CHURCHES AND CIVIC ACTIVISM IN ROMANIA. HOW ORTHODOXY SHAPES ROMANIA'S FUTURE
CHURCHES AND CIVIC ACTIVISM IN ROMANIA. HOW ORTHODOXY SHAPES ROMANIA'S FUTURE

Summary/Abstract: After the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, churches have quickly returned as major societal actors in several post-communist countries. The Romanian Orthodox Church is one of them: in recent opinion polls, 87.6% of ethnic Romanians said they have much or very much confidence in the Orthodox Church – a higher share of the population than for any other national institution. Moreover, nearly half of the Romanians grant their church an active role in politics.1 Hence, there is a lot of room for the Orthodox Church to shape the democratization process in Romania. This article focuses on one aspect of the church's potential influence, namely on the mobilization of its members for civic activism. As to other organisations in Eastern Europe, the social differentiation and political pluralization that come along with the postcommunist transition pose a challenge to the churches in the region. However, unlike the Orthodox Church, the Catholic and Protestant churches in Eastern Europe belong to an international body that looks back on a long history of acting in a democratic environment – thus drawing from a significantly different accumulated organisational learning. Through their churches, Christians in Eastern Europe are therefore exposed to different organisational norms and values. The Catholic and Protestant Church are found to put more emphasis on the societal involvement of their members, appear more ready to accept religious tolerance and have a less nationalist outlook than the Orthodox Churches. The quantitative analyses in this article show that the organisational culture of the Romanian Orthodox Church induces significantly less activism among its members than its Catholic and Protestant counterparts. Moreover, denominational affiliation is the most important explanatory factor for civic activism in Romania out of a wide range of variables.

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