To Reconcile is to Revisit
On Secularism and the Orthodox Faith
PROFESSOR VASILEIOS THERMOS
Father Mark is a conscientious Orthodox priest. He cares for his flock, he reads and prays, and he labors to better inform and guide his parishioners. He has sometimes condemned secularism in his sermons as proclaiming emancipation from faith and introducing an anthropocentric worldview. Yet he did not attempt to influence his daughter about her prospective husband. He naturally and calmly welcomed the one she chose.
Athena, a pious Orthodox wife and mother, prepared a letter of complaint for the local mayor; if necessary she is determined to reach even the House of Representatives. The issue is about the quality of meals offered in her children’s school. How can they pretend that they know nothing about healthy food? It is unacceptable to feed young students a diet consisting mostly of junk.
Like thousands of Orthodox Christians, Father Mark has accepted freedom of choice in certain aspects of public and private life, while Athena has made use of her sanctioned civil rights. What do they share in common? They take for granted these protections and freedoms, now cornerstones of political and social life, which would have likely been unheard of earlier in history. Both of them are unaware that these elements of their lives, among many others, are products of secularism.
As a historical process, secularism has represented the displacement of religion from its privileged status as the measure of everything in society. But it’s important to recognize that secularism ushered in other social changes: it affirmed free choice of studies and jobs, introduced political votes and their equality, rendered leadership electable and not hereditary, presented free choice of spouses as the most natural thing in the world, and made interventions of parents in the lives of their children, as they raise their own families, sound weird and offensive. It is indeed difficult to grasp that a few centuries ago, all of the above was simply unimaginable. Yet all of these have been adopted by Christians as natural and desired; Orthodox are not an exception, in spite of our comparatively conservative stance toward Modernity. Nevertheless, Athena agrees when she hears Father Mark express disapproval of secularism, and Father Mark wholeheartedly approves her complaint about her children’s school!
Secularism is an easy target for Christian polemic, yet it yields possibilities one cannot imagine oneself without. Potential objections like, “Does secularism necessarily accompany progress?” or, “Why not invent a contemporary social order, with all its acquired benefits, in which religion is the central motivating entity?” sound utopic. A regression to premodern mindsets implies a life without current medicine, a society that oppresses individuals, and a country with non-democratic institutions. Like it or not, premodern society failed to present democracy, freedom, or scientific progress; it is meaningless to wonder whether we should regress to it. As we Orthodox Christians sit quite comfortably with these freedoms that stem from Modernity, I believe we are called to pose other critical questions. Some of them could be:
Why has Christianity alone not been able to induce or inspire the achievements of Modernity in the past?
Is Orthodox theology by definition hostile toward secularism?
Are there natural points of convergence?
What are the premodern remnants in the Orthodox Church and its theology that still prevent it from successfully coming to terms with secularism?
How can the Orthodox conscience blossom in a secular context?
Given that transformations of institutions, habits, and the social psyche in general started as soon as secularism appeared, one reasonably wonders why they never emerged during the times when Christianity prevailed. It can be jarring, or even shocking, to realize that our ancient and medieval Church Fathers and Saints shared the false scientific ideas of their times. To give a few examples, they would have believed that the sun revolves around the earth; that fetuses are preserved in the form of seed in men’s bodies and start developing as soon as they are implanted in women’s uteruses; that the world was created 5,500 years before Christ’s birth; and that the heart as an organ was the locus of emotions and kidneys the place of desires.
Of course, many scholars and scientists of the Middle Ages were faithful; religion has never been incompatible with knowledge. Nonetheless, its pace of development became much more accelerated in Modernity. In addition to this, democracy was not an option, and human rights were inconceivable. An emperor’s power was thought to be of divine origin, ordinary people were not expected to hold political ideas and goals, and constitutions that restrained leaders would have been seen as arrogant or blasphemous.
With this in mind, a serious challenge for Orthodox theology arises. Why was Biblical and patristic theology not adequate for fostering the genuine social improvements that came along with Modernity? Is faith not enough? I believe it is a question of how Orthodox theology is interpreted and put into practice. The principles that led to these social improvements were always embedded in the Christian tradition, but it took certain historical events for them to be fully realized.
In the fourth century, beginning with Constantine, Christians found themselves in a place of unprecedented power and influence. They became increasingly self-confident. Over time, the revolutionary content of the Gospel was overlooked, unholy alliances with the state were established, and theocracy became a desired self-evident reality. As a matter of fact, an immanent political ideology (which constituted an early atypical secularism) contaminated the Orthodox Church and for many became part of their psychological and theological DNA!
