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other ways, like the situation in contemporary Israel where Christian and Muslim minorities are
subject to a somewhat different set of laws from those applying to the Jewish majority. During the
Soviet period, the atheistic ideology of Marxist/Leninism was invoked to remove any religious
content from national identity, although the Churches themselves, to a greater or lesser extent,
continued to claim that they represented their flock whether or not they were believers or
practitioners.The coincidence of religious and national identity before and during the period is
well illustrated in the following statement:
Because of its national character and its status as the national church in every independent
Bulgarian state until the advent of communism, the church was considered an inseparable element
of Bulgarian national consciousness. Baptism, before 1944 an indispensable rite establishing
individual identity, retained this vital role for many even after the communists took power. The
power of this tradition caused the communist state to introduce a naming ritual called ‘‘civil
baptism’’.
Since the collapse of Communism, the ‘‘Mother Churches’’ have struggled to recover from the
effects of several generations of state-imposed secularism and to reassert themselves not only as
the religious but also as the cultural and moral leaders of their country—and, even if they cannot
expect to be the nation’s political leaders, they have attempted to ensure that they should be
recognized as the religious body to which the state should lend an ear, and that, even if not
Established, they should enjoy a special status within the country. One of the main means of
underscoring their importance to the nation is through promotion of the claim to play an integral
role in defining each individual citizen’s identity: if you are a Bulgarian, that means you must be a
member of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church; if you are a Romanian, that means you must be a
member of the Romanian Orthodox Church. This belief can encompass a nice twist that was
demonstrated by my Armenian landlady when she insisted that the Krishna devotees I had visited
in their Yerevan temple were not Armenian because they were not Christian—and then, when I
asked whether that meant her two children (who, having been brought up under communism, were
avowed atheists) were, thus, not Armenian, her indignant retort was ‘‘Of course not—they’re
Christian atheists!’’ That, obviously, meant that they were Armenians.
There can be little doubt that geo-political boundaries not only can entertain a considerable
number of anomalies, but can also appear to be remarkably open to negotiation and manipulation.
It has, for example, been pointed out that there are more members of the Russian Orthodox Church
outside the Russian Federation than there are within its boundaries, and while many of these are
expatriate Russians (as in Estonia) this is by no means always the case. Geo-political locations of
religious identity within Ukraine are, to say the least, contentious, a number of political
manoeuvrings having resulted in opposing factions within its Orthodox Church, the largest of
which owes allegiance to the Moscow Patriarchate, while the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Kiev
Patriarchate, formed after independence (1991),would confine the Church to national boundaries.
Further complications arise with the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church which, outlawed
by Stalin in 1933, survived mainly in the diaspora until it was legalized in 1989.
Throughout the region, ‘‘foreign’’ religions are seen as a challenge to the National Churches, not
merely because of what they believe or practise but because of their multi-national character. The
Moscow Patriarchy has,for example, attacked the Catholic Church and accused it of trying to steal
members of its flock. To exclude oneself from the nation’s religious identity automatically
excludes oneself from the national identity—it is not that one has become a heretic, one has
become a traitor. However, a similar reaction greets new indigenous religions, such as Vissarion’s
Church of the Last Testament in Russia or Mariya Devi Khristos’s White Brotherhood in Ukraine.
As one examines the ways in which boundaries come to be defined according to the specific
interests and relative strength of the definers, it is possible to detect certain more or less systematic
patterns. Very generally speaking, it would appear that each religious grouping tends to draw the
line delineating‘‘real’’ national identity so as to align itself with the more powerful religions.That