Confronting Communism with Christian Ethics: The Ethico-Religious Motivation of Eastern European Dissidence

Abstract

The present study aims to argue that concepts like ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘political religions’ are still an important part of the political science vocabulary and should not be abandoned. Although they were adopted by many important scholars, these concepts went under fire starting in the 1960s. They were accused of being too broad, too vague, trying to constrain under an artificial conceptual umbrella a diverse and heterogeneous reality. Most of all, some found irritating the historical comparison between National Socialism and Communism and the use of term ‘totalitarian’ for both of the regimes. Therefore, ‘totalitarianism’ was considered a propaganda tool of the Western world against the Soviet Union and not a scientific concept. Similarly, ‘political religions’ was seen as a weapon invented by conservative thinkers and not a valid instrument of political theory. As a ground for our research, we employed an analysis of the self-understanding of those involved in the resistance against Communist totalitarianism, choosing some important figures of Central and Eastern European dissidence. Dissidents felt they were confronting a political system which aimed to be the sole source of values for the individuals' public and private lives, and the word ‘totalitarian’ was thoroughly adequate to describe it. We also underline that ethics, as a mandatory prerequisite for any political opposition, was a common feature in the intellectual dissent's thought. However, the main contribution of this article is the attempt to reveal the common ground of dissidence ethics and Christian values, although those presented here were lay intellectuals. Describing Communist regimes in religious terms and adopting a strategy of opposition rooted in Christian ethics seemed to be the self-evident solution for the lay dissidence.