Byzantium, Orthodoxy, and Democracy Aristotle Papanikolaou Aristotle Papanikolaou is an assistant professor of theology at Fordham University, New York, NY, 10023. I would like to express my thanks to William Schweiker and Charles T. Mathewes for their com- ments on an earlier version of this article. Responsibility for whatever mistakes, omissions, and defi- ciencies that may appear in the argument is clearly my own. I would be remiss if I did not also thank my students in the “Orthodox Christian Social Ethics” class that I taught at Holy Cross Greek Ortho- dox School of Theology, in Brookline, MA, from 1997 to 2000. Their interest and insights, together with their probing and incisive questions, did much to shape this article’s form and content. Journal of the American Academy of Religion March 2003, Vol. 71, No. 1, pp. 75–98 © 2003 The American Academy of Religion This article addresses the question of the compatibility between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and modern understandings of democracy. Re- cent images in the press suggest at worst hostility toward democracy and at best ambivalence on the part of the Orthodox churches. The source of this hostility and ambivalence lies in part with Orthodoxy’s Byzantine heritage. The influence of this heritage is especially evident in a recent debate between two contemporary Orthodox ethicists, Stanley Harakas and Vigen Guroian, over the proper role of the Orthodox Church in re- lation to the American democratic state. Through an analysis of this debate this article argues that there does not exist a “clash of civiliza- tions” between Orthodoxy and democracy and that Orthodox support of communitarian forms of democracy is warranted on inner theologi- cal grounds. This article also intends to offer a concrete response to an inevitable question regarding the relation of religion and empire: Are re- ligious traditions whose own thinking on political philosophy was shaped within the context of an empire inherently incompatible with modern democratic principles of church–state separation, multiculturalism, and religious pluralism? The church’s ideology is common to that of all authoritarian ideologies. . . . It was because of the Orthodox Church that this society was easily con- vinced that it had to become obedient followers of the Communist Party. —Miladin Zivotic, former philosophy professor at Belgrade University (in Hedges 1997)