The national Church as a historical form of Church-type. Elements of a configurative theorization

Abstract

The national Church is characterized by a concentric synthesis of religion, nation, culture and society, in alliance with other social authorities. The socio-religious body it constitutes presents features similar to those of a system’s organic whole. Its composition may be described as plural and animated by an esprit de corps. The regulatory social codes structuring its varied social relations contribute to establishing the bond of reciprocity in the distinction. The various mediations implemented in this sense are aimed at periodically revitalizing a tradition in order to maintain an ecclesial body that is at the same time social; all the more so as the national Church is at odds with the conditions of organized religion in contemporary society, its historical characteristics notwithstanding.

Over and above its variations, the national Church will be examined as a socio-religious formation which, as an organized religion, almost exclusively appears as a Church-type and not as a sect-type or mystical-type. The Church’s character of externality and extension in no way excludes arrangements in affinity with a sect’s visibilized intensity or mysticism’s interiority, its source of intensity. The priority allotted to any of these expressions of religiosity marks the religious organization of relationships between members, relations to what is not, the world, and representations of a symbolic order, beyond the capacity for self-regulation of conflicts, internal as well as external (Séguy, 1980: 101–110; Turcotte, 1999). The national Church, as a historical form of the Christian Church, presents members and activities in interdependent, highly organic transactions, as well as the consequent tensions or conflicts between national membership, religious confession and cultural identity. By means of mediations, these transactions produce effects, among other things, on the terms of membership or exclusion, on the socialization of individuals or member groups, and on arrangements for conflict resolution and the development of regulatory modes. What counts on all sides is the need for conditions guaranteeing permanence in facing the challenges and hazards of history. In this connection, three authorities, at once autonomous and interrelated, are directly concerned: namely the Church as an institution and community, State society – governed by public authorities – and civil society taken as a whole in all its diversity. ¹

The national Church, a concentric, varied and interactive whole

To a certain extent, the Church-type favours exteriority and consequently objective mediations – such as traditions, the sacraments, preaching, ministries and hierarchically arranged governments – rather than subjective mediations leading to an intensified belief, as in prayer or spiritual meditation. Having once proclaimed its message interpreting the founding texts, the socio-religious grouping circumscribed in those terms seeks to blend itself into social life at the primary stages of an existential rationalization, thus preparing for a progressive religious development and, thereby, a penetration of cultures and masses. To achieve this, adaptation to the world, to what is different, is sought, but without entirely endorsing it a priori and, in consenting to transactions ranging from the spiritual to the economic, remaining ready to sacrifice for extension, but not for intensity or interiority (Séguy, 1980: 101–110; Turcotte, 2010: 198–200).

In agreement with this process and along the same basic lines, the national Church defines itself via a concentric synthesis of religion and nation, culture and society. Next to other societal authorities, it presents itself as a socio-religious body, developed as an organic whole with interdependent components. Its composition – territorial in this case – proves to be simultaneously plural and animated by an esprit de corps. Regulation is consistently combined with intransigence – or a refusal to water down the specific – and arrangement, i.e. transactions acknowledging distinctions. Thus civil society corresponds straightforwardly to the ecclesial society within a geographical space and under the government of a State confessing the same religious allegiance. Its spatially circumscribed self-definition is based on a singular history, traversed by a territorial assertion of religion and culture, in the wake of resistance to foreign domination or territorial arrangements such as ‘cuius regio, eius religio’ (to each region its religion). Thus, individually or collectively, a particular way of living and seeing things in life can flourish, lending them a significance and sense rooted in a heritage and a project. A national Church’s entire society is akin to that of its ethno-cultural religion, where the synthesis of power, religion and culture takes the form of an interpenetration aimed at guarantying ethnic reproduction, or even supremacy over the entourage (Barth, 1969). The various social authorities, including that governing the economy, refer back to a totality, to a ‘sacred canopy’, serving to reinforce the invariant character of representations and means of regulation. This results in a socio-religious constraint on consciousnesses and actions, a constraint requiring conformity, at least externally, as well as relegating dissidence to the private sphere. Where needed, this relegation may be accompanied by sleights of hand for the public expression of non-conformity as defined by authority. The range of behaviours and positionings may include vindicating a difference, whether individual or collective. The space devoted to it varies depending on cultures, historical rootedness, and wide-ranging challenges to be met, among which are those involving the individuation of persons and the autonomization of consciousnesses.

