Religion and Modernization in 19th Century Greece.

This paper explores the background of the relation of religion and modernity in Greece from a historical and cultural perspective. As in most parts of the world so in Greece modernity has had a serious impact on both the church as an institution and on religious culture at large. Secularization has been a dominant process in Greek society and culture since independence and even before. Compared with other European countries, however, Greece is less secularized and the decline of religion as well as the advancement of modernity presents certain idiosyncratic patterns. The mainstream culture and social structure in the west as a whole has been moving along the same path of social change. Namely the path of modernity. The paper argues that for various special, historical and cultural reasons this has not been the case in Greece. On the political plane, because of its cultural and historical role, Greek Orthodoxy has been, implicitly and explicitly, one of the central ideological pillars of the modern Greek nation state. As a consequence of the constitutional position of Orthodoxy as the official religion of the country the Orthodox Church has lost its essential institutional autonomy to the state.