Political Orthodoxies

The Unorthodoxies of the Church Coerced

Cyril Hovorun, Cyril Hovorun

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781506431604
• eBook ISBN: 9781506453118
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politik & Staat

Dispatches on nationalism and religion As an insider to church politics and a scholar of contemporary Orthodoxy, Cyril Hovorun outlines forms of political orthodoxy in Orthodox churches, past and present. Hovorun draws a big picture of religion being politicized and even weaponized. While Political Orthodoxies assesses phenomena such as nationalism and anti-Semitism, both widely associated with Eastern Christianity, Hovorun focuses on the theological underpinnings of the culture wars waged in eastern and southern Europe. The issues in these wars include monarchy and democracy, Orientalism and Occidentalism, canonical territory, and autocephaly. Wrought with peril, Orthodox culture wars have proven to turn toward bloody conflict, such as in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. Accordingly, this book explains the aggressive behavior of Russia toward its neighbors and the West from a religious standpoint. The spiritual revival of Orthodoxy after the collapse of Communism made the Orthodox church in Russia, among other things, an influential political protagonist, which in some cases goes ahead of the Kremlin. Following his identification and analysis, Hovorun suggests ways to bring political Orthodoxy back to the apostolic and patristic track.

1

Secularism, Civil Religion, and Political Religion

Secularism

We will consider various forms of political Orthodoxies through the prism of three concepts: secularism, civil religions, and political religions. These concepts have been elaborated in the frame of social sciences. This does not mean, however, that our analysis of political Orthodoxies will be sociological only. It will also be theological and historical. We will be talking about religious phenomena turning political and vice versa. In this sense, all political Orthodoxies explored in this book are secular phenomena. They became an intrinsic part of various civil and political religions. We will judge them against theological criteria in sociological language.

The first concept that covers modern forms of political Orthodoxies like a canopy is secularism.^[1] Secularism can be beneficial for the church, when, for instance, it liberates religion from political obligations. It clears a path for the church to discover the church’s true self. In what follows, however, we will concentrate on the negative impact of secularism when it infects the church with ideology. Most forms of political Orthodoxy turn secular even when they want to wrestle with secularism. Before we proceed to analyzing why political Orthodoxies are largely secular, we need to make some terminological distinctions between three related but particular terms: secularism, secular, and secularization. These all refer to a space free from religion; however, their approaches to this space differ. Secularism is an ideology and a political agenda that ostracizes religion from the public square with the ultimate goal of exterminating religion altogether. This ideology is usually oppressive to religion. Secular describes the character of a political, social, or ecclesial space. It can be neutral or even beneficial for the church. Finally, secularization is an objective social or political process that leads to gradual abandonment of different social domains by religion.

All three terms come from the Latin word saeculum, which in Greek is aeōn [αἰών]. Both words originally meant “century” or “age.” Early Christian writers used the word saeculum in application to this world as opposed to the eternal world of God, which they often called the “ages of ages” (saecula saeculorum; οἱ αἰῶνες τῶν αἰώνων). Augustine, for instance, denoted as saeculum the world measured by time.^[2] He opposed it to the “city of God,” which exceeds any frame of time.

The juxtaposition between saeculum and saecula saeculorum was elaborated upon in modern sociology of religion. For instance, Charles Taylor in his famous book A Secular Age defined as “immanent frame” what the Fathers of the church called saeculum. The Taylorean frame became all-embracing in the period of modernity. It has included states, societies, and even some churches. This frame is immanent because it belongs to this world. Everything within this frame appears to be trapped in saeculum and has very limited access to saecula saeculorum. The prevalence of the “immanent frame” over the transcendental divine sphere, saecula saeculorum, has become a characteristic feature of modernity, according to Taylor:

We can come to see the growth of civilization, or modernity, as synonymous with the laying out of the closed immanent frame; within this civilized values develop, and a single-minded focus on the human good, aided by the fuller and fuller use of scientific reason, permits the greatest flourishing possible of human beings.^[3]

The immanent framework is thus a characteristic feature of modernity. It differentiates modernity from the premodern stages of human civilization: antiquity and Middle Ages. Premodernity related itself to the divine, saecula saeculorum, while modernity has made even the divine a part of the secular immanent frame. Modern churches have not escaped this frame. Some of them deliberately and consciously embrace secularity, and some find themselves locked into it while wrestling against secularism. The more the latter churches fight against secularism, the deeper they may sink to the immanent frame of secularity. These churches may claim that they struggle in the name of God for transcendent goals, but their methods are confined to this world.

