America the despised

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Takis Michas

In Greece, as well as in other nations (such as Serbia) that emerged from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, religion became an essential component of the national ideology. The ethnos and Orthodoxy fused. Thus, to be Greek is to be Orthodox. The leader of the Greek Church constantly stresses the nation 's identification with Orthodoxy. It is characteristic of the total identification of the Greek Church with the nation that, as Victoria Clark points out, even foreign converts to the Greek Orthodox Church adopt not only the theological dogma of the Orthodox creed but also the foreign policy positions of the Greek government. (3)

The fusion of Church and nation has reached a point that the religious leadership has become the spearhead for all of the major secular nationalist initiatives in modern Greece. Thus, at the beginning of the 20th century; the Church promoted "The Great Idea" (M[epsilon][gamma][alpha][lambda][eta] I[delta][epsilon][alpha]), the creation of a "Greater Greece" encompassing the territories of the old Byzantine Empire; now, about a century later, the Church has taken the lead in mobilizing the population on issues such as Macedonia, NATO and Serbia.

The Greek Orthodox Church--and particularly its present leader, Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens--has consistently adopted extreme nationalist positions. In the early 1990s the Church helped lead the opposition to the recognition of its northern neighbor and former Yugoslav republic under the name of "Macedonia." It played a decisive role in fomenting nationalist feelings by organizing and participating in mass rallies against the new state's "usurpation" of the name Macedonia. Moreover, for almost a decade, the Greek Church provided the ideological legitimacy for the Greek state's moral, political and economic support to the regimes in Belgrade and Pale. It also provided rhetorical cover for Serbian war crimes in Bosnia and Kosovo. The Church even invited indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic to visit Athens in the summer of 1993 in order to honor him at a rally in a stadium in Piraeus. Greek priests traveled regularly to war-ravaged Bosnia to provide spiritual succor to the Bosnian Serb army in Sarajevo, Zvornic and other places.

The anti-American and anti-Western narrative of the Greek Orthodox Church does not emanate from the religious metaphysics of Eastern Christianity in general, but from what the Russian theologian Alexander Schmemann calls the "theological nationalism" that dominates the Greek Church. (4) It is the worldview inherent in this type of nationalism that accounts for the anti-Western and anti-American attitudes of the Greek Church, not anything inherent in Orthodoxy's theology or dogma. But it is this phenomenon of "theological nationalism" that explains one of the most remarkable developments in recent Greek political life: the ideological rapprochement between a largely anticlerical and avowedly atheist Left and the Greek Orthodox Church. This is partly explained by the fact that Archbishop Christodoulos's speeches are often couched in a left-wing idiom, as when he attacks U.S. "imperialism" or denounces American ideas about a "New World Order" as "similar to Nazi ones." But this rapprochement also manifests itsel f in more direct ways. The Archbishop stated recently that he finds the Communist Party's geopolitical views on issues like globalization, Kosovo and U.S. foreign policy to be "much closer" to those of his Church than those of many other political parties.