I believe writersoul is on point here. MO is not just Orthodoxy in lazy form. It’s not just “Shabbos and kosher and that’s it”. It can’t be reduced to what people do or don’t typically wear, or which mitzvos they do or don’t keep. It’s a hashkafa. An ideology. It means that on the one hand, you engage fully with the secular world, that you aren’t afraid of interacting with the secular world and with non-Jews, that you believe that non-Jews and secular Jews can make positive contributions to society, that you respect them for those contributions and acknowledge them as real people with real rights, not lesser forms of humanity. That you believe that your children can grow up to be strong, independent adults, and that you can send them off into the secular world without being fearful of what it will do to them. And it means on the other hand that you acknowledge the existence of an all-powerful Creator, of a Torah and mesorah passed down through generations, representing absolute truth, that Jews are bound by halacha, that men and women have (on the whole) different roles in life, that sometimes you will encounter parts of Torah that make you feel highly uncomfortable, that you will struggle to accept, and that that struggle is itself something holy, insofar as it pushes you to get to the heart of the text and to really internalize it in a deeper way. And that as much as rabbis and talmidei chochomim are to be revered, they are not in any way to be put on a pedestal (similarly, women should not be put on a pedestal) and deemed all but infallible, that it is far from assur and even encouraged to “argue with” a Rishon, without insisting that the Rishon was exponentially greater than you in learning and therefore how dare you challenge him.
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