ISTANBUL (RNS) — At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Greek President Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced that legislation to allow same-sex couples to marry will be approved by the parliament in Athens by the middle of February.
Citing his government’s support for equality but also “the rights of the children that already exist,” Mitsotakis called marriage for same-sex couples “a fact, it is reality, and ultimately I think that this must be the result of legislation of the Hellenic Parliament.”
But the bill is testing another longstanding reality in Greek public life: the influence of the Greek Orthodox Church, which is vociferously opposing the idea of legalizing marriage for anyone but traditional heterosexual couples.
“The bill abolishes not only rules of bioethics, Christian values and the Greek family tradition, but it overturns the rights of future children and gender roles as elements of the cohesion of society,” said a church statement Tuesday, after a meeting of its bishops called to voice their objections to the law.
The Greek constitution recognizes the Eastern Orthodox Church as the “prevailing religion” of the state, and several government departments, most prominently the Ministry of Education, are inextricably tied with the Orthodox hierarchy.
But the bill itself is evidence that the church’s influence has waned in recent years, according to Thanasis Koukakis, a Greek journalist and scholar of theology who’s been covering the issue for years.
“The larger society has this perception that the church is part of our culture, they have the perception that the church is something that helps Greek society in certain conditions or circumstances,” Koukakis told RNS. “But there’s not the spiritual connection that there used to be in the decades before 1980.”
While more than 90% of Greeks identify as Greek Orthodox, only 55% of Greek adults said that religion is an important part of their lives, according to a 2018 pew study. Church attendance is also in significant decline.
Koukakis recalled that when he was younger, in the early 1990s, the church was able to mobilize massive protests over issues like removing religion from Greek identity cards, but those days are long gone.
“The influence of the Greek church in Greek society and the Greek political system is much more weak, compared to 30 or 40 years ago,” Koukakis said. “Right now, the Greek church cannot really do anything specific in order to stop the Greek administration.”
But the church in its statement on the bill relied less on its authority than on a social argument, saying the subject of marriage “concerns everyone, even if they do not accept Christian ethics.”
“The initiators of the bill and its supporters promote the abolition of fatherhood and motherhood and their transformation into neutral parenthood, the disappearance of gender roles within the family and put before the interests of future children, the sexual choices of homosexual adults,” the statement read.
