“THE NEAREST EXIT” by Olen Steinhauer

“Erika knew surprisingly little about the Orthodox Church, most of her understanding coming from a single conversation she’d had in the eighties with a Romanian informer who had come to Vienna to discuss the terms of his employment.

The professor had been a talker; she could hardly get a word in at all.

On the subject of the conspiratorial Romanian mind, he started with the obvious variable: the Securitate, the regimen’s feared secret police, which, according to rumors Erika didn’t believe, employed in some fashion a quarter of the population. When he saw this didn’t sway her, he turned to religion and democracy. He said,

<<Democracy functions in Protestant nations.
It barely functions in Catholic nations.
It doesn’t function at all in Orthodox nations.>>

<<It’s about independent thinking,>> the professor explained

<<How God’s word is interpreted.

You Protestants, you believe that all it really takes is a Bible to work through who God is and what He wants.

The Catholics read on their own, but they require a pope to help them through the difficult parts. They can’t absolve themselves of sin; the Church has to do that for them.

An Orthodox church represents the link between the earthly and the spiritual. The dividing line is at the front of the church, at the iconostasis. Medieval images of Christ and the saints gaze out, as if heaven is on the other side of the screen, and the Holy peer through. Judging.
Then it happens.
The priest steps behind the screen into the sanctuary. After a little while, he steps out again to share what he’s learned.>>

<<Where does truth come from?

For Protestants, it comes from self-examination.
For Catholics, from assisted examination.
For Orthodox Christians, a man of importance steps behind a screen, talks to God in secret, and comes out to tell you what God wants.>>

<<It works the same way with politics.

Politics for us is a dark, smoky room where a few important people come to an agreement.
Afterward, they step out into the morning light and tell the masses that, say, they now live in a communist country. Or that they live in a capitalist one — it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that my people will never believe that they’ve taken history into their own hands. 
That’s not reality for them.
In our reality, democracy will always be an illusion.>>”

Kindle, 2022