Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

faith. That is, it is not only anti-nationalistic but also explicitly anti-statist
religiosity, such as for example, the faith of Jehovah Witnesses and similar
sects and the faith of mystical and sufi orders.
According to the sociological concept of religious revival, it is characterized
by the growth of new cults and sects that both challenge established
religious institutions and respond to secularization trends in society. 14 Accordingly,
genuine religious revival typically comes “from below.” Yet what
was happening in the former communist countries was the opposite: religious
elites and established institutions mobilized the people against atheistic
regimes and, once they were brought down, turned against liberal parties
and policies, religious and ethnic minorities, and each other. As presented
in the preceding chapters, during the most of the period under consideration
in the Yugoslav states, religious beliefs and practices in mainstream faiths
have been in decline and no growth of new cults and sects has been observed.
Sociological surveys of religion conducted in the 1980s by both Yugoslav
neo-Marxists and Catholic schools of sociology of religion, as well as
an independent study carried out in Serbia, found that the secularization
accelerated by the post-1945 abrupt modernization of previously backward
rural society had not been reversed. 15 As noted earlier, under communism,
the numbers of believers were in decline although religious organizations
grew and expanded from the 1960s. Findings from international surveys of
religiosity, conducted during and shortly after the fall of communism, did
not reveal any striking difference. 16 Yugoslav religious minorities (e.g., various
Christian denominations of Protestant origin, Islamic sufi-dervish orders,
and other cults and sects) manifested less political religiosity but did
not reverse secularization trends. 17 Finally, activities of Western missionaries
and nontraditional cults bloomed in postcommunist eastern Europe and the
former USSR during the 1990s. Yet, according to Sabrina Ramet’s research,
these activities did not bring about a profound change in religious life and
could not challenge the consolidation of traditional faiths that fostered nationalism
and frustrated liberalization in postcommunist societies. 18
To be sure, ethnic nationalistic revolutions in the former Yugoslavia’s
successor states did, at least temporarily, give momentum to a new “patriotic”
religiosity. The Catholic priest-sociologist of religion Ivan Grubisˇić
wrote that, according to new surveys of religiosity conducted at the end of
the 1990s, more than 90 percent of the population in Croatia were selfdeclared
practicing Catholics, in contrast to 64 percent in the 1980s. 19 This
cleric scholar, however, was frustrated with the quality of this new spirituality.
He remarked once that during the 10 years of postcommunism, the
most prosperous and influential people in Croatia became “tycoons, crooks,
war profiteers, professional politicians, union leaders, religious leaders, drug
dealers and those in the prostitution business.” 20 In another commentary,
which he voiced in a 2001 interview in the wake of the bishops’ attack on
the left-center government in Croatia, he repeated that no matter what
church leaders do, even if it is struggle with regimes and governments,
conclusions 219