Religion as an Ethnic Marker:
Orthodoxist Attitudes to Race and Religion
Roland Clark,
Masters Candidate, University of Pittsburgh
This paper examines the typologies created by right-wing intellectuals in interwar Romania to define “Romanians”. In an age of eugenics, scientific racism and biological determinism, many racist thinkers turned to religion and romantic nationalism to determine what it meant to be Romanian. Focusing on the interwar works of Orthodoxist writers, in particular the theologians Nichifor Crainic and Dumitru Stăniloae, this paper asks why they considered religion more salient a marker than biology, how they articulated their understandings of ethnic identity, and what difference their identification of Romanians as a religious group made to their work.
Frequent contributors to the literary journal Gândirea, of which Crainic was an editor, both men worked within a clearly delineated intellectual tradition known as ‘Gândirism’. The identification of Romanian with Orthodoxy was the result of a long process of collective, collaborative thought. Debates about the nature of the state, the place of folklore in Romanian culture, church/state relations, definitions of Orthodoxy, the relative importance of reason and ‘mysticism’ in epistemology, and a social ontology all helped to build a coherent – albeit self-contradictory – definition of Romanian-ness.
