ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY AND THE ROMANIAN NATIONAL FAMILY

conceptual metaphor (Lakoff, 2002: 85–100), in the studied empirical material, Tudor indicated schematically the boundaries of intelligibility of the Romanian national family, evidencing its moral wholeness understood in terms of ethnic

‘purity’ and Orthodox Christianity as a birthright³⁶. The allegedly inborn Orthodox Christianity of the national family in this context plays a dual role. The assertion that the Romanian people was born Christian has been often used in Romanian historiography to underline the Roman filiation – Romanians as the easternmost outpost of Latin–Europe – and the nationalist claim of continuous inhabitation of the lands that would later become Romania by the Romanian people (Boia, 2001:

63; Dobrescu, 2003: 395; Leustean, 2007: 729–730; Stan & Turcescu, 2007: 44–

46). It is worth noting that the relationship between the Romanian state and Romanian Orthodox Church has a rather tortuous history. However, being the religious institution for the largest part of the Romanian ethnic majority, and being autocephalous – it is governed by a national synod, and appoints its own patriarch – has enabled the Romanian Orthodox Church to claim to be the national church, despite the nominally secular character of the Romanian state (cf. Leustean, 2007; Stan &Turcescu, 2007). This notwithstanding, Tudor’s claim that Romanian people are born into Orthodox Christianity seems to indicate their moral superiority, thereby naturalising a hierarchy of ethnic belonging and worthiness crowned by the figure of ethnic Romanians – claims which appear strengthened with the help of nouns that were capitalised. The national minorities were, in turn, named using non–capitalised nouns, in accordance with the common grammatical rules of Romanian language. Such a stance was further

36 In contrast, the Hungarian minority can ‘only’ claim baptism to Catholic Christianity by Saint Stephen/István sometime during the tenth century, while the Romani (Rroma) have no attestation of their Christianity – a consequence of their centuries–long status as slaves in the Romanian Danubian principalities.

emphasised in a subsequent editorial in which Tudor attributed to the people of that ‘part of Europe’ a certain naïvety or even childish innocence ‘because they have a genetic heritage similar to that of the first Christians – selflessly helping others – but certainly not suicidal and not inclined to love out of interest’ (RRM 528, 2000: 14).

In the 2000 Parliamentary and Presidential elections, the PRM and Tudor proved to be major adversaries to the political establishment. Participating actively in the Romanian political arena – marked by authoritarianism and electoral competitors more interested in protecting and expanding their personal interests, rather than democratic pluralism and serving the public good (Miroiu, 2004: 222) – the PRM and its leader finished the election as the second largest political force, behind the centre–left Social Democratic Pole of presidential candidate Ion Iliescu. The PRM polled 19.5 percent of the votes for the Chamber of Deputies (84 seats), and 21 percent for the Romanian Senate (37 seats), becoming the main opposition party. Equally astonishing was Tudor’s qualification for the presidential run–off with 28.3 percent of the votes, second only to Iliescu who received 36.4 percent (Andreescu, 2005: 188; Chen, 2003: 169; Mungiu–Pippidi, 2001: 230; Pop–Eleches, 2001: 156; Popescu, 2003: 331–332; Sum, 2010: 19). His strong electoral support notwithstanding, Tudor lost to Iliescu in the run–off. The elections were a very tense moment that witnessed a rallying of the centre–right supporters behind the centre–left candidate as the sole way of preventing Tudor from acceding to power. This was nevertheless interpreted as a rather ominous sign as Iliescu appeared to embody the ‘father figure’ preferred by the Romanian electorate, despite criticism concerning his tainted past as a member of the Romanian nomenklatura (Chen, 2003: 173–174; Gallagher, 2005: 267–268).

Nonetheless, Orthodox Christianity was subsequently reified as a distinguishing feature of the common Romanians, as it was the case in one editorial published on the eve of 2004 Parliamentary and Presidential elections.

Indeed, the Romanian national family was not only depicted as ‘devoured’ by its love for Jesus Christ by Tudor, but also steadfastly conservative, in the sense of piously following and obeying uncritically the Church hierarchy that was revered as holy in itself:

I always look in awe at the crowds of simple people that sweep with their knees the church floors; that stand still on the dusty roads, transfigured by a devouring love for our Saviour Jesus Christ; and that lay their meagre garments at the feet of priests, abbots, bishops and metropolitan bishops for these holy men to brush against the clothes and to transfer onto the garments a piece of their holiness.