It is my hypothesis that the excessive distress and hostility felt by the majority of Orthodox Christians toward secularism stems from their addiction to another form of secularism: the Byzantine one. Though we shouldn’t ignore the Byzantine empire’s excellent cultural achievements, Byzantium also set a precedent by which Orthodox Christians became accustomed to having a privileged status before the state. I believe many are now experiencing a traumatic displacement from that condition. A big portion of the Orthodox distress springs out of the fact that some of us see and speak from the point of a latent secularism that is actually antagonistic to the modern explicit one. Paradoxically, it was easier to oppose pagan or Islamic religious persecutions than it is to oppose secular indifference; the former reflected homologous regimes that would attack other groups in the name of a faith, whereas the latter is a godless locus that promotes neutrality of faith. In other words, Orthodox Christians have been trained for centuries to defeat false gods, yet they now find themselves lacking the competence to convince those who play in a completely different field, without religious terms. After all, the Orthodox Church seems well capable of resisting enemies, yet She does not possess the ‘know-how’ of being one equal among the many.
Rather than the Byzantine era—or its parallels in Church history, such as the Russia of the tsars—the best model for us now, in the contemporary, postmodern era, is the Church of the first three centuries. How, we might ask, did the Church expand so rapidly at a time when the state was not only not backing it, but was also actively opposing it? This is indeed the appropriate moment to get lessons from the obvious similarity of our times to the globalized world in which the Church took Her first steps.
Perhaps the theological adventures of the time are part of the answer. Christianity’s encounter with Hellenism in the third and fourth centuries changed the religion itself without betraying its message. Rather, the experience clarified that message and further reinforced it. According to some thinkers, many aspects of Modernity have their predecessors in Christian thought; for instance, emphasis on personal responsibility, individual freedom of choice against collectivity (a stance which allowed conversions and facilitated martyrdom), equality before God, introspection, voting under the principle of majority in synods and councils, demystification of nature by accepting medicine, and rational undoing of heretical arguments.
There is no inherent obstacle in Christianity to what we today experience as progress. Rather, the cultural elements of antiquity and the Middle Ages colored Christianity, just as they colored everything else. The absence of democracy and personal freedom were an outcome of premodern culture, not of Christian theology. We must admit that many Christians (including some of the Fathers) have supported pre-modern values. It is such a strange thing, and so difficult for us to acknowledge, that despite their theological profundity, the Fathers were “children of their time” as well!
From this perspective, Orthodox Church is not by definition hostile to secularism. If we reject the very idea of a secular state, the only alternative is a society in which religion is officially sanctioned as the ultimate criterion of law and everything else. I do not consider this a viable condition.
Of course, it requires hard work to disconnect theological truth from the culture of the time when it emerged, so that we can creatively offer testimony in the contemporary landscape. Along with this challenge, we also must contend with the strong national and local (not to say tribal) feelings that are common in Orthodox communities. Folk theology, as expressed in sermons, pastoral guidance, writings, and catechesis, often fails to distinguish between truth and habit, and to discern cultural elements that have mingled with spiritual life. In such a situation, secularism is automatically perceived as a threat. This helps explain the regressive views that now dominate much of contemporary Russian society—for instance, the opposition found there to democracy and gender equality. These views are defended in the name of Christianity, which is understood as simply a bulwark of ideas, attitudes, and customs from yesteryear.
At the same time, we can take certain cues from the way Christians of earlier eras accepted and made use of Greek culture and thought. In truth, the distance between Hellenism and Christianity was much larger than the one between Christianity and Modernity now. Modernity has more characteristics in common with Christian theology than Hellenism did. Hellenistic thought was an immensely different universe compared to the Hebraic one; yet their convergence became reality because our Fathers were neither afraid nor prejudiced.
To conclude, in the topic discussed here, reconciliation requires revision. The Orthodox Church is invited to revisit both Her habitual assumptions (to distill them from their pre-modern context), and Her theological hermeneutics when applied to contemporary culture. The Church is called to criticize and condemn beliefs and attitudes that are incompatible with the Christian message, but also to identify seeds of divine revelation wherever they exist. This double task seems to me quite urgent if the Orthodox Church is to survive in the middle of so many cultural wars, let alone be of any influence as a “yeast” (Luke 13:21).
Rev. Dr. Vasileios Thermos is a psychiatrist for children and adolescents and a professor of Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Psychology at the Ecclesiastical Academy of Athens. His books in English are published by Alexander Press and Sebastian Press. He is a priest of the Church of Greece.