As a rule, quality sledgehammer is hidden behind spiritual rapture

The title of this conversation is taken from the book by Viktor Ivančić, Hrvoj Polan and Nemanja Stjepanović Beyond the seven camps: From the crime of culture to the culture of crime (p. 156), and theologian Branko Sekulić, author of the book Penetration into the heart of sacralized crime (XX century, Belgrade, 2024) - which is the occasion for this conversation - continues to dig into that, at least at first glance, surprising combination of the words "culture of crime" and that in a religious key. We believe, namely, that culture and crime are opposite concepts, as, say, life and death, good and evil, and culture would be, according to our positive prejudice, on the side of life, as far as possible from crime and death. Sekulić, however, provides a very unpleasant insight that culture, expressed in its religious form, is not only innocent when it comes to crime, but that it actively, violently and effectively, and sometimes joyfully and ecstatically, participates in it. As a convincing example of such "work of a religiously impregnated culture", Sekulić offers the Yugoslav wars. However, he is equally interested in places of resistance to that (murderous) culture understood as such.

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The work and scientific biography of Branko Sekulić (1983) is very rich, and in addition to the books published in English, we highlight The creeper of Christian vulgarism: The phenomenon of ethno-religiousness in the territory of the former Yugoslavia (Ex libris, Rijeka, 2023), which forms a kind of whole with his last book Penetration into the heart of sacralized crime. Sekulić is an assistant professor and lecturer at the "Matija V. Ilirik" University Center for Protestant Theology in Zagreb, founder and president of the Institute for Theology and Politics (since 2023), director and lecturer at the Academy of Theology and Politics (since 2023), and theological editor of the Alternative and Left Festival in his native Šibenik (since 2014).

"WEATHER" What is sacralized crime??

BRANKO SEKULIC: Not only the belief that good is done by killing, but that good is done precisely because of killing. This is the pathology of the executioner who, by demonizing others, believes that he is participating in the sacred ritual of cleansing his own living space from evil spirits. It is a peculiar act of liturgical characteristics, the ultimate scope of which, to use Ivančić, is contempt for other people's victims and glorification of one's own criminals. It is the reality that we live intensely. Schools, streets, sports and cultural centers, bridges, and even icons bear the names and images of war criminals, while their victims are not only silenced or denied, but presented to the public as evidence of the success of the "holy war" that was carried out. Let's just remember the celebrations after the Vukovar massacre in '91. or ushita after the exodus from Knin in '95. It is a direct consequence of the blessing of ethno-nationalist agendas by certain church structures, according to whose parameters the policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide is understood as a divine act of world creation, one's own world, one thoroughly filtered from the presence of others.

If we follow Ivančić's and your analyses (we must not bypass Ivan Čolović either), culture appears as the fuel of all imaginable (and unimaginable) iniquity. Use Čolović's coin "blood”…

Moreover, Čolović's term krvtura is found in the very foundation of Ivančić's thesis on the culture of crime, and in the very foundations of what here, to reach Konstantinović, functions as the palanquin theology that I am considering. Namely, Čolović was the first in this region, at least as far as I know, to break the famous myth that culture and crime are mutually exclusive, clearly showing that the only culture that has thoroughly taken root in us is that of eliminating the other. This is evidenced by various academies of sciences, writers' societies, associations of writers, associations of cultural workers, state radio and television, etc. which are at the transition from the eighties to the nineties, as Mark Thompson beautifully titled his book Forging war suggests, war persistently forges. When the critical moment was reached, the ideologues, Čolović will say, were discarded, and the ideology was taken over from the representatives of the striking ethno-nationalist policies. With that, the slaughter could begin, revealing to us recently, just as Ivančić notes, that in those new national projects liquidation is the only creation. When you add the myrrh of incense to it all, then the liquidation rises from the mundane to the sacred level and the story begins about the sanctity of one's own culture, which takes on the contours of divinity, God as such. With the fact that God is here, to refer to Konstantinović again, understood as just one palanquin norm, as God-kind, a god of anger and rage who judges everyone the way he behaves towards his kind. Our cultures are anointed precisely on the altar of such deities.

What prompted you to open a theological perspective in a thoroughly treated topic? What does a theological perspective offer in relation to, let's say, philosophical, sociological or anthropological angle from which ethnonationalism is studied?

You said it well, the topic is thoroughly covered, however, a huge part of that material is, as Max Berholtz rightly noted in his book Violence as a generative force, of a descriptive nature, and in many respects the explanation of the issues we are discussing, and in which, after all, we live, is lacking. The lack in question is even more noticeable when the mentioned issue is approached from the position of religion, and the religious aspect is, with due respect to all others, still crucial, because it has been shown that every attempt at discord between the ethnic groups in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, based on cultural, customary, physiognomic, linguistic and other differences, was fruitless until the religious dimension was included in the whole story. Then there was a clear division between Catholic Croats, Serbian Orthodox and Bosniak Muslims as something fundamentally incompatible, that is, opposed. Therefore, without a normalized religious segment, we simply will not have a normalized society in these areas, and without the deconstruction of the sacral addition to ethno-nationalism, there is no possibility of a correct understanding of the perniciousness of the policies that led us to perceive ethnically clean areas as the promised land.

What does it mean "normalized religious segment"?

