Abstract
‘Greece is under the protection of the Virgin Mary; we have nothing to fear’, a deputy of the New Democracy conservative party (ND) argued.1 This statement was pronounced during a severe political crisis at the time of the formation of the coalition government under Prime Minister Papadimos. Admittedly, that particular deputy has a very crude populist orientation, but the above statement could have easily been evoked (possibly in a more sophisticated fashion) by many of his colleagues across several parties. Clearly, politicians employing such discourse present themselves as guardians of the supposedly threatened national identity, drawing from the deep-rooted identification of the Greek nation with Orthodoxy, and appealing to the empirically documented high and widespread religiosity of the Greek people.
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© 2013 Thalia Dragonas
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Dragonas, T. (2013). Religion in Contemporary Greece — A Modern Experience?. In: Triandafyllidou, A., Gropas, R., Kouki, H. (eds) The Greek Crisis and European Modernity. Identities and Modernities in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137276254_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137276254_6
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