(RRM 737, 2004: 12) Elevating the said hierarchy of moral worthiness, which distinguished between

‘pure’ ethnic Romanians and ‘other’ ethnicities inhabiting the ‘Country’, Tudor

indicated the symbolic boundaries of the national family. Importantly, such boundaries were used to define not only the ‘essence’ of Romanianness, but also to mark the difference between the ‘strong’, ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’, on the one hand, and the ‘weak’, ‘diseased’ and even ‘abnormal’, on the other. A case in point was Tudor’s vehement opposition to the decriminalisation of homosexuality³⁷ in 2000, a year which was mystically referred to as ‘the very year when we celebrate two thousand years from the birth of Our Lord Jesus’. Tudor then saluted in his editorial the Romanian Orthodox Church’s appeal though its highest prelate Patriarch Teoctist to boycott the new law. He attempted to exploit this occasion politically, noting deridingly that the governing coalition – reuniting the aforesaid centre–right, liberal, and centre–left parties – that had ‘the unimaginable irresponsibility’ to pass the aforementioned law, was ‘in itself an alliance against natural laws’ (RRM 521, 2000: 14). Opposing such ‘unnatural’ political solutions, which threatened to push through ‘irresponsible’ policies, Tudor subsequently appealed to an idealised, naïve and uncorrupted Romanian nation. The Romanian national family was depicted as obeying the ‘natural laws’ of compulsory heteronormativity – denoted by opposition to decriminalising homosexuality;

abstention from raping defenceless women, thereby performing their (reproductive) sexuality exclusively within the family’s private enclosure; and over-potent masculinity – marked by the pious submission to the exclusively male organisation of the national Orthodox Church (cf. RRM 528, 2000: 14; RRM 737, 2004: 12). This underlined further the pivotal role the national Orthodox Church played in defining Romanianness, thereby superseding regional specificities and uniting coreligionists, in an ever closer collaboration with the Romanian state power – and strongly reminiscent of the interplay between Orthodoxy and ethnocracy of the interwar period (Leustean, 2007: 720–721; Livezeanu, 2000:

303–304; Stan & Turcescu, 2007: 44).

The 2004 Parliamentary and Presidential elections witnessed the crystallisation of several electoral alliances, and a clearer profiling on the left–

right ideological cleavage. As such, the incumbent Social Democratic Party (Partidul Social Democrat, PSD) – the result of a merger between the two main centre–left parties, the PDSR and PSDR – entered the elections on their allegedly satisfactory governmental record: significant economic growth (a GDP increase with 8 percent), accession to the NATO/OTAN, and progress on the path towards EU–membership. The PSD renewed its previous alliance with the PUR, forming the National Union (Uniunea Naţională) electoral alliance. Their main competitors, the ‘Justice and Truth Alliance’ (Alianţa Dreptate şi Adevăr) –

37 Article 200 of the 1968 Basic Penal Code defined homosexual relationships as criminal; prior to 1989 it had been applied with the purpose to persecute and to force collaboration with the Ceauşescu’s secret police. In the post–dictatorship context, the article was often employed discretionarily by the police and had drawn harsh criticism from the human rights organisations and from the Council of Europe (Turcescu & Stan, 2005: 291–292). Article 200 was eventually repealed in June 2001, by the centre–left Năstase government.

reuniting the PD and PNL – focused on the imperative of reining in institutionalised corruption, which they associated with the political and economic oligarchy crystallised around the PSD. In turn, the PRM entered an electoral alliance with a trade union block (Downs & Miller, 2006: 412; Ieţcu–Fairclough, 2008: 373). Under these circumstances, Tudor emphasised the PRM’s righteousness in a renewed attempt to make use of religious arguments for electoral purposes. He described the PRM as ‘the party that does not change allies’

– indicative of moral uprightness and steadfastness – and that ‘has the decency not to participate’ in ‘dishonouring trade–offs’. In conclusion, he maintained, ‘the PRM is the sole Christian and moral force’ in Romanian politics (RRM 754, 2004:

12–13). The PRM and Tudor lost some of their political appeal, despite Tudor’s promise to improve on the results of the previous elections. Indeed, the PRM’s support decreased in the 2004 Parliamentary elections, polling 13.0 percent for the Chamber of Deputies, and 13.65 percent for the Romanian Senate (Downs &

Miller, 2006: 413–414).

