Negotiating Pluralism and Specifying Modernity in Greece: Reading Church–State Relations in the Christodoulos Period

Abstract

The author explores Church–state relations in Greece during the period of Archbishop Christodoulos’ ecclesiastical leadership. Church–state interactions are analyzed as a series of engagements shaped by the logic of pluralism, whereby emblematic episodes reflect the efforts of Church and state to resolve their respective ambivalence regarding the conception, sources and manifestations of, as well as responses to, religious pluralism in contemporary Greece. Re-problematizing Church–state relations within the theoretical framework of pluralism offers analytical and practical gains in resolving the core issue in longstanding debates about constitutional design for Church–state relations in Greece, namely, the need to balance the state’s responsibility for uncompromising protection of the freedom and equality of all citizens, against the sensitivity to both historical and contemporary factors that constitute the cultural particularity of Greece. Finally, exploration of Church–state relations in terms of pluralism situates Greece within the broader reconsideration of the meaning and role of religion in Europe in the 21st century, particularly as such inquiry is linked to the political, legal and social aspects of democratization, and thereby suggests that questions of modernity in Greece are more usefully considered in terms of the country’s particularity rather than its exceptionalism.