Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

218 balkan idols
The Myth of Religious Revival
While sociologists of religion publish studies, hold conferences, and argue,
still uncertain, over whether secularization is “real” or not and, if yes, how
much it has really weakened religion during the modern era, religious organizations
have taken the frightening impact of secularization as a giver.
Since the onset of modernity, people of faith have been waiting for some
kind of a large-scale “global” religious revival. Atheistic communism was
presumably the strongest secularizing factor ever in history, and its demise
seemed the right time for the long-awaited global revival. Even otherwise
quite skeptical scholars came to believe that a large-scale religious awakening
was in process. Samuel P. Huntington built his much-debated “Clash
of Civilizations” thesis on such an assumption. 11 Of course, Huntington and
other secular scholars and analysts of political affairs are primarily interested
in statistics and the potential for political mobilization of persons who
share certain religious convictions, values, and practices—not in the quality
and purity of moral and spiritual life. By contrast, some sociologists of religion,
and perhaps most notably religious scholars and theologians, have
always been more concerned with the question of “genuineness” and the
ethical dimensions of religious experience than with statistics about churchmosque-synagogue
attendance and the display of religious symbols in street
marches. Peter L. Berger has written that “upsurges of religion” in the modern
era, are, in most cases, political movements “that use religion as a convenient
legitimation for political agendas based on non-religious interests”
as opposed to “movements genuinely inspired by religion.” 12 To be sure,
Berger has also noted that every religious “upsurge,” including the recent
dynamics of religion worldwide, is accompanied with an increasing religious
commitment, that is, that the numbers of religious people grow. 13 However,
the content and character of such religiosity should be (and invariably is)
congruent with each concrete movement’s ideas, aims, values, and concrete
experience. For example, religious and ethnic revolutions and movements in
the Balkans during the period under consideration could generate only more
hatred and fear and faith in state power although no religion officially professes
hatred, fear, and idolatrous worship. That is to say, believers and converts
whose “spiritual experience” made them “aware” of divine support for
their group and of rival groups’ “evil character” and turned them into worshipers
of ethno-religious nation-states, are almost invariably intolerant,
authoritarian-minded, and conflict-prone. Even though as an outcome of
such movements numbers of “religious” people may have been growing,
both these “converts” and their religious leaders seem strikingly analogous
to adherents of secular ideologies if not basically the same regardless of
symbols and rituals they use. Speaking with relatively highest certainty
about the Balkans but cautiously implying about the dominant religion
worldwide (which in my view is patriotism and nationalism), I would argue
that a genuine faith is only an unambiguously apolitical and antipolitical