Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

thor Filip David and the opposition circles around the bimonthly Republika,
among others, called the national church a carrier of nationalism that
would outlive Milosˇević. 29
Accordingly, in spite of dynamic religious organizations’ activities in some
periods, no genuine religious revival ever occurred in any of the Yugoslav
states. The only possible genuine revival in Yugoslavia would have been a
rise of the influence of minority faiths. This did not occur, and mainstream
faiths even attempted to check the influx of foreign missionaries while harassing
domestic minorities. I introduced the Yugoslav minority faiths (“minor
religious communities” or sects) in the religious portrait of Yugoslav
states in chapter 1, where I said that they were not linked with any particular
ideology, ethnic group, or state. As noted, these minor faiths are multiethnic,
and while their members have not been the agents of the Yugoslav
conflict, they have contributed to the interfaith dialogue and religious peacemaking.
Minor Protestant Christian communities were the only religious
organizations in Yugoslavia that did not take part in the Yugoslav ethnic
conflict. Minor religious organizations and individual religious figures, operating
autonomously, successfully contributed to interfaith dialogue, religious
peacemaking, and relief work—all this with no strings attached (in
contrast to the large religious organizations, which always compete with
one another and pursue political and economic interests). In addition to the
quixotic Bosnian Franciscans Marko Orsˇolić and Ivo Marković, and several
other autonomous religious figures mentioned in chapter 10, the champions
of religious peacemaking and interfaith dialogue in the successor states of
the former Yugoslavia have been members of minority groups, such as Jakob
Finci of the Sarajevo Jewish community and the Pentecostal Christian
scholar from northern Croatia, Peter Kuzmić. It is in order to note in this
conclusion (as I did in chapter 1) the benign role of minority faiths in the
former Yugoslavia and its successor states. This “different kind of faith” has
survived amid all the Balkan idols. This example, like many similar cases,
provokes the assumption that genuine religion may be possible only in sects,
cults, and individuals, most likely hermits and heretics. A genuine religious
revival exemplified in the rise of new cults and sects could be observed in
recent decades, for example, in South America, Asia, and Africa, but not in
countries where “godless” communism had collapsed. There, traditional
faiths sought to fill the space vacated by communist parties. This process
had to do not with spiritual and moral recovery of society but with religious
organizations’ struggle for ideological monopoly and the spoils of postcommunism—power
and privatization of former socialist property. New theocracies,
state religions, and religious states have succeeded in recent decades
more often than liberal democracies. There are a large number of semitheocracies,
state religions, and religious states in our world today—notably
in the Muslim world but also elsewhere. During the same period, many new
liberal democracies experienced the clerical challenge and remained threatened
by antisecular forces.
conclusions 221