Does the West have an Orthodox problem?

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The scenes on CNN today of Serbian political and religious leaders holding candles at a vigil to protest Kosovo’s independence, as well as the rogue protesters setting fire to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade, bring to mind Graham Fuller’s January/February FP cover story, “A World Without Islam.” In the piece, Fuller cautions Islam’s critics not to assume that a Middle East dominated by Orthodox Christianity would be any more accepting of Western influence than today’s Middle East. With Serbian Christians now fighting to retain what they they view as their religious homeland, maybe he was on to something:

The culture of the Orthodox Church differs sharply from the Western post-Enlightenment ethos, which emphasizes secularism, capitalism, and the primacy of the individual. It still maintains residual fears about the West that parallel in many ways current Muslim insecurities: fears of Western missionary proselytism, a tendency to perceive religion as a key vehicle for the protection and preservation of their own communities and culture, and a suspicion of the “corrupted” and imperial character of the West. Indeed, in an Orthodox Christian Middle East, Moscow would enjoy special influence, even today, as the last major center of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Orthodox world would have remained a key geopolitical arena of East-West rivalry in the Cold War. Samuel Huntington, after all, included the Orthodox Christian world among several civilizations embroiled in a cultural clash with the West.

Whatever you think of Fuller’s characterization, it certainly seems noteworthy that the United States and the EU are about to go the mat with Russia for a Muslim country at the expense of a Christian one. If the rift between an increasingly religious Russia and the West continues to grow, can it be long until the op-eds start appearing on “The Orthodox Threat” or “The Failure of Political Orthodoxy”? “Orthofascism” doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it?