ABSTRACT
One of the broadly acknowledged aspects of Greek political life is the prominent role attributed to religion. This state of affairs has not emerged out of nowhere; it is a reflection of the deep-rooted identification of the clergy with the political interests of the ruling elites. The function of ecclesiastical bureaucracy as the ‘state’s ideological apparatus’ (Althusser 1971) or the nationalization of Orthodoxy for the development of the Greek political entity (Lekkas 1996: 183) illustrate the strong interplay between State and Church. This kind of relation has resulted in the reproduction of the social dominance of religion in a period when other European countries have been undergoing a secularization process (Barker, Beckford and Dobbelaere 1993; Bruce 1993). The so-called ‘state-law rule’ system that constitutionally defines the close State–Church relationship (Alivizatos 1999; Papastathis 2005), the tax exemptions enjoyed by the Orthodox Church, the special standing of the religious bureaucracy within the armed forces, as well as its electoral influence, are merely some manifestations of the prevailing status of the clergy within the Greek social space. In a Gramscian approach (Phillips and Jørgensen 2002: 32), this status has a hegemonic character, since the Church’s social position has been perceived (at least until recently) as ‘natural’, as an integral part of ‘common sense’ and, thus, ‘unquestionable’ for the vast majority of the Greek population. As a consequence, the Church has used State power to protect its authority. The political elites, on the other hand, have taken advantage of the symbolic status of religion for the collective imaginary, in order to ‘organize the social consent’ (Barrett 1991: 54) through the construction and consolidation of a modern civic identity based on the invented myth of the essentialist equation between Orthodoxy and the Greek nation.
