Dr. Ina Merdjanova, PhD

This project seeks to explore the social condition of what I call ‘neo-secularisation’ in Bulgaria by analysing how the Orthodox Church is both implicated in and affected by this condition. I interpret neo-secularisation as the complex process wherein – after a period of desecularisation of a previously secularised society, with the rise of religious authority at individual, social and/or political levels – the importance of religion once more decreases, and the hold of religious authority over the social system again declines. Rather than focusing on discontinuity with the communist past, and ‘revival’ of religion after 1989, the perspective of neo-secularisation explicates patterns of continuity between the communist secularisation and post-1989 developments in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and society.

Arguably, the communist secularisation inadvertently induced a feminisation of Orthodox Christianity, as the crack down on the Church and the domestication of religion turned elderly women into custodians of religiosity. The end of the communist regime propelled religion back into the public space, and re-emphasised male domination in the religious sphere. Orthodox Christianity gained presence and visibility as an indelible marker of national identity, but nonetheless did not have a substantial impact on the social norms, public morality and individual behaviour of the people who identify as Orthodox (around 76 % of the population). While communist secularisation was imposed by the state, neo-secularisation developed as an organic response to the inability of the Church to overcome the legacies of communism, or to offer a spiritual alternative to neoliberal individualisation and commodification of societal life. Importantly, neo-secularisation features a continuous feminisation of Orthodox Christianity, as women remain in the majority among practising believers, coupled with a continuous subordination of women in the liturgical and institutional life of the church.

The complex dynamic of neo-secularisation has induced anxiety within the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Recently, the Church joined a loose alignment of illiberal, populist forces in the country, which found common ground in the face of ‘gender politics’, and began campaigning against, for example, policies of gender mainstreaming and strategies to limit gender-based violence. I will look at similarities and differences between ecclesiastical support for anti-gender campaigns in Bulgaria compared to other East European contexts, to establish whether neo-secularisation is a cross-country phenomenon that plays a role in the rise of anti-gender politics, or instead a national specificity.