Turning religious practices into political guilt

Abstract

After being the target of the repressive policies of King Carol II and Antonescu’s dictatorships in the period from 1938 to 1944, the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Romania became one of those religious groups put under attentive surveillance and violent treatment during the communism regime. The repressive policies of the Romanian communist authorities towards the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the period from 1948 to 1975 were caused by the way in which their everyday religious practices and their close relationship with the headquarters in the United States were perceived by the Securitate, the political police in communist Romania. In order to legitimize their repressive actions, the Securitate issued a discourse in which the Jehovah’s Witnesses religious practices were turned into political guilt by giving them political meanings. Based on the theoretical contributions of Cristina Vatulescu (Vatulescu 2010), the paper analyzes the narratives of the Securitate files on Jehovah’s Witnesses by focusing on the criminal files processed by the military courts in communist Romania. It argues that the Securitate produced narratives by which the everyday religious practices of Jehovah’s Witnesses were mainly perceived as plotting against the social order and were repressed through the convictions issued by the military courts. The paper also raises several methodological questions concerning how to critically approach the Securitate narratives and the key concepts through which the political police perceived the minority religious groups in communist Romania.