Why 'They Just Prefer the Old Astronomy' Is Wrong
The most common Western summary of Orthodox calendar resistance misdescribes it. Correcting the summary is not taking a side; it is reporting the argument as its own advocates make it.
The concession that is usually granted
Orthodox writers on the calendar question routinely acknowledge that the Julian solar year is less accurate. The 1923 Congress itself proceeded on that acknowledgement — that is the entire reason the Revised Julian calendar was drafted with a more accurate rule than the Gregorian.
The four real axes
Authority (who may change a common inheritance), conciliarity (the form such a decision must take), continuity (the liturgical year as an interlocking whole, and the pastoral cost of dividing parishes), and Paschal unity (the Nicene settlement that all Christians keep one Pascha).
The pastoral axis, which outsiders miss
The calendar question has caused real schisms within Orthodoxy — old-calendarist groups separated from their mother churches after 1924. Any Orthodox hierarch weighing a calendar change weighs that history. The reluctance is informed by consequences already suffered, not merely by conservatism.
An honest counterweight
Some Orthodox writers argue the opposite way: that keeping a knowingly less accurate solar reckoning has its own cost, and that the Revised Julian adoption was a legitimate pastoral judgement. Orthodoxy contains this debate; it has not resolved it, and the archive does not resolve it either.