Orthodoxy as a Way of Living: Religion, Sect, and Crisis in Lebanon

Abstract

Since 2019, Lebanon has grappled with a series of systemic breakdowns that ushered in multidimensional regimes of precarity. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted from 2018 to 2021 in Beirut, this dissertation documents and historicizes how members of a Rum Orthodox community navigate and make moral sense of structural conditions of longue-durée inequalities and existential uncertainty. It proposes the analytical frame of Orthodoxy as a way of living (tariqat ʿaish) to investigate “Rum-ness” as a comprehensive model of existence anchored in the socio-political realities of crisis-ridden Lebanon. Through a focus on Antiochian Orthodoxy as an institutional tradition and a community of practice, my work makes a critical intervention in the scholarship on sectarianism (taʾifiyya) in post-civil war Lebanon. It investigates alternative communal formations (e.g., church, parish, eucharistic community), along with their institutional articulations in Orthodox theology and religious practice, to disrupt a public and academic focus on sect as a homogeneous analytical category and a ubiquitous social formation. Moving beyond dichotomies such as sectarian-ecumenical and sacred-secular, I examine disrupted religious lives within broader social worlds that intersect and go beyond crumbling state structures, sect-based networks, and secular ontologies. Each chapter in this dissertation works in and through crisis across multiple forms, highlighting its translations on the ground and in the lives of Rum practitioners, all within the urban environment of Beirut. These encompass welfare practices in a socio-medical center (mustawsaf) shaped by divine management and economic duress; foundational liturgical rituals challenged by conundrums of digital and epidemiological mediations; and real estate practices that ground Muslim-Christian interactions. By highlighting the local histories and experiences of this Arab Christian community, my dissertation prompts a critical examination of the political dynamics underlining studies of global Christianities. I engage with Orthodox anthropology to underscore relational networks and models of collective becoming that challenge scholarly understandings of personhood and transcendence rooted in dominant Western assumptions. Also, working at the junction of the normative aspirations of Orthodox tradition and the contingencies of precarious lives, I highlight the dynamic nature within institutional spaces of what counts as “right” belief and practice. I look at the ethnographic activation of theological tropes to highlight local Orthodox worldviews that intersect with the social reality of sectarianism in Lebanon.