Another illustrative example of policing the borders of the nation was Tudor’s own interpretation of the wider European anti–Islam attitudes in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 suicide attacks in the USA, and its adaptation to the Romanian specificities. The translation into Romanian politics was a gradual process, at first noticeable in 2004 and becoming most vicious on the eve of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. In this changed political context, criticising a Turkish–owned TV channel for unveiling a case of corruption among the Orthodox high prelates, Tudor maintained this was a matter for ‘the Romanian Orthodox Church’s Holy Synod to decide, not the business of newly arrived Muslims’. He subsequently warned that ‘Muslims should not touch the Romanian Orthodox Church; otherwise they will have to put up with me! Romania is not a village without watchdogs!’ (RRM 982, 2009: 13). The suspicion of terrorism was easily connected to religious difference – especially with the Islamic faith – Tudor making reference to a deeper, ‘immutable difference’ that could be used to deny the Muslim population the rights and legal protection guaranteed to his own folk (Glick Schiller, 2005: 529). The radicalisation of Tudor’s use of conceptual metaphors might be explained by several factors. The PRM did not manage to maintain its grip on its faithful electorate with its old nationalist litany directed against the Hungarian minority; the fact that the UDMR/RMDSZ had supported the various governmental coalitions in the past decade convinced the Romanian majority of their democratic commitment to the Romanian state. In addition, a significant percentage of the population had emigrated after Romania’s accession to the EU, which might also help explaining the decrease in nationalist fervour. In the context of an altered electoral law on the eve of the 2008 Parliamentary elections, which were for the first time decoupled from the Presidential elections, with a higher national electoral threshold of 5 percent and a significantly altered structure of the electoral districts, the PRM failed to gain parliamentary representation for the first time in its history. The PRM polled only

3.2 percent of the vote for the Chamber of Deputies, and 3.6 percent for the Romanian Senate, being the biggest loser of that electoral cycle (Marian & King, 2010: 13; Stan & Vancea, 2009: 51). Tudor has apparently succeeded in maintaining a loyal base, the PRM receiving 8.6 percent of the votes in the 2009 European Parliament elections, thereby sending three parliamentarians out of a total of 33 Romanian MEPs (Sum, 2010: 21).

In this respect, Tudor’s anti–Islamism appears in many ways similar to his xenophobic attitude against all those not narrowly defined as belonging to the Romanian national family; Muslims were thus portrayed as the menacing religious Others. Indeed, he claimed that Romanian youth was dangerously ‘lured into the most embarrassing sub–culture, […] of Oriental–Gypsy dances, of immoral parties, of rapes, of street language that disfigures our sweet language, and finally, of drugs, of prostitution […].’ The Romanian nation was thus depicted as on the brink of self–destruction, and Tudor urged the Romanians to ‘open the eyes and minds of the young generation to the glory of God – the sole source of true beauty, truth, and wisdom.’ (RRM 736, 2004: 13) The cultural and religious regression was manifested through the adoption of ‘Oriental–Gypsy dances’ – with Gypsy here in the sense of Ţigan Other (Woodcock, 2007: 494) – and social gatherings that could lead to young Romanian women being raped by those engaging in such actions – hyper–masculine Others symbolically reuniting the most threatening presences: that of the ‘uncivilized’ Romani (‘Ţigan’) and of

‘Oriental’ Muslim. These expressed Tudor’s paternalist preoccupation with the danger of pollution and of the irremediable degeneration of the Romanian national fabric. Consequently, the return to a patriarchal morale enforced by Romanian Orthodox Christianity was to ensure, in his view, a safe return to ‘true beauty, truth, and wisdom’. Tudor’s usage of the NATION IS A FAMILY conceptual metaphor thereby extended the metaphorical cluster towards portraying the Romanian ethnic majority as facing an imminent disaster and the identification of those that endangered its existence.