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report: January 2009 |
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Vodka bottles with onion domeNot only in Poland, but also in Russia, members of the clergy are becoming increasingly involved in politics. Yet this is not a local peculiarity – but rather a dangerous trend of the times.Religions are never non-political – even if we, from the perspective of the secular states with a neutral world view that have developed in Western Europe, may have grown accustomed to regard faith as a personal matter. Religious communities produce something that even political communities cannot do without: the feeling of belonging, the readiness of community members to take responsibility for one another. Faith is never wholly something that the believer only arranges with his or her inner self. Religious certainties and ideas of a good life and, vice-versa, an evil one go hand in hand, like Laurel und Hardy. In brief: a religious community always also has an idea, sometimes clear, sometimes more diffuse, of what is essential for an ethical life. In its essence, it has a set of certainties regarding how the communal moral life of human beings should be regulated in a moral (or godly) society.Whereas, over the past forty years, religious authorities in Western Europe have exercised restraint with regard to public political commitment, religious lobbies are now becoming increasingly involved in public discussion and political debate here too. They have their own opinions on questions such as abortion, the contraception and the use of condoms, blasphemy, pornography, school curricula, the theory of evolution, homosexual marriage, or the external boundaries of the European Union. And, usually, they also want their views to become state laws. Why, asked the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, recently, should religious convictions not also inform political life? Schönborn: “Of course they may. They are, after all, the convictions of the citizens.” The Catholic Church in Western Europe has recently shown little restraint in becoming involved in the political sphere once again. There are several reasons for this. One of them is that the general view of ‘secularisation’ has changed and that everyone is now talking about a ‘renaissance of religions’. Up until now, even the religious have had the impression that secularisation is simply the trend of the times and that they should become accustomed to exerting a dwindling influence. However, in the past fifteen years many distant regions of the world have been inundated by a wave of spiritualization. The Moslem world has been contemplating an often radical Islam, in the USA evangelical Protestants have developed into a influential political force, Latin America has experienced a second Christianisation and Africa is once again being actively proselytised. In Eastern Europe, the Christian churches (and also Islam in the southern Asiatic countries of the former USSR) are occupying the vacuum left behind by Communism. Suddenly, western European secularism seems to have been a special path in world history, and polit-icising religious persons seem to have become the normal state of affairs. This strengthens the confidence of clerics in all denominations. The Eastern European churches had in any case embarked upon a special path of their own – some of them over the past sixty years, others over many hundred years. No one case here is exactly like the other. In countries where the Reformation was strong above all in the Czech Republic, but also in Hungary the religious element still operates on the edge of society and politics, even today. In other countries, above all in Poland, Russia, in the post-Soviet Republics and the countries of the former Yugoslavia, the churches have, in part, gained a decisive influence on political life. In Poland, which was often partitioned, the Church had been the peg that held society together even before the Communist era. It “replaced for centuries the lack of a state”, as the writer Richard Wagner1 put it, and during the Communist People’s Republic it was also something like a “guarantee of Polishness” in contrast to foreign determination by the Communists, who in the final analysis were shielded by the Soviets. Wagner: “Acceptance of the church involves an implicit denial of Communism.” The Polish church therefore surrounded itself with a kind of barricade and was therefore able for a long time to protect itself against the wind of modernism that blew around the ears of its Western European co-religionists. Thanks also to the influence of a Polish Pope, a politically militant right-wing Catholicism developed, which is today grouped around the nationalist conservative party Law and Justice (PiS) and even more radical forces, or around the fundamentalist and anti-Semitic media company Radio Maryja. The Polish Catholic church is certainly a special case, even if Catholicism does display similar tendencies in Croatia or Slovakia. However, in Croatia and Slovakia, the political dimension of religion is still evident in yet another respect: it is ultimately religious denominations that distinguish Croatia from Serbia, and Slovakia from the Czech Republic, a not unimportant element in the collapse (in the case of Yugoslavia, violently) of formerly multi-ethnic states. In Russia things are at one and the same time both similar and significantly different. The autocephalous Orthodox churches 2 of the east were always national churches and so almost something like state churches – a tradition that could not even be extinguished by years of religious repression under the Communist rulers. These churches are therefore more political, because on the one hand they are always in danger of coming under state guardianship, yet on the other hand have a much more direct legitimising function for the respective rulers. Under President Vladimir Putin, the Russian Orthodox Church has once again continued this tradition. Putin demonstratively asked for the blessing of the Patriarch “by humbly bowing over the latter’s hand” (Elfie Siegl in Eurozine). Popes, too, occasionally pray for candidates of the Kremlin party. Publicly, Putin pursues a strategy of reinforcing the fragile Russian identity with the help of the Orthodox Church: “It is precisely the church that has, after long years of unbelief, of moral decline and religious hostility, been given the task of spiritually uniting the Russian lands,” according to the President, who incidentally, even in his previous life as a Communist KGB agent, always wore a necklace with a crucifix around his neck naturally, at that time, coyly hidden under his shirt. Identity politics always entails homogenisation inwards and demarcation outwards. This “Orthodox patriotism” is doubly explosive. Firstly: Orthodoxy is positioned as an alternative project to “westernisation”, a demarcation to the liberal-democratic modernism of the West. Secondly: the Orthodox Church becomes instrumentalised in conflicts between nationalities. After all, these conflicts at the fraying edges of an imperial state are also religiously coded one need only think of the way the desire of the “Moslem” Chechnyans to secede was shot to pieces. Resulting from this are signs of an Orthodox fundamentalism. The explosive mixture of religio-political and national political questions makes the church susceptible to a politics of the hard hand and to military adventurism. The anti-western reflex leads to an ostentatious rejection of all those practices associated with western Christianity, and these include the relative political abstinence of Catholicism. For instance, the recent ‘Social Doctrine’ of the Russian Orthodox Church proposed a close entwinement of state and religious politics as constituting the ideal image of a state, while on the other hand interpreting the world-view of the neutrality of the state as a negative development that has been supported by western churches. Militant anti-modernism and anti-liberalism is becoming legitimised. Both in St. -Petersburg and in Moscow, exhibitions of modern art have been afflicted by groups of vandal who destroyed “blasphemous” works of art (including a Pop Art Jesus displaying a Coca-Cola sign, or a vodka bottle with onion domes). One should be wary of dismissing this as a local peculiarity of a somewhat backward society. The political temptations of various religious auth-orities may well have their origins in different places, yet they also have a reciprocal effect and gain momentum from each other. The Christian churches are becoming more militant because they are being challenged by Islam, the Catholic episcopacies of the west for example in Spain and Italy are also becoming more politically active again, because they are being confronted with examples of clerical politics from elsewhere that they perceive as having been successful. The result does not make for pleasant news: the return of religious passions to politics. 1) Richard Wagner (born in Lowrin, Romania, in 1952) studied German and Romanian language and literature in Temesvar. In 1987 after being forbidden to work and publish in Romania he left the country and since then has lived as writer in Berlin. 2) The term “autocephalous” is used in the Orthodox Church to -describe the highest level of autonomy of a particular Church. Robert Misik, born in 1966, writes regularly for “tageszeitung” (Berlin), for “profil” und “Falter” (Vienna) and is one of the most controversial left-wing journalists of his generation. He is the author of numerous reviews, essays, commentaries and reports. In 1999 and 2000 Robert Misik was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Political Books. His most recently published book was “Gott behüte! Warum wir die Religion aus der Politik raushalten müssen” (God Preserve Us! Why We Have to Keep Religion out of Politics), Ueberreuter, Vienna 2008. related articlesrelated galleriesrelated projects» Back to report |
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