Hello friends
Hello friends. i just wanted to say briefly that i appreciate all of your stories and experiences. i, too, as of 2026, am no longer drinking the ortho-koolaid. i was Orthodox for 18 years, got an mdiv after college from a prominent Orthodox seminary, and was intimately involved in the life of the Orthodox Church.
i will say I am still a Christian and I’m still deeply interested in and fascinated by religion in general and its relationship to meaning, consciousness, transcendence, etc.. My reasons for leaving were primarily of a more scholarly nature: i just realized that most of what Orthodoxy claims about itself as theological and spiritual distinctives were largely constructed in the 20th century, which is a strange and disturbing realization when the Church claims it has never ever changed. i hung on for about 2-3 years due to a sense of responsibility to the community, but once those bridges were no longer standing, i felt no reason to stay.
it might surprise some of you that I became a Catholic. i’ll say one of my pet peeves when i was orthodox was how orthodox people would always bash and demonize other Christian groups, usually without ever fully understanding those groups at all, and that Orthodox seemed to especially hate Catholicism. they would always accuse it of being legalistic, scholastic, and the source of everything evil in the “West.” I’ll say that so far, I’ve experienced exponentially more legalism as an Orthodox than i have as a Catholic. The most striking thing to me about Catholicism today is how the image of Christ as “Divine Mercy” has become the primary devotional image in the contemporary Catholic Church, which i find very moving. During the early process of my conversion, i had what i would describe as a deeply spiritual experience ( perhaps mystical experience) with this image of “Divine Mercy.” i feel that the mercy i asked for over and over again as an Orthodox has finally been granted to me as a Catholic.
i know this is just my personal experience and your mileage will vary. Just wanted to share.