In a societal condition traversed by its national religious identity, the individuals or groupings laying claim to another cultural-religious membership yield – externally – to the ambient culture. If ever minorities have the ability to effectively vindicate the public affirmation of that difference, they must nevertheless come to terms with ways of seeing and doing things in their milieu. The social pressure extends to daily life, with its conventions and customs. The multiform constraints may even be exerting themselves when a reference of a socio-religious character and its inherited expression are in retreat. The retreat does not in itself erase the features of a society marked by a historical singularity – wherein religion and culture interpenetrate. Not only are confrontation or co-operation between interests and the calculation of means to be used in pursuing ends in question (instrumental rationality); just as readily, the socially constructed representations of life in society modelize the relationships between the constitutive elements, all the while giving them significance (symbolic rationality) (Zylberberg, 2004).

In addition, certain criteria allow us to gauge the advance of social inclusion when the religious differences of individuals and groupings are in question, their intent being to define themselves in terms resisting uniformization via an active ethno-cultural demarcation. In this domain, public declarations of national loyalty towards State society are of prime importance, coupled with reciprocal recognition of the existential coherence of worldviews. Under certain conditions, membership in a politically articulated broader ensemble can support a locally undervalued identity without hoisting it to the level of a historically dominant majority. This is the point where social minority followers learn about the dominant cultural and religious tradition and acquire respect for its influences on lifestyles. These criteria, pronounced in debates and forums for reflection, are in no way exhaustive, even if they embody the national Church’s viewpoint; they propose elements of practical rationalization for a complex question, involving both State and civil society.

In any event, the diversity of ethnic origins in a society is highly likely to impact on a Church’s national character. Recognizing that, the citizen’s national identity is nonetheless affected by his/her belonging to a given religious denomination. The close tie between religious confession and national identity does not in itself lead to their imbrication in a national Church – in the strict sense of the term –, as when religious institutions prove to be the only autonomous social authorities able to defend the nation’s or civil society’s subordinated interests in facing authoritative rule. With regard to the United States of America, seeing oneself as a member of the great American nation overrides regional, cultural, racial or religious particularities. Yet the latter play a determining role in regional social relations or in districts of major cities, with a social and cultural alignment variable according to the type of religious group adhered to, e.g. a Church, a sect, an ethnic Church or a cult, and to the local relationship between race, religion and ethnicity (Turcotte, 2006a). In the European context, differences in relations between the local, national and universal levels are variously detectable, depending on whether we are dealing with the orthodox arrangement, the Lutheran or Anglican Church’s, or the Catholic Church’s. The last favours ties between the local and the universal in denominational identification and sacramental celebration. Consciousness of belonging to a local community that enjoys the same organization and carries out the same gestures as other communities on a global scale tends to reduce the influence of national particularities, but without denying or relegating them. Wherever you look, living conditions in the great urban sprawls and the migration of individuals affect societal relationships, defined according to geographical areas or specific traditions. It may be true that God does not need a passport, but migrant groups or individuals owe it to themselves to know how to deal with multiple authorities. ²

The social and ecclesial functions of regulation

From the outside looking in, the national Church is easily seen as a fusional whole. That fusion is particularly visible when a religion has succeeded in penetrating a culture to the extent that those two elements of the society are closely imbricated. Yet the asset of interpenetration should not be seen as definitive: achieved once and for all. Does the imbrication in question not take place at the fringes of confusion and separation? This double source of pitfalls raises the possibility of unforeseen consequences, especially as regards the position of minorities and dissidents. Social regulation is in question. ³

The national Church puts forward definitions of itself, of life in society and of regulation – both political and religious. It reaffirms and revives those definitions in cultural and religious festivals and ritual practices. In so doing, it provides them with significance and concrete form, with a view to ensuring the reproduction of socialized invariants, thus bolstering the ‘that’s the way things are’ attitude towards routine and everyday rules, reinforcing internal cohesion and impregnating the national identity with the religious tradition of which the Church and society claim to be trustees (Weber, 1947: 124). In other words, an ensemble of symbolic representations – formal and informal rules governing practices in society or in Church – unites the actors, even those with opposing interests, thus furnishing the bases of a certain way of functioning in social and religious activity on the territory corresponding to a State or enclave. Regulation of that sort is to be distinguished from regulations (réglementation), such as a corpus of juridical rules governing an activity or institution. Regulation designates rather a coherent ensemble of codifications of social relationships, emanating from authorities or structural forms, such as institutions, norms, conventions and customs, in short social routine. It all forms a system that is itself divided into subsystems, thus guarantying a certain regularity in the relations in force within a given society over a given period (Lévesque, 2001).

