Symphonic Secularism: Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam, and Religious Freedoms in Contemporary Bulgaria

In 2002, a controversial new law in Bulgaria ended a decade long dispute between two rival factions vying leadership of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (BOC), a dispute that had plunged the Orthodox community into internal chaos.  The new legislation stated that the BOC had “a historical role in the Bulgarian state as well as current meaning in the state’s life”, and therefore reaffirmed a longstanding state-church relationship that allowed the state to regulate religion in order to achieve social harmony between otherwise contentious religious factions.  This explicit link between the state and church is a particular facet of Eastern Orthodox theology called “symphony” (Greek: symphoneia), a doctrine that asserts that the spiritual affairs of the church should not take precedence over the temporal affairs of the state.  Rather, the state and church should work together for the common good of society.  Compared to the Roman Catholic assertion of Papal supremacy over individual temporal leaders, symphoneia has given Orthodox Tsars, First Secretaries, and Prime Ministers the authority to oversee church affairs, a practice that stretches back to the Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christianity in 1054 and which is believed to protect rather than prevent pluralism.  Perplexed, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and the Bulgarian government filed an immediate appeal, claiming that it was the Court that had overstepped its bounds by challenging Bulgaria’s cultural right to the Orthodox doctrine of symphoneia and the government’s ability to ensure pluralism in its own way.  My paper examines the modern legacies of a particular Orthodox imagining of appropriate church-state relationship and how this affects contemporary Bulgarians’ understandings of religious freedoms and pluralism today.