Abstract

This text examines the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church and affiliated nationalist movements in the construction and maintenance of a collective narcissistic worldview within Serbian nationalist discourse. Drawing on concepts from political psychology, sociology of religion, and historical analysis, it argues that religious institutions have systematically mythologized Serbian suffering, externalized guilt, and sacralized violence through selective memory and historical revisionism. The narrative of perpetual victimhood—rooted in an exaggerated interpretation of Ottoman rule—has functioned as a moral license for irredentism, ethnic violence, and denial of documented war crimes. The text contends that this socially engineered pathology is institutional rather than ethnic in nature and remains a significant obstacle to accountability, reconciliation, and historical truth in the Balkans.

For centuries, Serbian society has been systematically conditioned to accept and internalize doctrines disseminated by the Serbian Orthodox Church. In alliance with the Chetnik movement — a historically well-documented network of ultra-nationalist, clericalist and expansionist militants responsible for large-scale atrocities — these institutions have played a decisive role in shaping a collective worldview rooted in grievance, mythologized history, and what modern psychology identifies as collective narcissism.

Definition of Used Terms
Collective narcissism refers to an inflated belief in the moral superiority and historical exceptionalism of one’s in-group, combined with chronic victimhood, hypersensitivity to criticism, and the conviction that violence is justified when framed as self-defence. Unlike ordinary patriotism, it is sustained through denial, historical revisionism, and moral exemption.

Church communities in the Balkans initially functioned as mechanisms of social cohesion during periods of foreign domination — a phenomenon not unique to the region. In Poland, for example, the Catholic Church served as a locus of national survival during Nazi and Soviet occupation. However, in the Serbian case, this defensive function gradually transformed into a permanent ideological structure. What began as resistance to domination evolved into a normalized, almost sacralized worldview of entitlement, irredentism, and collective victimhood.

Analysis
The persistent invocation of “occupation” became not a historical reference, but a mass-delusional rationalization: a self-perpetuating narrative in which Serbian expansionism was reframed as liberation, and aggression as moral duty.

Contrary to nationalist mythology, Ottoman governance rarely targeted Orthodox Serbs with systematic religious persecution. Ottoman law explicitly forbade religious discrimination, allowed Serbian religious institutions to operate, and permitted Serbian education — privileges denied to other Balkan populations, including Albanians. Nevertheless, the Serbian Orthodox clergy relentlessly instrumentalized the language of “liberation” to justify both internal repression and external aggression against neighboring peoples.

Among Chetnik expansionists and clerical elites seeking to Slavicize and forcibly Orthodoxize heterogeneous populations, the myth of the “Oriental Antagonist” — the Turk — was weaponized as a unifying enemy image. Loyalty to the Church became synonymous with loyalty to the nation. Dissent was framed as betrayal. Pacifism was equated with treason. This moral absolutism is encapsulated in the Serbian proverb: “He who does not know how to take vengeance will never be admitted into Heaven.”

Myths in History
In this ideological framework, history ceased to function as a field of inquiry and instead became a sacred narrative. Events were not examined but canonized; myths replaced memory; suffering was exaggerated, while Serbian crimes were systematically erased.

Serbian militarist and irredentist movements transformed the shared Ottoman experience of the Balkans into an exclusively Serbian trauma. The idea of a “liberated Balkans” became synonymous with a Greater Serbia. Albanians, despite centuries of largely peaceful coexistence with Serbs, were increasingly portrayed as more dangerous than Turks. Conflicts were not organic but deliberately incited by demagogical clergy and hegemonic politicians seeking territorial expansion.

Between the 18th and 19th centuries, the myth of “500 years of Serbian suffering” — as if suffering were unique to Serbs — was aggressively cultivated. This narrative directly facilitated violent campaigns across the Balkans, resulting in mass atrocities against Albanians, Bosniaks, Croats, Macedonians, Catholics, Muslims, and even other Orthodox Slavs.