That regulation, obtained through invariants structuring social relations, which are themselves varied, contributes to constructing the bond of reciprocity in the distinction. This last, conflictual in nature, is also reconstituted thanks to arrangements between social actors with divergent interests – arrangements that tend to stabilize and then reproduce themselves. Does the human being not act like a product of society and a production of society? Moreover, condensation or crystallization of the interactive experience is reinterpreted in co-operation or confrontation. In this area and at the macro-society level, recognition of the sharing of competences ordains recognition of the spheres belonging to each of them. This is the condition for a regulation of social relationships that is at once without rupture or unilateral subordination, at the intersection of the social order and the exchange of reciprocity. In cases of parties with opposing visions or interests, which are at least particularized, mediation by a symbolic third party or arbitrator seeks grounds for bringing together and an agreement, by these means establishing or re-establishing a tie that leaves each party with its character or proper position intact. Carried out in this way, arrangement thus breaks the circle of bipolarity of power relations closed to any solution. The individuals and authorities involved refuse the fusion of interdependent elements of the social system, fostering instead a regulation of conflict relations under the aegis of invariants that are socially recognized and interiorized in socialization. As regards the national Church, arrangement in regulation and the regulation of arrangement are both likely to be at the heart of resolving conflicts and tensions, inasmuch as this Church has to get along with other regulatory authorities, while vindicating its co-extensiveness with a given society. In detailed arbitrations, co-operation is a neighbour of confrontation, competition of convergence, and closure in bipolar conflict readily mixes with third-party mediation in negotiations leading to arrangement. Directing regulatory transactions is at stake (Remy, 1996; Remy and Turcotte, 1997; Turcotte, 2006b, 2007).

In debates on religion and nation, culture and society, national Churches today are confronted with questions and problems which to varying degrees damage their self-definition in terms inherited from a particular tradition and its references in debates between religion and nation, culture and society. As well as publications and conferences in meetings of learned societies, the acts of colloquia attest to this, as at the congress of the International Conference of Sociology of Religions in 2009. For example, the questions dealt with included the orthodox parish of today as a place of religious renaissance and denominational identity, in accord with their specific historical dynamics, be they Serbian, Russian or Bulgarian, as well as the tension between religious pluralism and ethno-national identity, as in Russia or Romania, or the face-off of human rights and a plethora of positionings in Poland. To this can be added criticism of the authoritative paths of ecclesiastical government faced with the autonomization of individuals and the secularization of public authorities. In societies in search of greater solidarity that are rebuilding their social base, some would like the Churches to contribute by becoming civil society’s public mouthpiece, as well as in its expressions of personal piety, pastoral support and social action. The national Church as a Church-type is at odds with modifications in relationships between nation, nationalism and religion (Turcotte 1992, 2003) and, on a wider basis, with the conditions of organized religion in contemporary society, historical particularities notwithstanding (Turcotte, 2009: 109).

System and interaction, institution and community

Socially, the national Church presents itself as a body with diverse members and functions or hierarchical roles. These Church-type features are in affinity with those of a system, but without being limited to that, given the internal structural differences, for example, between the monastic community and the parochial or diocesan institution. The image of the body to represent the Church in the diversity of its functions or members, as well as its unity under a head who is Christ, goes back to the first Epistle to the Corinthians (12, 12–27). This Paulinian development is rooted in the soil of experience and representations from various milieus of his time. This biblical reference, likening a religious social formation to a body, but not exclusively, served as a homologue in the social system’s theoretical elaboration. If a given social reality presents a system’s properties, and only in that case, then that reality will have characteristics proper to it from a sociological viewpoint. There are relationships of interdependence among the elements constituting it. The totality formed by the ensemble of elements is not reducible to the sum of those elements. The relationships of interdependence among the elements and the reality resulting from it are governed by rules whose rationality corresponds to the logic of the organic whole. The latter designates a broad ensemble, whose components are interdependent according to a co-ordination that is to some degree necessitated (Rocher, 1997: 248–264, 351–375). Does the same not go for the national Church taken as a social body?