Locked in the immanent frame, both secularism and anti-secularism turn to ideologies. Ideology is a theology that has been secularized. Politicized religion is intrinsically ideological. Although ideologies belong to the post-theological era, they are structurally similar to theology. Both ideologies and theologies feature ideas that explain visible reality and try to change it according to invisible patterns. Ideologies, like theology: (1) put ideas above the visible world; (2) are eager to subsume or even to sacrifice the visible world to ideas; (3) offer a holistic worldview; (4) easily mobilize masses; and (5) act with the power of a myth.^[4] In this sense, ideologies constitute a “secular religion” with its own “priests”—the intellectuals.^[5] The difference between ideology and theology, however, is that theological ideas lead a person to the divine, saecula saeculorum, while ideological ideas confine masses to the immanent frame of saeculum.

Ideology is a product of the process of secularization. It was invented in the beginning of modernity as an alternative to religion and was intended to exercise a religious impact on people’s mind and behavior. The French philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), who coined the term “ideology,” set les eléments d’idéologie [“the elements of ideology”] as foundations for secular epistemology.^[6] A faithful follower of the Enlightenment, de Tracy constructed ideology as a way of perceiving the truth without engaging a “religious bias.”^[7]

Almost half a century later, the concept of ideology reemerged in the works of Karl Marx (1818–1883), now itself an object of criticism for bias and distortion of reality. Ideology evolved from the accuser to the accused. Marx, in his work Die deutsche Ideologie [“The German Ideology”] (1846),^[8] criticized German idealistic philosophy for misrepresenting reality.^[9] Marx argued that when the picture of reality is drawn on the basis of ideas alone, a method the idealist philosophers committed themselves to, it leads to false consciousness. The true picture of reality can be drawn only on the canvas of the economic interests of social classes.

While wrestling with idealist ideologies, Marxism gradually turned into an ideology itself. In its Soviet version, it became a totalitarian ideocracy. Fascist movements that came to power on the pretext of fighting against Communism also turned into totalitarian ideologies. Ideologies became blueprints for gigantic projects of social engineering in the twentieth century and ended as bloodbaths with millions of human lives sacrificed to their ideas.

The tragic consequences of the totalitarian ideologies led to the crisis of ideology as a genre. In 1960, Daniel Bell declared that ideologies had completely exhausted themselves.^[10] In some senses, he was right, as ideologies had lost their sway over peoples’ minds, at least in the West.^[11] Postmodernism, which emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century but came to power after World War II, was among the killers of classical ideologies. At the core of postmodernist power, which weakened modernism, was relativism. As it advanced, however, postmodernism gradually turned itself into an ideology.

Both modern and postmodern ideologies contributed to the development of secularism. This concept is different from the concept of secular, as mentioned earlier, and the difference between them is signified by the suffix -ism. This suffix is usually a token of an ideology. Among the founders of secularism as an ideology were David Hume (1711–1776) and Auguste Comte (1798–1857).^[12] George Jacob Holyoake (1817– 1906), who followed in their footsteps, coined the word secularist. In its original meaning, it was synonymous with the words infid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dispatches: Turning Points in Theology and Global Crises
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Secularism, Civil Religion, and Political Religion
• How Civil Religion Becomes Political Religion: Greece, Romania, and Russia
• Orthodox Ideologies: Antimodernism, Monarchism, and Conservatism
• Case Study: Anti-Semitism
• Case Study: Nationalism
• Concluding Assessments
• Bibliography
• Index