Godless Communism Research Articles

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties by Peter Cajka

Reviewed by: Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties by Peter Cajka Matthew Levering Peter Cajka, Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 232 pages. Peter Cajka’s book is a complex work that can be engaged at many levels. Historically it is superb. Cajka offers lively accounts of now often forgotten but widely influential twentieth-century figures such as James Martin Gillis, C.S.P., Francis Connell, C.Ss.R., and John C. Ford, S.J., along with less influential but still notable figures such as John K. Ryan and George B. O’Toole. Gillis in particular stands out for his combination of profound social and political conservatism with a doctrine of conscience that allowed for radical conclusions, such as his strong support of the claims of the pacifist Canadian Baptist Douglas Clyde Macintosh. Cajka’s presentation of the popular Catholic thinker Daniel A. Lord, S.J., exemplifies the striking combination of conservatism and radical thought: “In the Protestant and secular imagination, Lord qualified as a Catholic reactionary; but like other Catholic thinkers trained in the Thomistic mode, he was a fierce defender of conscience rights”—notably in defending the rights of conscientious objectors to military service, on the grounds that Catholics are bound by divine law, as recognized in conscience, “not to fight in an unjust war” (53–54). For the period of World War II, Cajka pays particular attention to the Catholic Worker movement, which affirmed Christian pacifism. But he also attends to the ways in which Catholics responded (for example) to the military’s requiring quartermasters to hand out contraception and to the military’s building of “officially designated prostitution zones” in which the prostitutes had all passed medical exams for venereal disease (57). He also notes important Catholic responses, led by John Ford, S.J., to such events as the blanket bombing of Hamburg in 1943 that resulted—somewhat inadvertently—in the deaths of more than forty thousand civilians. Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle, archbishop of Washington, D.C., insisted after the war (in the early years of the Cold War) that “Catholics could join an American army fighting against godless communism, but no unjust law would force them to violate conscience to bomb innocents” (61). Cajka devotes a chapter to the Vietnam era that is filled with details that were largely new to me and that demonstrate how “the principle of selective conscientious objection, the just-war framework, and the rights of conscience were overlapping logics in a particularly Catholic approach to resisting [End Page 96] the draft” (68). Here he focuses on the Catholic Peace Fellowship, which emerged from the Protestant Fellowship of Reconciliation in conjunction with the Catholic Worker movement. The Catholic Peace Fellowship was founded by the Catholic Worker leaders James Forest and Tom Cornell in 1964, encouraged by Daniel Berrigan, S.J., and others. In 1965, Forest published a booklet with ecclesiastical approval (from the Apostolic Vicar for the United States Armed Forces) titled Catholics and Conscientious Objection. Cajka also draws valuable connections in this chapter to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which powerfully appealed to God’s law and conscience (including societal conscience) and argued that an unjust law is no law at all. Cajka turns from his chapter on Vietnam-era conscientious objection to a chapter on the rejection of the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae on conscience grounds. He focuses on the clash between Cardinal O’Boyle and a group of priests of the Washington, D.C. archdiocese, beginning with Cardinal O’Boyle’s removal of Joseph O’Donoghue from active ministry due to his questioning of the truth of Humanae Vitae. Shortly after Vatican II, a group of Washington priests had come together, and, in 1966, they named their group the Association of Washington Priests, led by O’Donoghue, John Corrigan, Shane MacCarthy, and others—later supported by the establishment of the Center for Christian Renewal. As Cajka frames the issue, “O’Boyle spoke for the clarity of the law. O’Donoghue, Corrigan, and their fellow priests pulled for conscience, a concept that they thought heralded...

Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump ed. by Andrew S. Moore

Reviewed by: Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump ed. by Andrew S. Moore Finbarr Curtis Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump. Edited by Andrew S. Moore. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. x, 197. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7434-0.) The proclamation of 1976 as the "Year of the Evangelical" in the United States served as the capstone of a conventional narrative in which theologically conservative Protestants disappeared from American politics in the [End Page 425] mid-twentieth century only to reemerge in the 1970s with the uncomfortable pairing of the presidency of Jimmy Carter and the rise of the religious Right. Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump brings together ten insightful essays on a range of themes that consider what happened in the four decades between President Carter and President Donald J. Trump. The book uses the year of the evangelical as an organizing theme, but several contributors challenge the conventional narrative. The first essay, by Randall J. Stephens, discusses how opposition to communism drew evangelicals into politics long before the 1970s. This activism did have some features of disengagement as it was a kind of anti-politics that saw "godless communism" as a pervasive feature of an expanding liberal welfare state that needed to be curtailed to protect Christian liberty (p. 17). In several chapters that explore the intersection of racial and religious identities, suspicions of an expansion of government overlapped with suspicions of the expansion of civil rights. Dan Wells's perceptive essay on Eldridge Cleaver demonstrates the whiteness of evangelicalism, as the former Black Panther was expected to speak in a white idiom that disavowed his radical past. Opposition to civil rights is central to Randall Balmer's chapter on the changing makeup of anti-abortion activism over the course of the 1970s. In Balmer's analysis, abortion, a largely Catholic issue at the time of Roe v. Wade (1973), became a rallying point for conservative Protestants who were upset at desegregated schools but needed a more respectable means to mobilize support for racialized family values. There is some divergence among the essays about how early evangelical opposition to abortion took shape. Balmer focuses on the coalition-building project of political activists. Essays by Allison Vander Broek and Daniel K. Williams suggest that while Catholics were the most visible and organized in their opposition to abortion, there was a latent theological appeal that fit with conservative Protestant attitudes toward sexuality. The book does not promise complete coverage of the years from Carter to Trump, but one notable feature is that Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Trump capture the most attention. Jeff Frederick sees the rise of Trumpism as the loss of what he calls Carter's "evangelical political authenticity" (p. 140). J. Brooks Flippen's essay on Reagan considers the irony of how a divorced actor with sporadic church attendance became the exemplar of the Christian Right. R. Ward Holder shares Frederick's view that enthusiasm for Trump represents a betrayal of evangelical principles. These chapters tell a declension story that moves from a sincere Carter, to a pragmatic compromise with Reagan, to a full-blown abandonment of moral character with Trump. There is some confusion that extends beyond this book over whether the use of the label evangelical describes a group of people or whether it is a rhetorical project to invent a group of people. In the former, evangelical describes a theological orientation that includes diverse racial, political, and religious groups as well as a set of principles used to applaud the sincerity of Carter and lament the immorality of Trump. In the latter, this rhetorical project has political, national, and racial dimensions that are internal to the claim of working within a conservative Protestant tradition. Hannah Dick most clearly articulates the latter position with her assertion that white evangelicalism is simultaneously [End Page 426] "a cultural framework, a religious affiliation, a class-based category, and a political orientation" (p. 174). One question the book raises is whether someone like Carter represents authentic evangelicalism or whether he is an idiosyncratic figure who represents the theological ideals of evangelical academics...

