intellectual dominance over American Orthodoxy, become increasingly multiethnic, and renewed its ties to Alaska natives.
The several hundred thousand Greek Orthodox who arrived from Greece, Asia Minor, and the Mediterranean islands between the 1890s and 1920s resisted Russian hegemony and formed separate parishes. The first, established in New York (1892) and Chicago (1893), were followed by 1921 by more than 160 others, mostly in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. In 1922 these formed the Greek Archdiocese of North and South America, based in New York City. Beginning in the 1930s, the church attracted Uniates, Albanians, Byelorussians and others. It became and remains the nation’s largest Orthodox church. By 1995 its United States membership of nearly 2 million was sufficiently large to warrant the formation of a separate archdiocese.
Americanization remains an important issue for American Orthodox, as manifested on the one hand by continuing ethnic consciousness and retention by many churches of their traditional languages and liturgies, and on the other by Orthodox leaders’ desire to be recognized as a major American faith.