The Church, as a social body and hence understood as a socially systemic reality, brings into play interdependencies that simultaneously refer to an economic, socio-political and religious whole. However relative, this interdependency does not mean a fusion or confusion of elements constituting the whole, but rather the distinction between the elements themselves, and between these and the socio-religious body as a whole. In fact, there is an interaction between the constituents that proves to be as much of a symbolic order as purely functional. Engaging social relations are not to be reduced merely to useful ties, to the very extent that those relations include a reference other than the material composition of a broad organic ensemble. This reference is impalpable in nature, while remaining accessible as passed on through the life and teaching of people with ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ lived experiences, as well as thanks to the mediation of religious communities and institutions, with their rites, customs and rules of life. In relationships between individuals, the symbolic reference thus mediatized may be considered as a third party making acceptance of the distinction possible until recognition of the difference, which, at the very same time, nourishes reciprocity. We are dealing with actors socially in communion in affirming individuality. But individuality remains a source of tensions and conflicts when it vindicates an irreducible singularity in face-to-face dealings. That vindication passes through the expression of an identity before which the other must position him/herself.

The relationship of reciprocity between social agents: interaction – individualized, moreover – is born and evolves in institutions or communities, be they civil or religious. Interrelationships everywhere are obedient to representations and practices – while simultaneously forging them. They are crystallizations resulting from experiences, such as common definitions of reality, customs and rules. These crystallizations, recovered or reinterpreted depending on the case, cultivate a feeling of belonging – in conjunction with places or journeys through life. They weave the social fabric in producing and reproducing it. Through socialization, the individual interiorizes that fabric in developing the biographical texture of his psychosocial personality, which then becomes a selection criterion as to what influences his will and liberty, on the edges of the system and process, of what is given and constructed in life.

The institution oversees a variety of functions and positions uncovering a sense (significance and orientation) in their exercise or existence in an aim which, exceeding singularities, opens onto a vision of things in life with far-off horizons – while remaining rooted in its own history. Defined in these terms, the institution calls for a needed public recognition of its purpose and criteria for social regulation. These criteria, which may overlap, are, notably, tradition’s ‘that’s the way things are’, the objective rationality of the rule, and recognition of the extraordinary in charisma or the affective in interpersonal relationships (Weber, 1947: 124). The institution’s symbolism is expressed through objective references to common membership in a world vision and a collective experience, through crystallizations such as rites, the flag, the language, a way of acting and thinking, or maintaining bonds with its fellows and foreigners.

In contrast to an institution, the community fosters the sentiment of belonging to a socially restricted being-together. The physical reduction contributes to nourishing subjective interdependence in the name of one and the same identity in affirming a spirit, and doing so in recognition of the difference, whether that recognition be enhancing or distantiating and critical. The community maintains bonds of an enveloping kind, under certain conditions ending up subordinating positioning or rational choice – notably – to emotional or identitary criteria that may go so far as to distort socially admissible logic. Sliding in that direction leads to communitarianism. In groupings restricted to community relations as such, those relations are defined by an explicit contract covering all aspects of life and, above all, the members’ participation where decisions are made regulating orientations and practices in managing the diversity of individualities and the routine of existence. A way of life that is rational in its objectified aspect defines the borders and spirit of a social formation; its members seek a personalized experience, all the while able to count on a support that is recognizable in daily life and tangible in personal interrelationships, practices of a symbolic order, participation in decision-making, and whatever else favours insertion into the community grouping (Weber, 1947: 320–322).

