The structural and day-to-day regimes of precarity triggered and enhanced by the multipronged crises in Lebanon since 2019 have renewed the academic and public focus on sect-based infrastructures as substitutes for dysfunctional public sectors. My presentation engages critically with this focus on sect as social formation and lived experience, particularly in relation to social welfare. Based on a two-year ethnographic research at an Orthodox socio-medical center in Beirut, I investigate Christian practices of giving and forms of sociality shaped at the intersection of local theological models, sectarian practices, and community service. Along sect-based and humanitarian incentives, I argue that the center’s work and identity were defined by a call to civic and social activism grounded in Orthodox models where Heaven starts Earth. With genealogies in the twentieth century Antiochian revival (nahda), these models advocate an engagement with the divine through immersion into history and earthly affairs. In this frame, the center was the scene for Christian practice as embodied social responsibility. Orthodox tropes of service and fellowship were activated as part of a divine management (tadbir ilahi) that addressed tangible material needs during periods of moral and economic uncertainty. Nevertheless, the human-divine relationality shaped by these tropes intersected with sect-based sensibilities and class hierarchies, prompting a consideration of Orthodox activist models and sectarian allegiances beyond traditional divisions of sacred-secular and national-sectarian. Through its ethnographic and theological focus on Arab Orthodox practitioners, this presentation adds a critical dimension to the anthropology of Christianity, where the epistemological heritage of Protestantism can operate as normative. It opens a discussion on localized expressions of Christianity, as they are influenced by both global histories of colonialism and regional histories of inter-confessional relations. It also highlights the social life of theological concepts, as they were activated through the religious and social experiences of my interlocutors, shaped by religious institutions as regulatory structures, and reactive to the social realities of a country in crisis. Moreover, in my focus on religion at the intersection of aspirational theological models and precarious lives, I highlight the intersections of Orthodoxy as sect and as community of practice in Lebanon. This allows me to explore welfare practices along and beyond sectarian models of differentiation and postcolonial secular ideals of national unity.

Between 2003 and 2010, some residents of Jeita (Lebanon) embarked on a mystical quest launched by one of their neighbors, a woman named Marsillah, who claims to receive weekly letters from Virgin Mary. Throughout the years, the residents prayed together, interpreted the teachings of the Virgin, built a shrine, published books, and invented a symbolic language meant to transcend the social and political divisions which in their view plague the country. Meanwhile, clergy leaders of the Maronite and Greek Catholic sects grew worried about the “heretical” practices and representations of Christianity entertained by this mystic collective. In 2010, the national police dismantled the collective, banned its activities, and sealed off the shrine. Its female leader was jailed. In 2012, the Lebanese State Council overruled the claim that the police has violated the right to religious freedom, and concluded that the mystics of Jeita had violated the country’s “religious public order.” This paper uses ethnographic methods to revisit this forgotten episode of Lebanon’s recent history. Drawing on fieldwork among members of the now-defunct Jeita-based mystic collective, but also on interviews with clergy members, judges, and lawyers involved in the Lebanese State Council’s decision, I discuss how a set of practices considered heretical by Christian authorities became a concern for the Lebanese state; how mystic interpretations and practices of Christianity became an issue of secular governance; how religious heresy was reconfigured as a threat to public order. Beyond the case of Jeita and Lebanese State Council’s decision, the paper also asks: how does the modern concept of “threat to public order” operate as a secularized version of the concept of “heresy” born in the 16th century? And to what extent can ethnography help us approach what Carl Schmitt and scholars working in the tradition of political theology call the secularization of religious concepts?

