Creationism in Today’s Orthodox Community

Abstract

The article aims at presenting an overview of the contemporary creationist views in Orthodox Christianity that constitutes the dominant religion in eastern Europe and northern Asia. Because Orthodox Christianity is an aggregation of independent churches related to countries with di6erent cultures, I have chosen to present 5ve important case-studies: Russian Federation, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece. In Russia, a dynamic creationist movement exists backed by creationist institutions that publish creationist literature, organize conferences, and put pressure on the state to introduce creationism in school curricula. In Serbia, where the creationist movement is not so strong, there are claims from organized creationists to remove evolution from textbooks. In Bulgaria and Romania, creationism seems not to be an issue, and creationist literature has been developed mainly from American creationists who visited these countries. In Greece, o7cials of the Orthodox Church have propagated intelligent-design creationism, mainly based on creationist literature imported from the Christian West. Orthodox creationists claim that evolutionism is a theory alien to their religion because it has been developed in Western countries. But they use Western sources and, except for Russia, there appears to be no purely indigenous creationist discourses.