Somewhere Between Paris and Tehran: Exploring Greece’s Media-mediated Sociopolitics of Religion and Their Implicit Class Connotations

This chapter examines the Greek Orthodox Church’s paradoxical representations in Greece’s media-mediated public discourse through the lens of class and culture. Employing discourse analysis and ethnographic methods, it explores how the Church is simultaneously portrayed as an ally of the upper-class bourgeois culture aligned with state power and European modernity, and as an impediment to progress enabled by the working-class underdog culture. The chapter locates these opposing portrayals within the framework of Greek Neo-Orientalism, demonstrating their detachment from reality and performative function in identity politics across party lines. Through an analysis of case studies on the 2023 Tatsopoulos affair and Covid-19 coverage, the analysis focuses on the Church’s spectral construction in the media as a battleground for diverging class cultures rather than an agent in its own right. The chapter ultimately argues that media representations enable the state’s cultural hegemony, and emancipating the Church could challenge the reformist/underdog dualism underpinning this paradox.