This paper investigates the relationship between religious identity and attitudes towards secularism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), with a specific focus on Lebanon. It challenges the prevalent assumption that high levels of religiosity in Muslim-majority countries correspond with a lack of support for secular governance. This assumption often leads to a reductionist view, suggesting that Islamic theology and historical precedents predispose Muslim societies towards merging state and religion, which could favor authoritarian regimes. However, this perspective tends to overlook the diversity within Muslim-majority societies and the suppression of political liberties by authoritarian regimes, thereby failing to accurately assess Muslim support for the separation of state and religion. Addressing these gaps, our study conducts an empirical examination of whether Christians and Muslims in Lebanon display differing attitudes towards the relationship between state and religion. Lebanon, known for its religious diversity and multi-confessional system, serves as an ideal case study to explore the impact of religious identity on political secularization attitudes. Utilizing a novel nationwide representative public opinion survey of about 1200 persons from October 2016, our findings challenge the conventional wisdom that religious doctrine is a barrier to secularization. We reveal a surprising similarity in attitudes towards state-religion relationships between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon, across all religious affiliations, including Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druzes, Maronites, Catholics, and Orthodox denominations. Support for a secular state and criticism toward sectarian political system is high across all Muslim and Christian denomination. This consistency suggests that religious identity is a less significant predictor of one's stance on secularization than previously thought. This study contributes to the literature on state-religion relations in the MENA region by questioning the dominant narrative that theological factors lead Muslims to oppose secular politics, distinguishing them from Christians. It underscores the importance of considering socio-economic and political influences over religious theology in determining attitudes towards secular governance, particularly in a uniquely pluralistic context like Lebanon.

In October 2019, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from all walks of life spontaneously took to the streets to topple the confessional political system and those sectarian elites responsible for the deteriorating socioeconomic situation in Lebanon. Dubbed Thawrat Tishreen (the October Revolution), the leaderless protest movement gave hope to those seeking change as it transcended sectarian identities and socioeconomic statuses, confirming citizens’ willingness to coalesce around anti-sectarian national interests. Recognizing that taking to the streets alone cannot bring about political change, some activists formed political parties to challenge the system from within while others utilized art as a form of resistance. Based on interviews with members of emerging groups and artists, this paper bridges the gap between the method of constructive resistance – a form of resistance that undermines existing power structures through building desired alternatives (Lilja 2021; Vinthagen 2015) – and the concept of artivism – a portmanteau of art and activism, in which artworks and creative expression serve to raise awareness and foster social change (al-Rammal 2022). It investigates the success of emerging groups that relied on secular political agendas against established sectarian parties. In addition to unexpectedly garnering 13 out of 128 seats in the 2022 parliamentary elections and forming the Forces of Change bloc, independent and secular nominees achieved other small but significant victories against the regime in syndicate and university student council elections, usually dominated by traditional parties. The paper also examines how activists used art – such as graffiti, cartoons, and music – to express political dissent and reclaim public spaces. It concludes that the triumph of anti-establishment individuals in different spheres underscores prospects of political change and bottom-up desectarianization, while art can deconstruct sectarian leaders’ influence and defy the regime in Lebanon beyond protest movements. As the protests have demonstrated their ineffectiveness in forcing politicians to reform the political system, other means and strategies need to be examined for future activism in Lebanon.

Based on interviews collected via a life history approach with Lebanese ex-combatants and ordinary civilians who experienced the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990, this article explains the conditions of possibility for violence as part of a social process that unfolds during the periods of pre-war, war, and post-war. This article shows how violence as a social process varies between groups of the same and different religious sects. While, at the inception of the war, the organization of the political, and armed fields was set up along the lines and formations of two major alliances the National Front, and the Lebanese National Movement, in this paper, I show how these organizational origins conditioned popular decision making to pick up arms or not along sectarian lines. I also show how the unfolding of war events fragmented these alliances even when the sect-based divisions were preserved. I start by tracing the historical organization of the warring groups pre, during, and post-war to explain how these organizations affect and are affected by the popular understanding of historical developments beyond the deterministic approach that the literature on sectarianism and on the Lebanese war tends to impose on ordinary Lebanese which reduces peoples’ group affiliation to their sect-based affiliation. The war literature on Lebanon mainly blames the geopolitics of the region, specifically the Arab-Israeli war, and sectarianism for the eruption of the armed conflict and the sustenance of this conflict for fifteen years. This article builds on that literature and departs from it in three ways. First, while the literature focuses on political elites’ decision-making processes in relation to the geopolitical situation at different moments during the war, this article shows how ordinary Lebanese made meaning of the geopolitics of the region and to what extent that played a role in their decision to fight or not. Second, rather than taking the violence of sect-based differences as a given, this article shows how, why, and when these identities turn violent during pre-war, war, and post-war periods. Lastly, this article challenges the instrumentalist assumption that ordinary people are manipulated by political elites into conflict, armed struggle, and cohabitation to serve elites’ agendas and shows that the process of decision-making at the popular level is a complex social process that is highly dynamic and ever-changing, at different moments before, during, and in post-war periods and therefore is not only controlled by political elites.