Church and State in Montenegro: From the Serbian Orthodox Church to the Church of Serbia

Abstract

The paper deals with the role of religion and the church in the post-socialist transformations of society in Montenegro, focusing on the period from the 1990s to 2022. The goal of the paper is to present the historical and sociological (non-)cooperation between the church and the state in Montenegro and their reflection on social circumstances. According to sociological expertise, secularization and atheization of the society carried out by the then political regime and aligned with Marxist reflections on religion were in force until the 1990s. Subsequently, a period of desecularization of society and revitalization of religion and religiosity followed. Accordingly, the role of the church and religion in this republic has also changed. Namely, there is an increased role of the church in the socio-political circumstances in Montenegro. The church’s role and its reflection on socio-political reality is analyzed through three historical determinants: the period from 1990 to 1998, marked by a symphony of cooperation between the church and the state. Then follows the period from 1998 to 2008, when cooperation is observed with a dose of caution, and, finally, the period from 2008 to 2021, which is marked by the cooling of church-state relations, which culminated in the Law on Freedom of Religion as an essential point of disagreement between the church and the then state policy and the ruling political establishment.