Bulgaria: Case-Study in Secularism

If individuals in post-colonial societies have the right to resist a definition of religion that relegates faith to the private sphere, might not communities also have a right to defend conceptions of faith that root religious identity in the public sphere? This is a particularly salient question if the popular imagining of the category of religion is not about private faith, but rather about clearly defining the (often contested) boundaries of historically constituted ethno-national communities. If post-colonial scholars are pushing back at liberal secularist discourses for the sake of protecting the public spiritual commitments of non-Christian minorities in Europe or the non-Christian majorities in the post-colonial world, why not take this same critique and examine an Eastern Orthodox Christian society?

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