AT LEAST in recent decades, the turbulent social world of Greece somehow managed to contain and hold in tension some extraordinary contradictions. Not least among these was the chasm between a conservative, established church, which is expected to beautify personal and national rites of passage, and a society whose morals and attitudes are ever more liberal and free-wheeling.

But in the last few days, that strange co-existence seems to have broken down. Alexis Tsipras, the leftist prime minister, used all his considerable rhetorical powers to push through parliament a bill that makes it much easier for a person to change their legal gender. (In a memorable turn of phrase, he insisted that “absolutely no tradition, no perception of family, calls for people to be sidelined or tossed aside into a social and institutional abyss.”) Broadly, people will be able to register their legal existence under a different gender without having to undergo any physical or psychological examination. Hitherto such reassignments were not usually recognised unless the person had undergone surgery to change their physical sex.

Campaigners for transgender rights hailed the change, approved by a comfortable majority of legislators, as a long-overdue concession to fundamental human rights. They were still unhappy, though, with certain details of the new law, including the lack of provision for intersex individuals.

But the ruling Holy Synod of the Orthodox church denounced the measure as a “monstrous” attack on family life and traditional values. Other opponents ranged from the historically pro-Soviet Communist Party of Greece to the ultra-rightists of the Golden Dawn party. New Democracy, the country’s main centre-right opposition, voted against the bill on the more nuanced ground that the minimum age at which a person is allowed to change their legal gender—15—was too low.

To many observers, it seemed as though Mr Tsipras’s Syriza movement was looking for ways to balance its failure to cast off creditor-imposed austerity and burnish its leftist credentials with a more liberal approach to social and personal questions. Culture wars may work where economic radicalism, which propelled Mr Tsipras to power, has all too clearly failed.

If that is the political purpose, then Syriza strategists may even welcome the fact they have prodded the church into showing its traditionalist, authoritarian side. Some bishops used thunderous, almost medieval language to denounce the law, others pulled their punches just a little.

“Today they tell us that God did not create man and woman, driving the idea from the minds of our children. Every man can easily become a woman, and every woman a man,” declared one prelate, Metropolitan Nicholas of Phthiotis. “Do you know why they are doing this? They want to ensure, at any cost, that homosexuals will be able to adopt children.”

Another Metropolitan Nicholas, this one a Harvard-educated former space scientist who oversees the Attica region, was more measured. He called the legislation sloppy and motivated by political expediency, but he said the church should embrace people who were unhappy with their legal gender with love and acknowledged that it might have made mistakes in this area.

In a country where secular sceptics and sharp-tongued clerics often have a kind of amicable, bantering relationship, things have suddenly become tetchy. A centre-leftist politician, Yiannis Rangkoussis, made waves recently by saying that he knew of some senior clerics who were secretly gay. The church immediately retorted with a legal challenge, demanding that he identify the clerics or else withdraw his assertion.

Nikos Kosmidis, a disillusioned former Syriza activist who is also an active but critical member of the church, predicted that the religious hierarchs would lose out if drawn into a prolonged battle for national hearts and minds with the secular left. Greek society is tolerant of personal idiosyncrasy but intolerant of perceived hypocrisy, even though both words have equally Hellenic roots.