The Belt of the Virgin and a Paradox: How We Queue but Do Not Go to Church

Last Friday around eleven in the morning, I walked past a queue that began behind the Church of Saint Sava and, by the Church marshals’ estimate, ran to about four thousand people. The line snaked up to Boracka Street, then turned back toward the plateau.

People were waiting. Some with folded newspapers on their heads against the sun, some with small bottles of water from Idea, others with children in pushchairs. The object of the wait was a brief touch of the belt. The Serbian-Orthodox reliquary, on display in the Church since 19 May, had been brought from the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos.

I stopped, looked around, and asked myself a question I had been carrying for years but had never put quite so clearly.

The paradox of high declaration, low practice

The question was this. If four thousand people queue at midday on a working day for one short touch of the belt, and in each of nearly a thousand Belgrade Orthodox churches the daily liturgy averages fewer than twenty worshippers, what are we actually measuring when we speak of the religiosity of Serbs.

The paradox is sociologically documented, not my anecdotal estimate. The 2023 Eurobarometer, particularly the module on religion and values, places Serbia at the very top of European countries by self-declared Orthodox affiliation (around 84 percent of the population).

But the same instrument shows:

• regular Sunday liturgical practice: below 9 percent
• “I practice only on major holidays”: around 38 percent

The declaration is nominal, the practice is sporadic.

Cultural-identitarian religion

I pivot to the sociology of religion, because mistakes are easy here. It would be easy to conclude that Serbian religiosity is fake, or that the Church has lost its space. Neither is sociologically accurate.

What has happened here is called “cultural-identitarian religion.” The concept was developed, among the first, by Grace Davie of the University of Exeter for the British case, and Mirko Blagojevic of the Institute of Social Sciences in Belgrade for the Serbian case.

For the British, Davie coined the term “believing without belonging,” faith without belonging to the community. For Serbia, Blagojevic described the inverse, “belonging without believing,” belonging without faith, which describes the same structural situation from another angle. In both cases, religion has detached from regular practice but has not disappeared. It has been transformed into a resource of identity activated in exceptional moments.

Three types of activation

In Serbia, the activation of the religious resource is most clearly seen through three types of event:

• the bringing of relics and holy objects from abroad (the Belt 2026, the Relics of Saint Nicholas from Bari 2017, fragments of the Cross), which regularly draw queues of tens of thousands over several days
• national holidays with a religious component (St Sava’s Day on 27 January, Vidovdan on 28 June), which gather tens of thousands outside the church but five thousand inside
• personal turning points (a child’s christening, a parent’s funeral, a wedding), which four out of five Serbian families attend even when they do not attend liturgy in between

All three share one feature. Religion is activated as a collective or personal rite of passage, not as a daily discipline.

What that tells us about ourselves

This structure is no surprise to the sociologist, it is above all an indicator. Of what. Of the fact that in Serbian society since 1990, the institutional capacity for everyday practices (worker, union, civic, parish-church) has eroded, while the capacity for large gatherings around symbols has remained.

Serbian society performs exceptional rituals better than everyday ones.

Sociologist Anthony Giddens, in “The Consequences of Modernity” (Polity, 1990), describes the late-modern transformation of religion as a shift from traditional authority to expert systems and to symbolic resources used by the individual on demand. Giddens’s frame for Britain and Scandinavia applies in Serbia too, with one important difference.

In Serbia the symbolic resource of religion has not been replaced by expert systems serving the same functions (psychotherapy, civic community, informal spirituality). It has remained the Church’s monopoly, with periodic activation.

A counter-argument from the Church

A binding counter-argument. There is a reading, often heard in church circles, according to which the paradox of high declaration and low practice is not a weakness of the Serbian Orthodox Church but its specificity, requiring a different metric. By that logic, the queues at the Belt themselves are a form of prayer and a form of faith, no less legitimate than the liturgical practice of Western Christians.

This is an argument with historical grounding (the Byzantine theological emphasis on the great feast over the daily hour), and I do not dismiss it. But sociologically it leaves the open question. If a community’s capacity is measured only through exceptional gatherings, what happens to the community on days when there is no exceptional event.

Because on 363 days a year there are no exceptional festivals. And a community that does not function on 363 days a year is not a community.

Most Serbs belong to the Church as symbol, not as community

One more thing should be said plainly, because otherwise it goes unsaid. In Serbia’s public space, religiosity is often posed against secularism, as though only two options existed, church everywhere or church nowhere.

Empirical sociology shows the real situation is a third one. Most Serbs belong to the Church not as a community, but as a symbol, and use that symbol as support in moments when daily life is too disordered to be borne without it. That is legitimate, but it does not constitute the Church as an institution.

The Church as an institution requires daily practice from its members. In Serbia it gets that from around 9 percent, around 600,000 people. That is a serious faith community, larger than the population of Nis, but considerably smaller than the four thousand in the queue last Friday.

Two months of peace

I return to the Church. As an old woman in the queue in front of me emerged after the touch, she crossed herself briefly and said to her husband:

Now I will have peace for two months.

Her husband nodded, as if he too needed only that.

The Belt of the Virgin gave two months of peace to one family. This is not nothing. But sociologically it is something other than what the statistics of affiliation suggest.

The question that remains, and which need not have an answer, runs roughly like this. When the shared memory that gathers us in a queue of four thousand cannot gather us on a Sunday morning in the same church, are we then a community, or an audience. And which of those two makes a society.