Intensity and intension best characterize the community, in contrast to the institution’s extension and externality. Both aspects are certainly found together in the organization, characterized by the delimiting of borders, deciding what is admissible and inadmissible in external relations, the appropriation of suitable means and ends – the latter defined as priorities achieved in the short or mean term – and practical success with consequential functioning. In short, self-reference defines the social formation’s borders, functioning and purpose. This is its functional and instrumental aspect, which may just as likely combine itself with the institution’s systemic interdependence as with the community’s contractual intensity. When instrumentalized and objective organizational success becomes an end in itself, the grouping’s legitimacy, namely the socially recognized criteria of its raison d’etre as an institution or a community, tend to reduce its functioning to utility, or to even sideline the subjective or symbolic references, logically granting primacy to measurable efficacy, operational effectiveness or financial profitability. In the contemporary context of the technocratization of State or civil society leadership, besides the dominant financial logic, many religious institutions or communities favour what depends on the organization in their self-definition, internal management and external relations, to the detriment of a raison d’etre with symbolic references and open to the horizons granted to a unique tradition, without being stifled by it (Dumais and Richard, 2007; Freitag, 1999: 1–32).

In the prolongation of this threefold conceptualization, a broad ensemble like the national Church may be circumscribed as an institutional whole including institutionalized, community sub-ensembles, such as convents or monasteries, bringing religious virtuosos together, and parishes territorially composed of the faithful who, displaying varied levels of membership, are gathered around the church as a place of worship. To differing degrees, depending on the institutional or community sub-ensembles, the national Church encompasses a population belonging to a tradition unique to it, through remembered historical facts and personages, in conjunction with religious representations of the purpose and identity of the broad ensemble, or in connection with a designated place. The tradition reinforces the commonly received culture and fashions visions of things and know-how, as well as the ordinary and the exceptional in life beyond individualities. To a cultural given of existence corresponds the feeling of belonging to a social formation, irreducible to any other formation and which has been given a name, an appellation. Hence the identitary conscience is itself vitalized by reference marks coming from a tradition and culture supporting the desire to live together (Turcotte, 2010: 200–203).

Esprit de corps, social cohesion and internal tensions

An esprit de corps traverses the various traditions of the national Church, perhaps all the more so if it is in the minority condition of diaspora. An esprit de corps indicates an ensemble of characteristics particular to certain social formations, institutions or communities. It does not target clearly circumscribed and distinct objects as do descriptive concepts. It leaves room for imprecision, evokes an ideal and questions its place of relevance. It takes on form and is incarnated in effective practices, in the continuous interrelationship of culture and behaviour, of an ideal and its concretization, of the symbolic and action. Palpable in being close to daily gestures, it remains in part elusive, perhaps because of the emotions (self-love among others) animating it, beyond shared interests or solidarity bound to a cause transcending the material things in life. Thus the diversified ecclesial body maintains itself via the systemic reproduction of sacralized invariants, as well as via an esprit de corps, with an internal coherence and firm cohesion, both revived by festivals or cultural and religious practices. The spirit’s body displays itself in ritual rationalization, a spirit of conviction mixed with the affective and emotional, with objectivity and subjectivity.

The term ‘esprit de corps’, referring back to Greco-Roman antiquity, has been the object of various reflections on the part of modern and contemporary authors. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sense, ‘esprit de corps’ signifies an identification with the city as a whole. This whole refers to the imagined representation of the body as an integrated whole, overcoming diversities or separations and thus achieving a ‘common identity’. Anyone can incorporate, engage and immerge himself in this kind of totality: be it the family, the clan, the tribe or the city’s or Church’s body politic, all of them living wholes. The unitary aspect is not retained by the encyclopaedia, wherein identification involves a grouping recognizing its limits within a designated environment, defining itself in relation to it – hence relatively – and delimiting a territory for itself. Consequently identification affirms the distinction and integrates the difference, contains the will to power and assumes self-control. A pluralistic conception (the multiplicity of functions and institutions) underlies this delimitation and contractualizes (inclusion versus exclusion) social relationships, which invites critical distantiating towards the discourses and positions adopted by various social bodies. A third form, suggested by Saint-Simon, initially refers to acting and being. An esprit de corps is developed in action and for action, even if it means calling aggressive and defensive identifications into question, and practising distantiation with regard to local identifications, while satisfying them through personal creativity and individual involvement. The esprit de corps is constructed in assuming and distantiating, with regard to an identification linked to a body not considered to be the product of a history, i.e. an undeniable fact, but rather a source of action whose spirit is not enclosed in national identifications. Here we have three forms of esprit de corps, three fundamental kinds of living-together (Guglielmi, 2005; Bourdieu, 1989: 254–259).

