The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization

Abstract

The aim of this book is both commendable and ambitious, in that it attempts “to take what historians and area specialists currently know about the Soviet Union and apply it to theoretical debates in the social scientific study of religion” (p. 15). In particular, it suggests that what is described as the “Secularization Experiment” tested the extent to which religious vitality or decline are a product of “ignorance, ritual activity, social institutions, social rewards, salvation incentives, and church-state relationships” (p. 24). In exploring these questions, Froese notes the Soviet assumption that if supply was cut off—in a particularly brutal fashion at times—then religious demand would disappear, as repression got rid of religious “free-riders” and made the costs of belief extremely high. Yet despite this he notes that the one thing the state could not do was remove eternal incentives or promises and that, for a section of the population, these promises ensured the continued survival of religious belief. It is impossible to do justice to all the data and discussion in a short review, but one can perhaps raise questions about several points made in this book. At the most basic level, one has to question some of the figures for religious adherence and belonging used for the Soviet period as the Barrett studies used here for 1970 are at best suggestive, and there is really little reliable data that enables us to understand the evolution of religious belief and identification throughout the Soviet period. Of course, when religion was so brutally persecuted at times it is hard to see how there could be such figures, but without them it is hard to draw firm conclusions about religiosity without extrapolating backwards from post-communist data. There has also been some suggestions that Alexander Yakovlev's accounts of the repression of bishops which are used here are not always reliable—in their reporting of the manner of death not the fact of the murders—and there is an inconsistency between the description of Patriarch Tikhon as being executed some ten years after 1922 and the footnote which more accurately refers to his death in 1925. One also wonders about the capitalization of the Secularization Experiment (and the rather sensationalist ‘plot to kill God’ title) which implies a degree of coherence in policy that was not always evident in practice, beyond a generalized desire to do away with religious belief. Similar problems may apply to discussions of religious revival in the post-Soviet states where the figures indicate a numerical revitalization consequent upon the lifting of repression but do little to indicate a “Great Awakening” style of religious rebirth.