Regulating Religious Freedoms in the 21st Century: Nationality, Religion, and Symphonic Secularism

Kristen Ghodsee

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Chapter 2 Regulating Religious Freedoms in the 21st Century

Nationality, Religion, and Symphonic Secularism

于Islam, Christianity, and Secularism in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe

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Kristen Ghodsee

Kristen Ghodsee
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类型:: 章节

Page Range:: 49–73

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004511569_004

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Abstract

This chapter interrogates Western attempts to render Eastern Orthodoxy as a fundamentally “undemocratic” religious tradition. While contemporary scholars have critiqued the ontological imperialism of Western human rights discourses, they do so only with regard to Islam. This chapter provides a close examination of three cases against Bulgaria at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) between 1996 and 2011: the case of Hasan and Chaush v. Bulgaria (application no. 30985/96—judgment 2000), the case of Supreme Holy Council of the Muslim Community v. Bulgaria (application no. 39023/97—final judgment 2005), and the case of Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (Metropolitan Inokentiy) and others v. Bulgaria (applications nos. 412/03 and 35677/04—final judgment 2009). In all three of these cases the ECtHR assumed a distinctly Western norm of secularism, which it imposed on a society that has a long history of church-state collaboration wherein temporal and spiritual powers work together to promote religious pluralism. This doctrine is referred to as symphoneia, and has been a core theological principle of Eastern Orthodox Christianity since the time of the Byzantine Empire.

Despite the long history of symphoneia, however, the ECtHR repeatedly roots the “Eastern” tendency for states to regulate religious communities to the Communist past, and it is convenient that most Eastern Orthodox majority states fell on the non-democratic side of the Iron Curtain (with the notable exception of Greece). The particular conception of religion that underlies the contemporary Bulgarian understanding of the appropriate relationship between the church and state reaches as far back as 1054 and the Great Schism between Western Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Thus, rather than simply promoting a European conception of human rights and the legal framework necessary to maintain a “democratic” society, the ECtHR imposes a specifically Protestant conception of religion on Eastern Orthodox countries, in the same way that it imposes a Protestant-infused secularism on Islamic countries or upon Muslim minorities in Western Europe. In the end, the chapter suggests that the universalism of Western human rights discourses is perhaps more compatible with the supra-national universalisms of Islam than it is with the ethno-national particularisms of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

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Islam, Christianity, and Secularism in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe

The Last Half Century

丛编： Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia, 卷： 129

Cover Islam, Christianity, and Secularism in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe

ISBN:: 9789004511569

出版社:: Brill

印刷出版日期:: 18 Apr 2022

Subjects

Front Matter

Part 1 Secularism in Bulgaria and Its Region

Part 2 Christian and Muslim Men and Women under State Atheism and Postsocialist Secularism

Part 3 Religion, Publicity, and Concealment in Orthodox-Majority Societies

Back Matter

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Chapter 2 Regulating Religious Freedoms in the 21st Century

Nationality, Religion, and Symphonic Secularism

Abstract

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Islam, Christianity, and Secularism in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe

The Last Half Century

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