Anyone who knows even a bit of the history of Christianity will have recognized the primacy of one or the other of these forms of being-together at a given moment of its historical development. Generally speaking, to the extent that a Christian socio-religious formation intends to transform its social environment, exerting an influence mediatizing the ideal and its effects on behaviours, there is a good chance that that very formation is itself changed, either voluntarily or by the introduction of foreign elements into its ways of seeing and doing things. Churches called national, with their own spirit and proper identity, took form in that interactive game. In so doing, those Churches have taken on the Paulinian reference to the body as an image of the Church. That metaphorical reference supports both the distinction and the hierarchy of functions, as well as their integration into a spiritual unity under the head, who is Christ, which commands an organization with authorized components, hence with an interrelational and hierarchized order. That unity does not mean fusion, but the affirmation and recognition of various organizational forms within a broad ensemble.

Consequently, not all members take part on an equal footing in defining the religious reality in a Church. In this regard, tensions emerge from power struggles, however latent they may be, notably of an economic or cultural order. The same goes for the criteria of public reception of definitions and their being manoeuvred. Being socialized in a symbolically and empirically singular world forges the personality of individuals whose spirit proves to be in affinity with the character belonging to a broad ensemble, or one of its sub-ensembles. Over the course of rituals and exchanges, an identity is produced and reproduced, whether it be taken up afresh or be in search of authentification, relativized or firm, visibilized or hidden, on the fringes or at the centre of an organized religion. An esprit de corps in the national Church is just as likely to be intense as ‘banalized’, in step with daily routine, or even fossilized within a mass of followers. In that case, raised awareness focuses on an elite, whether religious or not, who intend to play a decisive role in regulation and its arrangements (Turcotte, 2009: 115–116).

The conditions and challenges of historical permanence

Like societies, Churches act, and so work on themselves with a view to their development in space and time. Transforming themselves, they innovate while remaining fundamentally what they have always been, which leads them to selectively appropriate elements of routine, especially in rituals and ceremonials. Thus they reinterpret origins and tradition. What appeared as fixed once and for all, and a guarantee of historical continuity, calls for readjustment, revision or being taken up afresh or reconstructed on new bases. The enterprise seeks to restore stability and maintain the rules of permanence. With this end in view the religious institutions take on the spirit of falsehood, for not revealing the selection of elements they have abandoned or accentuated, or else in camouflaging redefinitions in reformulations that are in principle simply formal. The credibility of existing systems is at stake, whether involving rite, belief or morals. Those systems are confronted with factors or changes that end up affecting the interaction between institutional belief and its reception in a social and religious environment and, by rebound, identity and membership. At the consistency level of the socio-religious formation that is the Church, its esprit de corps comes into question.

Gaps of a symbolic or structural order are detectable in the national Church’s organic wholeness. Does the ideal vision proclaimed by officials or seen in civil society’s festive gatherings not aim at camouflaging them? At key moments, are they not periodically intended to recreate a collective consciousness that is somewhat frayed by the wear and tear of ordinary life? On the edges of its crystallization and reinterpretation, the collective consciousness of a singular history is periodically revitalized in rites and festivals, at the junction of what is religiously sacred and civilly defined, with a view to the maintenance and future of a society where a national Church holds sway. Yet transactions and arrangements must be fostered and a place left available for public liberty. Moreover, various factors, whether they arise from internal production or externally, necessitate renegotiations and transactions between the authorities concerned. For example, the entry of a State into the European Union where a national Church holds sway is quite likely to produce more or less unexpected effects, which have repercussions on the established societal order. Similarly, techno-bureaucratization opts for the advantage of management efficiency and does so to the detriment of symbolic aims nourishing an identity bound to the specificity of a tradition. By imitation, the working of institutions, whether they be civil or religious, tends to favour organizing things concretely without taking into account any broader goals than those of instrumental rationality (Giner, 2003: 61–113; Herbert, 2003).

