God, nation, and gender: Religious actors and the making of anti-gender politics in Greece

This article explores the role of religious and parareligious actors in shaping anti- gender mobilisation in contemporary Greece, situating these dynamics within the broader dissensus (Coman & Brack 2025) within liberal democracy in Southern Europe. Building on recent fieldwork and semi-structured interviews conducted in 2024-25, it analyses how Orthodox clergy, affiliated networks, and faith-inspired civic initiatives have articulated opposition to what they frame as ‘gender ideology.’ These actors engage in a multipronged campaign that combines moral rhetoric, nationalist symbolism, populist religious rigorism, and appeals to divine authority, presenting themselves as custodians of both faith and nation. Rather than interpreting anti-gender mobilisation as a predictable moral backlash, the paper conceptualises it as a deliberate re-entry of religion into the political sphere. It examines how parareligious activists (often lay believers and conservative intellectuals) operate in tandem with clerical elites to advance a shared moral agenda, blurring the boundary between spiritual guidance and political intervention. Their mobilisation draws legitimacy from Orthodoxy’s historical role in Greek identity formation predicated on ethnophyletism, turning religion into an instrument for articulating grievances against liberalism, secularism, and perceived Western cultural hegemony. By analysing this nexus of religious authority, nationalist discourse, and anti-gender rhetoric through the lens of dissensus, the paper argues that Greece exemplifies a broader illiberal trend whereby moral and cultural anxieties are mobilised to challenge pluralism from within democratic frameworks. The Greek case demonstrates how gender functions as a symbolic glue (Kovats & Poim 2015) uniting diverse actors in a project of moral restoration. This mobilisation transcends opposition to gender equality, reshaping the moral vocabulary of legitimacy and illuminating the fusion of religious discourse with illiberal resurgence in Southern Europe.