Time to Separate Church and State in Greece

Published by The National Herald, April 8, 2005

Nine hundred years ago, the Orthodox Church came to terms with the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and made the best out of a bad situation by accepting the protection of the Ottoman sultans. As such, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Orthodox Church led the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire and shepherded the economic, ideological and political identity of the disparate Greek communities from Asia Minor to the United States.

For the most part, the Church advocated submission to legitimate authority and, in this vein, condemned liberalism and excommunicated anyone who showed any inclination towards the secular ideas generated by the French Revolution.

The Church, in fact, embraced conservatism as its credo and vehemently opposed any form of liberal social, political and cultural changes. During the Ottoman period, the senior orthodox clergy disdained innovation to such a degree that it also influenced the Ottoman ecclesiastical leadership to reject not only new philosophical and social concepts, but even the scientific and technological revolution sweeping Western Europe.

In fairness to the Church at that time, there was really little choice. The Orthodox Church had to learn to survive within the bosom of a hostile empire. The Ottomans may have tolerated the Christians, but at best, they did so begrudgingly and, at worst, with considerable belligerence. Every transgression, real or perceived, usually resulted in the hanging of a patriarch or some other Church official. Indeed, the Ottoman sultan held the Church accountable for the good behavior of the Greeks throughout the empire.

Effectively, a moral contract existed between the Church and sultan since 1453 which was more binding than any written agreement. In essence this extended to include the concept that Church and State (meaning all religions of the empire) were indivisible. In 1453, neither did nationalism exist nor did political identity. These were the ideas of the Greek city-states and the Roman Republic, which were superceded in the First Century BC first by the worship of pagan emperors, and later by the Christian despots who ruled the Byzantine Empire absolutely until 1453.

The power of the Byzantine Emperor rested on the acceptance that he was God’s vicar on Earth, and hence, the emperors had to maintain a direct link between imperial authority and the Church. Ordinary citizens were the subjects of the Emperor and concurrently members of the Church and, after the Great Schism, exclusively of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Accordingly, in the political, cultural and ecclesiastical construct of Byzantium, the Emperor and Empire represented a universal dominion sanctioned by God. As a result, the universality of the Empire could not allow a division between secular and ecclesiastical authority. These notions persisted even as the Empire shrank to the confines of Constantinople, and even the last emperors, despite their feeble situation, continued to profess that they embodied church and state as one authority.

After the fall of Constantinople, the Ottoman sultans simply followed the practice of religious identification and, by so doing, segregated the population. The Ottomans not only refused to recognize national affiliation, but they also made every effort to prevent creation of a homogeneous society.

The Ottoman Empire was fragmented into religious societies of which the Muslim was simply the most important. The sultan ruled over all these disparate social, economic and religious entities as an absolute monarch. Any move towards breaking down the ecclesiastical bonds of the empire was a direct challenge to the absolute authority of the sultan. In this context, separation of Church and state was impossible, as well as dangerous.

The sultans supported the Orthodox Church as the political and ecclesiastical leadership of the Greeks because to do otherwise would have been to deny the nature of their own absolute authority. As both secular rulers and caliphs of the Islamic world, the sultans could not afford "separation of Church and State."

From the Ottoman perspective, it is significant that the Greek War of Independence represented the failure of the Church to maintain its sway over the Greeks and allowed the leadership of the sultan’s Orthodox subjects in Greece to sever from the empire. Remarkably, the modern Greek State only went so far as to establish an autocephalous Church, but not far enough to establish separation of Church and State. The new citizens of Greece were Greeks by virtue of being Orthodox. Notions of multiculturalism and recognition of ethnic diversity were rejected, and even defined as lethal to the existence of the new republic.

It is not surprising, however, that all newly created countries born out of the nationalism of the 19th Century effectively practiced the policies of exclusivity. In the context of the times, the presence of minorities, ethnic or religious, represented a mortal threat to the existence of the new countries. For example, the presence of an Albanian minority in Kosovo created the fear that, sometime in the future, the Albanians would wish to detach their part of Serbia and make it part of a greater Albania – which is exactly what has taken place.

In Greece, the Church provided the mechanism by which ethnic minorities quietly transferred their identity into the broader Hellenic entity. Because these groups were members of the Greek Orthodox faith, it was relatively effortless, and made all the more palatable by the fact that Church and State were one and the same.

In this manner, large groups were absorbed and became new citizens as the Greek State expanded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Furthermore, the commonality of religion was the criterion of the forcible exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1922. Despite local injustices and individual difficulties, the fact that the Asia Minor refugees were members of the Orthodox faith made it that much easier for mainland Greeks to accept them as equal citizens of Greece.

For the rest of the century the Church remained an inseparable part of the Greek state. This did necessarily serve the interest of the Church in the long run. As Greece underwent a series of upheavals in the 20th Century, the Church could not fail but be tainted by authoritarianism and corruption, which beset the country after the Second World War. As an inseparable part of the State, rightly or wrongly, the Church became associated with the extreme rightwing governments of the 1950’s, the monarchy and, finally, the colonels’ junta in 1967.

In the process, the Church lost the religious fidelity of many Greeks, who came to view the ecclesiastical organization as being more part of secular culture, rather than as a medium of faith.

In the Diaspora, the Church has provided islands of Hellenism and for a long time the leadership of the Greek communities.

However, the end of mass immigration from Greece and intermarriage has resulted in a steady decline of Greeks as the dominant members of the Church. Moreover, the Church in the Diaspora has had to deal with the presence of new Orthodox immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe, who are Orthodox but not Greek. To a lesser extent, Greece itself is no longer exclusively home to Greek Orthodox, but the domicile of a variety of Europeans.

Under these circumstances, separation of Church and State is a necessity not only for the Greek State, but also critical to the future wellbeing of the Church. As a vehicle of the Orthodox faith, the Church will be able to minister to all Orthodox, regardless of national identity. On the other hand, failure to sever the ecclesiastical body from the secular state will mean continued flare-ups of corruption and scandal which will progressively weaken the Church.

Dr. Gerolymatos is professor of History and Chair of Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia and author of "Red Acropolis Black Terror: The Greek Civil War and the Origins of Soviet-American Rivalry, 1943-1949."



Volume 7 Number 15 - Tuesday, April 12th, 2005	A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY