What's church got to do with it? Anti-gender mobilizations in the Orthodox Balkans. Panel organized within CA 23149 “Antigender-Politics”

Abstract

The researchers define four major phases of anti-gender mobilizations (Corrêa, Patternote & House 2023; Kuhar & Zaharijević, forthcoming). The 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing is seen as inaugurating the first phase of mobilisation against gender equality, mainly by the Vatican and the US conservative Christian organizations. The second phase began in the mid-2000, with the first campaigns occurring in Europe, and in particular in those countries where Roman Catholic influence is strong. In the most studied phase, which began in the early 2010s, the other Christian denominations seem to have joined ranks with the Roman Catholic church, helped by the steep rise of the (radical right) political actors who built their agendas around the vilification of ‘gender ideology’. The fourth phase, the one in which we are now, demonstrates the ubiquitous presence of anti-gender narratives, in both discursive and geographical terms. This ubiquity today almost obscures the role that the Church played in the articulation and the dispersion of anti-gender narratives. On the other hand, the Roman Catholic church’s influence is rather limited in the countries where this is not the dominant religion. These – among them countries in which Orthodox Christianity is the key religious factor – found less space in the scholarly research. Russia, for example, is the only non-Catholic country covered in the authoritative volume Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe (Kuhar & Patternote 2017), which provided anti-gender mobilisation scholars with a roadmap to understand the third phase of anti-gender campaigns, as well as the conceptual tools to be applied in their respective research. From today’s vantage point, when Eastern Europe – both its central and eastern parts – is described as a bastion of illiberalism, this must come as a surprise. What was happening in the Orthodox part of (Eastern) Europe in phases previous to this, fourth one? Although there is now sufficient data about the alarming presence of anti-gender mobilisations in the Orthodox Europe – from Greece to Ukraine – we are still lacking focused, comparative research on the role of Orthodox churches in their making. Focusing on Eastern Europe, Norocel and Patternote (2023, 125) claim that certain features of this region deserve further exploration: ‘state-church relations, welfare regimes, EU accession and “Europeanization,” and post-communist legacies, including the current role of the Russian Federation.’ This panel, concentrated on three Balkan countries, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria, aims to shed light on the first feature: state-church relations. The questions that guide us are the following: how did the position of the Romanian/Serbian/Bulgarian Orthodox church change in the last decade in reference to social issues, among them those pertaining to gender? What is the role of synergy between the state and the church in this transformation? Ultimately, are we witnessing the desecularisation of our societies?

Title	Details
The Orthodox Church as a political actor: anti–sex education mobilizations and the making of an illiberal consensus in Romania	View Paper Details
”The Garden of the Mother of God”: Orthodoxy and Anti-Gender Politics in Romania	View Paper Details
Anti-Gender Mobilizations: Backlash or a Project? The Case of Serbia	View Paper Details
From support to instrumentalization of the anti-gender movements? Тhe case of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church	View Paper Details
Contested national space, gender, and the Orthodox Church: comparing Georgia and Greece	View Paper Details