Religion, Politics, and the COVID-19 Pandemic in Greek Society: Legal Confrontations and Social Implications

The COVID-19 pandemic affected many aspects of people’s professional, family, and social lives including religious and spiritual practices. In Greece, although the government took strict measures to protect the population from infection, it hesitated to impose similar immediate restrictions on the Orthodox Church of Greece. The church was reluctant to close all the temples and persisted in practising the Sunday Mass and major religious holidays, albeit with a limited number of participants. Owing to this lack of unconditional compliance with the governmental restrictions, the church was perceived as being against the state and medical regulations. The main questions that this chapter will try to answer are the following: what kinds of measure were taken by the government in relation to religious places and practices during the pandemic? How did religious groups and institutions, mostly the Orthodox Church, respond to them? Did society accept these measures? Which was the pandemic’s impact on people’s religious beliefs, practices, and trust towards the Orthodox Church? The purpose of this chapter is twofold: on the one hand, to examine the implications on the societal level in the light of the Orthodox Church’s social and political dominance under the prism of secularisation and, on the other hand, to systematically describe the political and legal developments during the pandemic pertaining to the ‘politics–science–religion’ triangle in order to showcase the pandemic’s impact on religious practices.