Thirteenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The Orthodox Church of Greece - through its NGO and in cooperation with international aid agencies, other NGOs, and the Greek state - runs multiple shelters, schools, and food distribution projects in its capacity as a practical arm of contemporary government and civil society. While this seems on the surface to be the insertion of religious practice into the public sphere, these projects are instead wrapped up in a process of secularization themselves. In fact, in many of these spaces, actors nominally employed by the Church of Greece model their work itself as truly secular or irreligious. Based on 10 months of participant observation and interviews over the course of my dissertation fieldwork, this paper focuses on the employees of a teen migrant shelter and an adult migrant school. I look at the ways in which the institutionalized care of the Church is secularized in order to fit itself into the larger humanitarian and charitable landscape of Greece. Further, I consider the methods employees use to distance themselves from both the larger Church and religious practice while remaining employees of it. Finally, I highlight the ways in which religious symbols and ideologies still slip through the cracks of the organization’s secularized fortifications. In so doing, I offer an important reflection on the blurriness of the boundaries between the secular and the religious in modern national Churches.