THE BALKAN GOD MARS - THE RELIGIOUS FACTOR IN THE WARS 1991-1999
THE BALKAN GOD MARS - THE RELIGIOUS FACTOR IN THE WARS 1991-1999

Author(s): Mirko Đorđević
Subject(s): Politics, Political Theory, Politics and religion, Inter-Ethnic Relations, Wars in Jugoslavia
Published by: CEDET Centar za demokratsku tranziciju
Keywords: Religious communities; Serbian Orthodox Church; war; symphony; applied theology; religious-ideological discourse; re­ligious-warlike discourse
Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses the role of the religious factor in the wars fought in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999. Special attention has been given to the Serbian Orthodox Church and the religious-warlike discourse that dominated its rhetoric in those years (and the rhetoric of other religious communities) and its so-called applied theology. The aforementioned discourse was directly in the function of the war objectives of the Serbian regime headed by Slobodan Milošević, with whom the Church had established some kind of a symphony in accordance with the archaic model of Byzantine origin. On the one hand the Church has been manipulated there, but on the other, it paid a price for its incapacity to achieve an evangelical spiritual renewal, which was substituted by the initiation of a strong clerical influence on the society in that period.

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