Christianity Under Communism

A war on God

For Karl Marx, religion was "the opium of the people," a drug that dulled the pain of oppression and kept the poor from revolting (see Faith, Science and Liberal Theology). Once a just Communist society was built, he believed, religion would simply die out. Vladimir Lenin, leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, was more aggressive. Religion would not die on its own. It had to be actively destroyed. The Soviet Union became the first state in history officially committed to eliminating religion.

The Russian Orthodox Church was a natural target. It had been closely tied to the tsars (see Orthodoxy in Russia), it was wealthy, and it was the strongest institution outside the state. Shelley sees Communism as the most powerful of the 20th century's secular "ideologies" or substitute religions, with its own scriptures, prophets, saints and promised paradise [check].

Soviet persecution

Within weeks of the revolution, the Bolsheviks nationalized church land. A 1918 decree separated church from state and school, stripped the church of legal status and property, and banned religious teaching of children. In 1917 the Russian Church had restored its patriarchate after two centuries. The new Patriarch, Tikhon of Moscow, condemned the Bolsheviks' violence. He was arrested and died in 1925.

Persecution came in waves:

• 1918–1922: civil war violence. Thousands of priests, monks and nuns were killed. Church valuables were seized during the 1921–22 famine, supposedly for famine relief.
• 1920s: The state encouraged a schismatic "Living Church" to divide Orthodoxy. The League of the Militant Godless spread atheist propaganda. Under pressure, Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) issued a declaration of loyalty to the Soviet state in 1927, hoping to save the church's existence. Many believers saw it as a betrayal, and some formed underground "catacomb" churches.
• 1930s: Under Joseph Stalin, especially during the Great Terror of 1937–38, the church was nearly annihilated. Tens of thousands of clergy and believers were shot or sent to the Gulag labor camps. By 1939 only a few hundred churches remained open out of over 50,000 before the revolution, and only a handful of bishops were free.

Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews and Buddhists suffered too. Baptists and Pentecostals, though small, endured intense persecution and maintained unregistered congregations.

Stalin's turnabout and Khrushchev's crackdown

When Germany invaded in 1941, the Orthodox Church immediately called on believers to defend the motherland. Needing national unity, Stalin changed course in 1943. He allowed the church to elect a patriarch, reopen some churches and seminaries, and function under close state control through the KGB. Thousands of churches reopened. But in 1958–1964 Nikita Khrushchev, who promised to show "the last priest" on television, launched a new campaign that closed about half of the open churches. For the rest of the Soviet period, the church survived as a tolerated but tightly controlled institution. Some of its leaders were compromised by KGB cooperation. Faith was kept alive above all by grandmothers (babushkas), who baptized children secretly and taught them prayers, and by brave priests like Alexander Men, who was murdered with an axe in 1990.

Christianity and Communism, 1917 to today

Eastern Europe

After 1945, Soviet-backed Communist governments took power across Eastern Europe. Each regime tried to control or crush the churches through show trials, confiscation of property, closure of religious schools and orders, and infiltration by secret police.

• In Hungary, Cardinal József József Mindszenty was arrested, drugged and tortured, and put on trial in 1949. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Freed briefly in the 1956 revolution, he spent fifteen years in refuge in the US embassy.
• In Romania, the Lutheran pastor Richard Richard Wurmbrand spent fourteen years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement and under torture. His book Tortured for Christ (1967) alerted Western Christians. The Romanian Greek Catholic Church was forcibly merged into the Orthodox Church in 1948.
• In East Germany, Protestant churches negotiated an uneasy coexistence as "the church in socialism," and they provided some space for dissent.
• Albania in 1967 declared itself the world's first officially atheist state and banned all religion completely.

Poland and the Polish pope

Poland was different. Its Catholic Church was deeply bound up with national identity and too strong to destroy. Under Cardinal Stefan Stefan Wyszyński, imprisoned 1953–56, the church kept its independence. In October 1978 the cardinals elected the archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, as John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. In June 1979 he visited Poland. Millions gathered. In Warsaw's Victory Square, he prayed: "Let your Spirit descend, and renew the face of the earth, the face of this land." Many historians see the visit as a turning point. It gave Poles a sense of their own strength.

A year later the Solidarity trade union, led by the devout Catholic electrician Lech Wałęsa, emerged from strikes at the Gdańsk shipyard. Its members held Masses at the factory gates. Martial law in 1981 suppressed it. In 1984 the secret police murdered the pro-Solidarity priest Jerzy Jerzy Popiełuszko, and hundreds of thousands attended his funeral. Solidarity survived underground.

1989: the candles and the wall

In 1989 Communist rule collapsed across Eastern Europe, largely peacefully. Churches played major roles:

• In East Germany, weekly Monday "prayers for peace" at St Nicholas Church in Leipzig grew into mass candlelit demonstrations. On 9 October 1989, 70,000 people marched peacefully. The regime did not shoot. A month later the Berlin Wall fell. An East German official later said they had been prepared for everything except candles and prayers.
• In Romania, the revolution began in Timișoara when crowds gathered to protect the Hungarian Reformed pastor László László Tőkés from eviction.
• In Czechoslovakia, the aged Cardinal František Tomášek supported the "Velvet Revolution."

In 1991 the Soviet Union itself dissolved. Churches reopened by the thousands. The Russian Orthodox Church experienced a dramatic revival. Since then it has become closely tied to the Russian state again under Vladimir Putin, with leaders supporting the war against Ukraine. Many Orthodox Christians elsewhere have sharply criticized this.

China

When Mao Zedong's Communists won China's civil war in 1949, there were perhaps 4 million Catholics and under 1 million Protestants. Foreign missionaries were expelled by 1952. The government created state-controlled churches: for Protestants the "Three-Self Patriotic Movement" (self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating, ironically borrowing a missionary slogan), and for Catholics the "Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association," independent of the pope. Christians who refused to join were persecuted. The independent preachers Watchman Nee and Wang Mingdao spent decades in prison. Nee died there in 1972.

During Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), all public religion was banned, churches were closed or destroyed, and Bibles were burned. Outsiders assumed Chinese Christianity was dead.

When China reopened after 1979, the world discovered that Christianity had not only survived but grown dramatically, especially in rural house churches meeting secretly in homes. Without foreign missionaries, without seminaries, often without Bibles, Chinese believers, many of them women, had spread the faith. Estimates of Chinese Christians today vary widely, from about 40 million to over 100 million. They are often under pressure, especially in unregistered churches, with crosses removed and churches demolished in some provinces under Xi Jinping. The Vatican's 2018 provisional agreement with Beijing on appointing bishops remains controversial.