Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

Kresˇimir Ćosić organized church life and a base for missionary work in
Eastern Europe and obtained a place of worship, thus making possible the
first established community of this rapidly expanding American church in
the communist world. A number of other minor faiths (e.g., the Transcendental
Meditation movement and several gurus and swamis operating in the
East and West) were also allowed to establish themselves without restrictions.
Paradoxically, after the fall of communism, as I will show chapters 10
and 11, the major local religions and ethnic nationalistic regimes considered
domestic religious minorities and foreign missionaries a gross threat, harassed
their leaders, obstructed their development of new places of worship,
attacked them in the media, and sometimes even persecuted their members.
Interfaith Relations
In the history of the two peoples and churches, Serb Orthodox and Croatian
Catholic clergy recorded best results in interchurch cooperation when both
ethnic communities found themselves facing a foreign threat. Thus, a common
enemy made the two churches allies occasionally (definitely not always)
under Turkish Ottoman rule or, remarkably, in the European revolutionary
year 1848, when Serbs and Croats, including their native clergy in the Habsburg
monarchy, forged a “fraternal” South Slavic alliance in order to resist
an aggressive nationalism from Hungary. In this fascinating and unique
case, even top church leaders and official hierarchies supported the interethnic
and interchurch alliance. Otherwise, interfaith cooperation between
Croatian Catholicism and Serbian Orthodoxy or good relations of the two
churches with Slavic Muslim clergy was a sporadic practice and, by and
large, a result of individual enthusiasm.
The religious history of South Slavs records conversions, tensions, and
interfaith incidents, although as Ivo Banac pointed out no large-scale religious
wars ever occurred in the region as in western and central Europe. 55
Examples of amity as well enmity were recorded among various religious
denominations. Thus, the Serb Orthodox bishop Nikodim Milasˇ views the
religious history of Dalmatia and Croatia as a history of hatred and intolerance
of ethnic Serbs under Venetian and Austria rule. 56 The Ottoman
conquest of the Balkans also worsened religious relations. 57 Although Christians
of Catholic and Orthodox faith occasionally cooperated in the struggle
against the Turks and served in Christian armies, Christian clergy in the
Ottoman zone fought for survival and often at the expense of each other.
After the massive Serb migration from Kosovo to Habsburg lands, church
struggles escalated and aggravated Catholic-Orthodox relations in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. In 1611 in Marča (present-day northern
Croatia), a group of Orthodox bishops founded a “Uniate” diocese, thus
bringing local Orthodox population (of various ethnic origins, including
Serbs, Romanian Vlachs, and Ukrainians) under papal authority. After the
religion, ethnicity, and nationhood 15