Among Albanian folklore exists a warning directed at the Serbian public: “Do not believe your black-bearded priests.” For centuries, the Serbian clergy lived in material privilege while demanding unquestioned loyalty, obedience, and sacrifice from their congregations.

Orthodox Serbian children are socialized from an early age into a ritualized victim narrative. In churches, they are taught exclusively of alleged atrocities committed against Serbs — by Turks, Albanians, Bosniaks, Croats, Germans, and others — while Serbian atrocities are systematically omitted. This asymmetry is not accidental.

Collective Narcissism
As in every narcissistic relationship or society, the narcissist can never be the perpetrator. All wrongdoing is externalized; guilt is projected; responsibility is denied.

Victimhood

Within this ideological system, victimhood functions not merely as collective memory but as political capital. The amplification of suffering becomes a strategic resource: the greater the perceived trauma, the greater the moral immunity. Any demand for accountability is reframed as renewed persecution, allowing guilt to be eternally deferred.

This mechanism ensures that power remains insulated from critique, while violence is continuously re-legitimized through the language of historical grievance.

This indoctrination extends beyond religious institutions into academia. So-called Serbian scholars routinely publish ideologically driven works that promote a delusional synthesis of superiority and victimhood. Figures such as Dušan T. Bataković exemplify this tradition by meticulously documenting Serbian suffering while omitting Serbian massacres — including the killing of approximately 150,000 Albanians in 1912–1913, over 200,000 Albanians by 1918, and 35,000 Albanians in 1878.

Moral Disengagement

Within such a framework, violence is not merely justified but morally inverted. Killing becomes protection, expulsion becomes liberation, and ethnic cleansing is reframed as historical correction. Perpetrators do not perceive themselves as aggressors, but as reluctant guardians of a threatened moral order.

In a narcissistic national narrative, accountability is experienced as an attack, and restraint as betrayal.

Despite over 140,000 Albanian, Bosniak, and Croatian civilians killed in the Balkan wars in 1991-1999, Serbian irredentist discourse remains obsessively focused on Serbian victims.

Between 1991 and 1999, Serbian state forces and paramilitary units killed approximately 140,000 civilians in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. Yet Serbian politicians, journalists, and self-described “activists” persistently minimize or deny some of the most severe war crimes in Europe since Auschwitz. Instead, they amplify Serbian suffering — despite the documented reality of 50,000 murdered Bosniaks, 50,000 raped Bosnian women, tens of thousands of murdered Croats, and 12,000–15,000 murdered Albanians, including thousands of children.

Denial remains deeply entrenched. In the early 2000s, the Serbian Orthodox Church publicly declared that Albanian Muslims were treated with respect during the Serbian invasion of Kosovo in 1912 — a statement that brazenly ignored the mass killings of approximately 50,000 Albanians in Kosovo and over 120,000 Albanians across Albanian-inhabited regions.

This is not an inherent Serbian trait, but a socially engineered pathology — cultivated, maintained, and exploited by institutions that benefit from perpetual grievance, moral exemption, and historical distortion.

The Serbian case is not unique, but it is exemplary. Wherever religion is fused with nationalism, grievance with entitlement, and history with myth, similar structures emerge. What distinguishes the Serbian example is not its existence, but the depth to which denial has been normalized, institutionalized, and morally sanctified.

To this day, the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Chetnik movement remain active participants in an unholy alliance defined by denial, sacralized violence, and collective narcissism — a structure that continues to obstruct reconciliation, truth, and accountability in the Balkans.

Final words

What persists today is not historical trauma but a carefully maintained culture of denial, in which religious authority, nationalist mythology, and institutional power converge to absolve violence and sanctify impunity. The Serbian Orthodox Church and its allied nationalist networks have not merely failed to confront the crimes committed in their name; they have actively worked to erase them, relativize them, and recast perpetrators as martyrs. In doing so, they have transformed memory into propaganda, faith into an instrument of domination, and victimhood into a permanent moral shield. As long as this structure remains intact, reconciliation will remain impossible—not because the past is unresolved, but because it is deliberately falsified.