Vassil Prodanov

Religion and Inculturation in the Post-Communist World  

Admittedly, the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is the most important event since the Second World War, and represents the beginning of a new stage in world history. We face now a unique predicament in history when in an inconceivably short time a universal ideology, the belief system of a population of about 400 million people, populating almost one fifth of the earth, broke down. This leaves a huge number of people in conditions of moral, spiritual, ideological, political, cultural and economic crisis. Millions of individuals find themselves in a blind alley of internal chaos without identity or meaning in their life. This vacuum is unknown in the human history. Even the collapse of the old ideologies and religions in the Roman Empire and their replacement by Christianity took place over a much longer period of several centuries.

The Post-Communist world is at the crossroad. What to do next; where to go? In this situation three major sets of ideas and belief systems rush forward to serve the souls and govern the behavior of these millions of people - liberal democracy, nationalism and religion. In some cases they are separated, but most frequently they are mixed in miscellaneous and some­times odd combinations. Undoubtedly, religion is one of the most influential forces.

The Christian Church now confronts the unimaginable situation of a new world open for new evangelization. When, 500 years ago, the mission­aries reached the New World and were trying to convert the indigenous peoples they collided with people who were closed in their own strong belief system, and they thought it necessary to use force to coerce them to be evangelized. The current "New World" — the ex-communist world — is much more open and eager for a new evangelization, because the old belief systems have been destroyed and the souls of these people are void, without meanings, without identities. This situation has never existed in history; scores of religions and sects are rushing to transmit their meanings to these empty souls.

Ethnic and Religious Revival:  

Religion as a Ground of Ethnic and National Identity

In the last decade, we have observed a coincidence of two processes - religious and ethnic revivals. They are intertwined and feed upon one anoth­er. The endeavor of ethnic revival or nationalism may use religion as an additional force. At the same time, in its struggle for survival and to regain territory, religion uses the ethnic and national identification. Accordingly, the issue arises of the similarity and difference between these two processes. Since the strengthening of religion, neo-evangelization and neo-islamization could use nationalism as a resource. In a number of countries, a stronger influence of religion and opposition to secularization are inseparable from nationalism. In the Catholic sphere, Poland and Ireland confirm this hypoth­esis.

Many similarities of national and religious identities allow close interaction and integration between them.

1) These are the two larger Gemeinschaften overstepping the direct relations characteristic of family and kinship. They require overriding all other obligations, call for sacrifice, and satisfy the need of affective relation­ship. Because the national and religious communities are not directly "visi­ble" identification with them is realized by means of highly developed sym­bolic and ritual systems.

2) These two communities put strong emphasis on the role of the past, tradition, history as factors for identification.

3) Their sets of symbols are included in the culture and interact with all other symbols in the cultures. If a religion is strongly rooted in a culture, it could play a larger role in ethnic and national identity. Religion and na­tion exchange their symbols and mutually support each other. But major religions go beyond nations. They are included in the cultures before the rise of nations and in this way the religions could be the ground for a develop­ment of national identity, but not conversely. Religious distinctions and conflicts precede national distinctions and could become boundaries for different nations.

4) The major causes bringing about today's religious revival - disruption of the other communities, social insecurity, the rise of non-material values, etc.—bring forth as well ethnic and nationalist revivals.

Ethnic and national movements use religious identifications and symbols to strengthen their positions. Religions also use ethnic and national movements to strengthen their own positions. This is one of the best avail­able opportunities for their inculturation. But in different periods, different types of relations between religion and nationalism could be found.

The first type is that of separation, hi a secular society and a secular national movement, religion is separated from the state. But the main char­acteristic of the nation is that this is a community desiring, supporting, and identifying itself with its own state. That is why nationalism might divide from religion. The case of the father of the modern Turkish nationalism, Kemal Ataturk is typical; he divided the state and Islam giving birth to a secular nationalism.

The second type of relationship between religion and nation is one of relative independence and interaction. In some situations and within some limits, religious identity prompts national identity or national identity prompts religious identity. When, for instance, a Bulgarian compares his national identity and culture with Turkish national identity and culture, he commonly thinks of himself also as Christian and accepts the "otherness" of the Turks as including, above all, the fact that they are Muslims. In this case, religious identity becomes part of national identity. But when the Bulgarian compares his national identity with that of the Serbs, with whom they share the same Orthodox Christian religion, then the religious identity does not share in the national identity, and other non-religious characteristics will be more important.

In the third type of interrelationship between religion and culture the religious identity becomes the ground for nation (or ethnic) identity and is considered as the most important part of this identity.

a) Religion and ethnic identity. In fact, in the most Ancient societies the religions were ethnic religions and were the most important factors supporting ethnic identity. This is the case, for instance, with Judaism, which has guarded the Jewish identity for thousands of years without a common Jewish political unity.

Ethnic revival today in the developed countries also is inseparable from some religions. This is especially visible in the USA where churches and the parishes too often are the only force uniting an ethnic group; it is their place for contact, meeting, and support. Here the church is the nexus, or core of ethnicity. In fact, when the state's support of ethnicity is absent, the church commonly becomes the most important institution in conserving this ethnic identity. This is the case with the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which supported the Bulgarian ethnic identity for five hundred years under the Ottoman yoke.

b) Religion and national identity. As E. Gellner points out, a people's meeting with larger cultures, especially literate cultures which is often medi­ated by a conversion to a variant of a world religion, allows ethnic groups to acquire assets which may later help to turn them into nations and structure them as such.[1]

Accordingly, religion plays an important role in almost any national movement, especially in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa. The modem Bul­garian nation began in the XVIII century with the activity of a monk, Father Paisii, who wrote a history of the medieval Bulgarian kingdom and brought together what was required for a common Bulgarian spoken language. The first fighters for "national awakening" in Bulgaria were monks and priests. In India in his appeal to the Indian masses Gandhi also suggested a greater mobilization of the role of religion than has been usual in modern Europe.

My claim is that the opposition of "us and them" between two groups in a situation of conflict has been the most important factor in the process of "national awakening" and nation building for the last two centuries. When this opposition takes place between two different religious societies, religion plays the first role in the process of nation building and maintenance of national identity and a specific religious-ethnic identification is developed.

Accordingly, Poles maintained their Catholic Polish identity in the struggles with the Russian Orthodox Christian state. In Great Britain, Irish, English, and Scottish identities were formed on the basis of different religions - Catholic, Anglican and Calvinist. People in Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia share a single language and culture, but feel themselves affiliated to three different nations because their religions are different – Catholic, Orthodox Christian, and Moslem. In principle, when national and religious identi­ties and oppositions between two groups coincide, their tensions and strife tend to be much more severe and harsh. The reason is that we have here a unity of two most important distal identities of the person and one's em­brace of these identities is much stronger if people have different national and ethnic identities the uncertainty, danger or crisis connected with one of diem could be replaced by the other. If they are tangled in a common religious-ethnic identity, then the danger of losing this identity is perceived as much stronger and the battle to stand up for it is much more furious and bloody. It is no accidents that as most all ethnic conflicts and wars in the contemporary world are not "pure" ethnic, but religious-ethnic.

At the same time, the different religions have different abilities to interact with nationalism to support it and to provide a basis for religious-ethnic identity.

It could be a one-sided or a poly-sided religious-ethnic identity. A nation has a one sided religious-ethnic identity if this identity defines the nation only in opposition to one or several, but not to all other nations. For instance, Roman Catholicism is part of die national identity of Lithuanians when they compare themselves with Lutheran Germans or Orthodox Rus­sians and Byelorussians, but not when they compare themselves with Catho­lic Poles.

A nation will have a multi-faceted religious-ethnic identity if its religion is not universal, but specifically ethnic. This religion will distinguish it form all other nations and make its identity stronger and more closed. Typical is die case with Japan where most of die Japanese people are connected with die old Japanese animist religion, Shinto, or in China where similarly die specifically Chinese semi-religious teaching of Confucianism is most widely spread.

Another distinction, which could be drawn is between partial and complete religious-ethnic identity. Partial religious-ethnic identity is formed in cultures, which are to some significant extent secularized so dial die tradi­tional religious cultures do not concur. There, die national and religious identities will coincide partially. The more a religion is separated from die profane culture, the more partial and non-important will be its role in development and maintenance of national identity.

Complete identity in which die limits of die religious, cultural, and national identities almost coincide means a lack of clear-cut borders between die sacred and die profane, die religious and die mundane.

From this point of view, we can say that Protestantism could be in­cluded in only a partial religious-ethnic identity, while die Muslim religion could be die ground for a complete identity. Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian Churches be "in between."

This implies a different role of these religions in die processes of development of ethnic self-consciousness and nation-building. The Islamization or Neo-islamization almost definitely means a change of national identity. In die history of humanity Islam has been die most mighty "melting pot" for die assimilation of different groups, much more mighty than die "melting pot" of American civilization during the XXth century. The potential of the other world religions to create and support national identity is weaker and secularization has weakened it additionally. Accordingly, it would be easier for Islam to use nationalism as a means of Islamization than for Christianity to do this for the purpose of evangelization.

Re-Evangelization and Re-Islamization

In the developed countries, the process of religious revival is strongly connected with growing diversity and pluralization. This means that a variety of new religions and sects are quite active, and that the old universal churches search for ways to adjust to the new plurality and to face the issue of inculturation.

On the whole, in the Third World and the ex-communist world reli­gious revival has first of all the form of re-evangelization and re-islamization. Different versions of Christianity and Islam are the mainstreams in this shift to the de-secularization an de-atheization of these societies, as people search for faith, meaning, solace and support in order to be able to cope with their broken lives and realities.

The revivification of Christianity and Islam in the ex-communist world, Asia and Africa is as a matter of fact, a revivification of two old adversaries. During this millennium, Russia and the Balkans always have been frontline sites, areas of contact and conflict between these two great civilizations.

The revival of Christianity and Islam in these regions is linked first and foremost with the failure of the two major projects of modernity, both originating in the Enlightenment: Communist society and Westernization. The attempts at rapid industrialization to overcome the backwardness with­out market and democracy in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have failed. But in many countries of the Third World this has also failed. When the power of the efforts to overcome the backwardness and the build modern secular societies are compared the stronger is the restoration and resurgence of religion.

The most forceful manifestations of Islamic resurrection has occurred in the more advanced and "modernized" (seemingly secular) countries of the Muslim world, such as Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, and Tunisia. The secular "White Revolution" in Iran was replaced by the "Islamic Revolution." The sense that existing political, economic and social systems had failed and disenchantment with secular modernization brought forth a quest for identity and a greater authenticity. Nationalism and religion are answers to this quest. In the Christian states, they partially overlap. In the Muslim world the feeling is widespread that Islam provides a self-sufficient ideology for both state and society, a valid alternative to secular nationalism, socialism, and capitalism. As John Esposito points out:

In the nineties, Islamic revivalism has ceased to be restricted to the usual marginal organizations on the periphery of society and instead has become part of mainstream Muslim society, producing a new modem-educated but Islamically oriented elite which work alongside, and at times in coalition with its secular counterparts. Revivalism continues to grow as a broad-based socio-religious movement, functioning today in virtually every Muslim country and transnationally. It is a vibrant, mul­ti-faceted movement that will embody the major impact of Islamic revivalism for the foreseeable future. Its goal is the transformation of society though the Islamic formation of individuals at the grass-roots level. Dawa (call) societies work in social services (hospitals, clinics, legal-aid societies), in eco­nomic projects (Islamic banks, investment houses, insurance companies), in education (schools, child-care centers, youth camps), and in religious publishing and broadcasting. Their common programs are aimed at young and old alike.[2]

There is a revival of Christianity also in the ex-communist block, but the situation is quite different compared with most Islamic countries. On the one hand, there is a surge in the quest for religion as a refuge from the severe value crisis and as a foundation for the identity of the personal self. But the Orthodox Churches in most of these countries is not sufficiently mobile and versatile to react to this quest. They have not enough missionary spirit and missionary structures. Both within and in public a furious struggle for power in some of these churches is waged. They are not too well prepared to face the growing need for re-evangelization. For the last hundred years they have had almost no experience in inculturation and lack the ability to adapt themselves to the psychology of the contemporary person. Thus, many other denominations are trying to gain influence in this region.

On the other hand, by contrast to most muslim countries where neo-islamization is an expression of disillusionment with the process of Westernization, understanding their failure to be a result of Westernization, in the ex-Communist countries the attitudes are just the opposite. The mass impression is that a lack of Westernization is the main reason for the failure of their countries. They are ardent, zealous adherents of anything coming from the Western world. This world is looked to for support in distress. This leaves room for a great influx of different sects, religion and denominations from the West, and first of all, from the USA. They bring with them not just their religious hope, but the lure and reputation of something from a country seen as an example to be followed. Some of them are Christians, some of them are not, but there is much room for neo-evangelization. What is different from the Muslim revival in the Middle East is that this is taking place in conditions of greater democracy, openness, and competition among different religions. Moreover, most of the sects and churches coming form the West bring with them some idea of the limits of the appropriate activity of the church in civil society and the division between civil society and state. They are accepted by people as part of their way to the new dream: the wealthy West.

Accordingly, we have conditions for a more monolithic and authoritarian re-islamization and more open and pluralistic re-evangelization. If the former is connected with a tendency to full deserialization, the second is connected with an endeavor to overcome atheization. If islamization is a strong political movement toward unity between state and church, re-evan­gelization is first of all a shift in civil society without so strong a tendency to unite church and state. For instance, the new, post-communist constitution of Bulgaria did not merely promulgate once again the separation of church and state, but forbade the establishment of parties on religious grounds.

Across a huge territory from Asia and Africa to Europe, we observe the revival of two old rivals with different positions, advantages and disad­vantages in the processes of evangelization and islamization, re-evangelization, and re-islamization. In this process Western and Eastern traditions encounter one another.

Their difference from the point of view of a strategy of inculturation is that in principle in most cases evangelization and re-evangelization have as their points of departure some distinctions dividing sacred and profane, secular national identity and religious identity. In contrast, Islam tends to deny these distinctions in principle an strives to include under its rule the whole person and culture. That is why Islamic conversion encloses the whole person in a specific world and is quite successful. For this reason, it is more difficult to convert a Muslim to another religion or to secularize him than to do so which a Christian. It is a well known fact in the history of the Muslim religion, that although Muslims were initially a minority in the conquered territories, in time they became a majority, due largely to mass conversions of local Christians. In addition, those who remained Christians were Arabized adopting the Arabic language and culture.[3] At the same time, there is not a single case of mass conversion of Muslims to the Christian faith. That is why the communities of Muslim emigrants in the developed Western countries are more closed and more difficult to integrate into the whole society.

The major peculiarity is the near inseparability of the religious from the national (or Ethnic). Evangelization does not mean ethnic or national conversion. Islamization means a change of the entire way of life and practi­cally always leads to a change of ethnic or national identity. When convert­ed to Islam a Christian, Buddhist, etc. population either affiliates itself to the closed muslim nation or claims its own specific Muslim national identity. This is true throughout the world. In Bulgaria, Christians who changed their faith to become Muslims under the Ottoman yoke are now inclined to identify themselves as Turks, because Turkey is the nearest nation which is Islamic in religion. At the same time in Bosnia Serbs identify themselves as a specific Muslim nation, although they speak the same language as Christian Serbs. Even if, as in the case of Bosnia, people are not very religious, reli­gion left so deep a vestige that now, with their brother Christians, they wage the most bloody nationalistic civil war in recent European history. To be Bosnian means first of all to be Muslim, and to be Muslim means to be Bosnian. In the same way in Malaysia many consider it axiomatic that to be Malay is to be Muslim. In Bulgaria Muslim theology has never been devel­oped nor has the Muslim literature been disseminated, the Koran is preached in the Arab language which almost no one understands. Nevertheless, Islam is retained as the way of life, and there remains the self-consciousness of "us" Muslims as different from "them" (Bulgarian Christians). Their Islamic identity and their appropriate ethnic or national identity are inseparable. According to J. Esposito,

the modem notion of religion as a system of personal belief makes an Islam that is comprehensive in scope, with religion integral to politics and society, 'abnormal' insofar as it departs from the accepted 'modem' norm, and nonsensical. Thus Islam becomes incomprehensible, irrational, extremist, threatening.[4]

The problem however is not just that of different perceptions of religion as a result of modernity, as J. Esposito emphasizes. There are two more impor­tant distinctions, which are disregarded by him. The first distinction is the originally different notion of relations between the sacred and profane, religion and the state, which are characteristic of Christianity and Islam and not just of modern and pre-modern visions of religion. The second distinction is that the inseparable unity between Islam and state leads to an integral unity of religious and national identity. The nation is a phenomenon of modernity, of the modern world, and now this modern phenomenon is linked with the pre-modern unity between religion in state.

Accordingly, nationalist and religious revivals, which could be quite separate in other cultures tend to coincide. This multiplies their force, strengthening both religious and national identities. This is in some sense a new historical phenomenon. When the two parts of a uranium nuclear bomb unite they become qualitatively new and different, and are followed by an enormous explosion. Similarly, the fusion of nationalist and religious revival may be the greatest danger in the Post-Cold War world.

As a matter of fact most of the nationalistic and ethnic wars and conflicts during the last decades are religious-ethnic wars. This makes conflict much more plausible in the case of ethnic (national) opposition and tension between "us" and "them". Accordingly, along the thousands of kilometers of the borderline between Islam and Christian civilizations we observe tensions, conflicts, terrorist acts and wars. It begins from the military clashes with the Muslim minority in the Philippines, passes through Islamic terror­ism and separatism in India, the civil wars between Muslims and Christians in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Lebanon, Cyprus, the relations between Jews and Arabs, the tensions between Greece and Turkey, Bulgarian Chris­tians and Bulgarian Muslims, the war between Christian Serbs and Muslim Bosnians, the conflicts between Christians and Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, etc. Everywhere the war is between religious-ethnic identities.

Two additional factors prompt the confrontation between these two different religious-national identities and cultures.

The first factor is the traditions and stereotypes of the confrontation between these two civilizations:

The confrontations and conflicts have spanned the ages and reinforced images of a historic and global militant Islam: the early Muslim expansion and conquest; the crusades and the fall of Jerusalem; Ottoman hegemony over Eastern Europe and, with the siege of Vienna, its threat to overrun the West; the great jihads against European colonial rule; Arab-Israeli wars; the economic threat of oil embargoes; Iran's humiliation of an "America held hostage" and its threat to export its revo­lution; media images of despots (Quddafi, Khomeini, Saddam Hussein) wielding an Islamic sword and calling upon the fren­zied faithful to rise up against the West; and the specter of radical revolutionary groups seizing Western hostages, hijack­ing planes and wantonly visiting a reign of terror. Death threats against Salomon Rushdi and Muslim secular intellec­tuals like the Egyptian philosopher Foudad Zanaria, who had declared that "the tide of political Islam . . . constitutes a very real danger", reinforce images of an intolerant and dangerous Islam.

At the same time one finds similar stereotypes from the other side.

Muslim images of the West in turn as the "real" threat to them. Many in the Arab and Muslim world view the history of Islam and of Muslim world's dealing with the West as one of victimization and oppression at the hands of an expansive imperial power. Thus many counter that it is "militant Chris­tianity" and "militant Judaism" that are the root causes of failed Muslim societies and instability: the aggression and intolerance of Christian-initiated Crusades and the Inquisition; European colonialism; the break up of the Ottoman empire and artificial creation of modem states in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, and Palestine; the establishment of Israel; Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and its invasion of Lebanon; and the extent to which oil interests have been the determining factor in support for autocratic regimes.

The second factor prompting the confrontation between Christian-national identities and Islam-national identities, between the processes of re-evangelization and re-islamization is the desperate crisis, destitution, and marginalization of millions of peoples in the area of the main contacts be­tween the two civilizations in ex-communist countries and a large part of Muslim states in Asia and Africa. In these conditions people become intoler­ant and look for scapegoats and enemies, which is the strongest factor rein­forcing the nationalistic identity. This occurs in the "zone of contact".

In any case, the process of re-evangelization in the Ex-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is inseparable from an encounter and tensions with the concurrent process of re-islamization.