Not to waste too much words, in the briefest terms, in the post-Yugoslav case, this primarily presupposes deterring certain religious structures and their supporters from "spiritual support" for war criminals, war profiteers and economic criminals. Note that we are talking about religion here, not faith, and these are, at least from a Christian perspective, two different and often contradictory things. Faith is the legacy of the practice of Jesus of Nazareth, and religion is the belief system that was built around that legacy in a certain sociopolitical context. Therefore, the religious institution, that is in this case the church, by itself does not have the weight that the practice of the Nazarene united in the form of the gospel has, but the church gains that weight only if it follows and fulfills the content of the gospel. Following and fulfilling the content of the gospel means, primarily, caring for the most vulnerable in society and standing up against social injustice. And that up to the level of his own death if he dies, just as the Nazarene himself showed when the political-religious establishment of the time crucified him in the name of preserving its privileges. Therefore, when we consider all of this, it is very clear on whose side the religious institutions in our region have been for the most part until now. If anyone happens to have problems with understanding, let's note - on the side of those who crucified. The normalization of religion is the opposite process.

In the Yugoslav wars (as you show) a strong link between the state and religion was re-established, and the consequences were disastrous. The separation of politics and religion is considered, for several centuries (at least in Europe), important civilizational achievement. How do you see that relationship today??

The biggest misconception lies precisely in the fact that it is maintained that this connection was once broken, and it is, in principle, about the continuity of the connection between the ethno-national and religious element that can be clearly traced from the thirties of the last century onwards. The only difference is that what was once manifested as ethnophiletism, today appears as a phenomenon that I call ethnoreligiousness. Ethnophiletism, to put it simply, is a combination of ethno-national and religious moments in which the ethnic (national) aspect is placed before the religious aspect, while ethno-religiousness implies placing a specific ethno-nationalist concept before the religious aspect. In other words, if ethnophiletism implied that to be an Orthodox it is enough to be a Serb, or to be a Catholic it is enough to be a Croat, for ethno-religionism this is not enough, and it assumes that an Orthodox cherishes the idea of ​​Dražin Chetnism, that is, the Catholic idea of ​​Ustasha. In short, if we consider ethnophiletism a heresy, we must understand ethnoreligiousness as a crime, because unlike ethnophiletism, which pretends to have an unconverted romantic relationship between people and religion, ethnoreligiousness unequivocally generates a blessing for the policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide. However, this, let's call it, vulgarization of the relationship between ethno-national and religious aspects is not only a post-Yugoslav, Balkan specificity, but if we take into account that of the current 110 conflicts that are being fought in the world, a huge percentage of them have an ethno-(national)-religious character, and if we take into account the triumphant return of political religions in the last twenty years, then it becomes quite clear that the idea of ​​secularism is on the apparatus, and there is a dead race in the world who will be the first to turn it off. For now, I prefer Islamic fundamentalism and American "white Christian nationalism".

Important "conceptual figure" your book is Fr. Srećko Badurina, a priest who was fiercely opposed politically-religious establishment. Why is this kind of personalization important to you??

Together with Franjo Starčević, it forms the backbone of the practical application of my theological concept directly opposed to what I call the phenomenon of ethno-religiousness, figuratively speaking, the birthplace of sacralized crime. The concept is composed of ethnocultural empathy, a branch of social psychology, which, in short, advocates the necessity of stepping into the shoes of others in order to be able to adequately understand and judge them, and the twist, presented in the New Testament episode of the meeting between the Canaanite woman and Jesus, when Jesus breaks the centuries-old ethnic hatred that existed between the Canaanites and the Jews, until then understood as mortal enemies. Applied to our context, this is what Badurana did during the 1990s, persistently opposing any generalization of Serbs and Orthodoxy, insisting on distinguishing the manipulators from the manipulated, and claiming that, regardless of the fact that at times he succumbs to low passions due to the Serbian aggression against Croatia, he as a bishop has no right to preach himself instead of Christ. Be careful, don't go over this lightly, "as a bishop he has no right to preach himself instead of Christ", that is, namely, a test that few of those who claim to be believers are able to pass. So, you have a concrete example in the time of the inter-ethnic conflict that testifies that the highest prelate position, that of the bishop, behaved differently from the generally accepted war-mongering agenda, and there is almost no mention of that. Perhaps the problem lies precisely in the fact that, unlike Stepinac and Velimirović, he is not a saint of divisions, but, practically, the only person on whom it is possible to establish an ecumenical dialogue between the Croatian Catholic and Serbian Orthodox communities.

Churches are in the Yugoslav wars, how do you show, were too often on the side of the persecutors, and not persecuted. Where do you get your optimism from? (if it is a question of optimism at all) that even exceptional individuals, like Badura's, they can trigger a powerful flowering mechanism in the other direction?

The great Danilo Kiš wrote on one occasion that he does not want to live in peace with the whole world, but with himself, and that is somewhat tentatively my motto, with the fact that I would only add that he would probably have surrendered to anyone long ago. Accordingly, whether the church mechanism in these areas will become something more than a crusade for the freedom of the spirit, and whether the political structures here will ever be anything other than, in principle, criminal, does not burden me too much, but I am sure that contributing to their defeat, every day in every way, and as it makes sense - with thought and deeds.

How do you understand the calling of a theologian?? Your calling is not exhausted in this kind of criticism, no matter how necessary and precious it is.

No matter how you define a theologian in the Christian sense, he is, above all, a follower of the practice of Jesus of Nazareth, brutally tired under the accusation of a political rebel. His crime rested in the criticism of the political and religious norms of the time and the structures that support them, claiming, for example, that the preservation of human life in certain cases has priority over laws and that it does not matter who speaks but what is said. The purity of his engagement was clear and unequivocal, and freed from any fear or self-censorship. Therefore, for me, theologians are exclusively those who exude such a way of acting, while in all the others who, as the Slovenians would say, shout at theologians but do not act like that, I kind of doubt, carefully looking to see if they might not have any nails in their pockets, ready to assist in some new crucifixion.