Moreover, the rise of democratic practices and scientific knowledge tends to erode the religious authorities’ ability to define authorized knowledge and the normative orientations regulating individual and collective behaviours. Other factors intervene, like the imposition of an ideology pushing the affirmation of religion in the private sphere back, or even denying the psychosocial plausibility of the religious experience. In that case, and especially if the religious institutions intend to continue governing the systematization of social life, there is a good chance that the Church–State struggle will occur between two authorities with monopolistic claims. The struggle may lead both of them to lay claim to non-negotiable spheres, without coming around to recognizing competences properly belonging to civil society. The route in that direction is likely to be tortuous, and shifts most often take place due to events challenging the established order and forcing negotiations hitherto considered unthinkable. Consequently, a change occurs in the direction of reciprocity, however selective that reciprocity may be. In the face of a totalitarian regime, nothing but cracks or gaps in the system leave a national Church with a modicum of autonomous action. The same applies to minorities or dissidents when the national Church becomes invasive as regards religion, whether it be in collusion or in opposition to State power. In the context of modernity, the division of competences regulating the entire society continues to present us with quite diverse methods and varied circumstances, depending on what history has handed down. Relationships everywhere remain at the stage of an irreducible conflictual duality, unless there is recognition of a third party opening the path to arrangement.

Methods of arrangement are a central theme running through Ernst Troeltsch’s (1923) analysis of European Christian Churches and groups. As much a philosophizer and theologian as a sociologist and historian, Troeltsch may be seen as devising an intellectual project consisting of an analysis of the socio-political scope of the theological definition of Chalcedon: ‘one and the same Christ the Lord, the only son, whom we must recognize in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation’. The formula binding Christ’s two natures into the unique person of the Word underlies the concept of arrangement in the Troeltschian sense. In its simplest expression, the State can give in exchange for what it receives; the Church can receive in exchange for what it gives. They face one another, like the sacred and the profane, without confusion or separation. In Byzantium, did God and Caesar not combine without fusion or fission? That is what Gilbert Dagron (1996) endeavoured to show in his analysis of the relations between political and religious powers in Byzantium, notably in the person of the emperor. ⁴ Caring for the body and caring for souls are to be distinguished, yet remain interrelated: whence imperial power’s sacral dimension and, at the very same time, the patriarchal function’s political aspect. Separation of those two powers does not involve the separation of the spiritual and temporal spheres in the lives of cities and the men living in them. This description exhorts us not to take the path of simplification, avoiding taking complexity into account and scrutinizing its paradoxical expressions, at the gates of the human comedy. The Christian social body is not reducible to an immutable monolithic block. It is the social productions resulting from arrangements that tend to stabilize themselves, while remaining prone to fluctuations and reversals. From this viewpoint, fossilization cultivated for its own sake, and closed to any possibility of change, is highly likely to lead to self-destruction. Societies, including societies described as traditional, move, readjusting themselves in interaction with what is outside them, caught up as they are in the tension between the system and movement, the production and reproduction of social relationships. ⁵

Conclusion

In line with Max Weber’s and Ernst Troeltsch’s conceptualization, the national Church is seen to be a Church-type. As a diversified organic whole, it stresses religiosity’s externalization and the coextension of its representations’ influence on the behaviours of a territorial population. Expressly designed transactions advance the parameters of mediation, which is reformulated to accord with the degree of extension and the context. Having attained territorial coverage of a nation, its extension means the interweaving of national identity, religious identity and cultural identity, organizing religion’s composite in relationships between the religious institution, the civil society and State society (Turcotte, 1992, 2003). Recourse to objective or subjective Church-type mediations continues to ensure the reproduction of sacralized invariants, legitimizes the ‘that’s the way things are’ routine, revives the esprit de corps (firm internal coherence and cohesion), in short, invoking, if not revitalizing, a tradition with a view to maintaining an ecclesial body that is at the same time social – beyond diversity and differences. These features and goals, in no way exclusive, can to a certain extent be found in other institutions, notably socio-religious ones. They relate to the question of mediations in the constitution and functioning of socio-religious or political groupings. Hence the national Church’s configurative theorization may well represent a possible source of vis-a-vis as comparative reference in the socio-historical understanding of institutions embodying a kind of religious allegiance. But such a comparison calls for a social sciences approach coupled with mastery of a culture and appropriate knowledge.