Ninth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The paper aims to discuss the topic of religious truthfulness within Orthodox Christianity. To understand the construction of Orthodox religious truth one needs to underline an ontological differentiation between politics of religious truth, as an indicator of religious continuity, and religious truthfulness, as an indicator for analysing rupture within the subjectivity formation. Much of the recent debates within Anthropology of Christianity concerned rupture vs. continuity. Rather than discussing the two from a dichotomy perspective, the paper will look at how a religious tradition associated by scholars with continuity, Orthodox Christianity, can offer ethnographic material to illustrate how both continuity and rupture (reflected in the theological term of “metanoia”) can coexist. The paper will present the case study of a Church congregation from a Romanian urban industrial landscape. Dealing with the diversity of religious commitment within a religious group, the paper will address how in post-socialist Romania, an Orthodox Christin becomes a particular type of Orthodox Christian, what are the prioritisation tools by which religious truths are claimed, forming different subjectivities within the same tradition. Within the ethnographic context, the believer harvests mystical experience, affects towards Saints and narratives of people with harisma, the historicity of martyrs of communism, and eschatological discourses. These elements are piled and folded into forming religious subjects in intimacy with the divine to create the sensation of truthfulness, determining rupture within the individual and transfer from one form of subjectivity to another, from “lukewarm Christian” towards a “true Christian.”