The Not-So-Puritan Origins of the American Self

The Not-So-Puritan Origins of the American Self Gideon Mailer (bio) Evan Haefeli, Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497–1662. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2021. viii + 383 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Twenty years ago, while I was studying at Cambridge University, my accommodation overlooked a college chapel that had once been a victim of Puritan iconoclasm. The chapel of Peterhouse was consecrated in 1633 by supporters of Archbishop William Laud and his Beauty of Holiness movement. Unsurprisingly, its quirky Renaissance-Gothic synthesis did not appeal to the thousands of Parliamentary troops who were quartered in Cambridge during the English Civil Wars, nor the newly appointed "Commissioner for the destruction of monuments of idolatry and superstition" for the Eastern Association, William Dowsing (1596–1668). Though Dowsing succeeded in removing statues of angels and cherubs from the chapel in 1643, High-Church-leaning Peterhouse fellows managed to hide the Flemish stained-glass panel that depicted Rubens's Le Coup de Lance, which they reinstalled after the restoration of the Stuart royal line in 1660.1 Ten years after gazing at that chapel roof, during my two-day campus interview for a job at the University of Minnesota, I included its iconoclastic story in my response to a question from a search committee member. I had been discussing how the 1707 Act of Union between the English and Scottish parliaments had created a bi-confessional British state, which provided a model of jurisdictional pluralism for dissenting Protestants in North America. But the professor asked me to rewind one century to consider how the 1603 Regal Union between the English and Scottish monarchies might also help us to understand the origins of religious pluralism in colonial North America and the nascent United States. I used the chapel story to illustrate a warning that I offered to students: be careful mining seventeenth-century Anglo-Scottish history for the disestablishmentarian roots of British imperial life and American religious pluralism, or even the notion that multiple religious establishments might cohere within a single political union. As demonstrated by the deployment of authority by William Dowsing, iconoclastic Puritans shared a tendency for [End Page 7] centralized statecraft and bureaucratic control with their Laudian adversaries, even as they sought to devolve some forms of power to local Congregational churches. Those who opposed the nature of the Anglican establishment of religion did not necessarily repudiate public and civic support for religious authority in principle, nor hold tightly to grand theories of religious pluralism. Following my Peterhouse vignette, therefore, I suggested that civic leaders in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Virginia were likely to have demonstrated similar ambiguities in their approach to religious pluralism during the foundational period of their colonies. But I was not able to support my assertion with any historiographical reference. I certainly raised a knowing eyebrow as I played an audio recording of President Ronald Reagan's speeches from the Oval Office, which claimed that the liberty of religious conscience had spearheaded the American Founding during the 1770s and the destruction of "Godless communism" during the 1980s; and that those successes were rooted in the work of pilgrims to America such as the "early freedom man" and Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop.2 Yet I could not yet point to any Americanist who had examined conceptual similarities between the work of mainland English leaders and the constrained approach to religious pluralism among settler elites in Anglican Virginia, Puritan New England, or Catholic Maryland during the first half of the seventeenth century. Instead, I quickly turned to the more familiar historiographical terrain of the 1688 Glorious Revolution, the contingency of Lockean contractual theory, and their influence on the freedoms enjoyed by dissenting Protestants in British North America. Patriots eventually complained that the British Kingin-Parliament had afforded too many religious liberties to French-speaking Catholics in the territory of Quebec, which included Indigenous lands in present-day Minnesota. Notwithstanding the move towards disestablishment in the nascent United States, I finished with a flourish, some Patriots looked back to the Glorious Revolution as they opposed London for expanding religious pluralism in the British imperial realm.3 If I had had recourse to Evan...

‘The Franco Way’: The American Right and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–9

The following article is an intellectual and cultural history of the American supporters of Francisco Franco (hereafter referred to as American Francoites) and the Nationalist Movement during the Spanish Civil War. This article examines political pamphlets, magazines, radio broadcasts, journal articles, and books to reconstruct the American Francoite worldview. Like pro-Franco Catholics across the globe, American Francoites insisted the war was not between democracy and fascism but communism and Christianity; as Americans, they believed that supporting Franco was critical in fulfilling a patriotic and providential duty to protect Western Christendom from godless communism. Investigating the American Francoite worldview contributes to a recent body of scholarship detailing the rise of transnational anticommunism and nationalism as a constellation of culturally contingent reactions to the growth and spread of international communism. American Francoites emerged as one peculiar form of anticommunist American nationalism. In conclusion, this article argues that the political myths perpetuated by the pro-Franco argument – that the war was a battle between godless communism and Western Christendom – survived both the Spanish Civil War and Franco himself, merging easily into the ‘new conservatism’ of the postwar period and continuing to inform the beliefs and attitudes of the present right.

John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Faith by Patrick Lacroix

Reviewed by: John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Faith by Patrick Lacroix Mark Massa S.J. John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Faith. By Patrick Lacroix. [Studies in US Religion, Politics, and Law] (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. 272. Hardback $34.95. ISBN 978-0-7006-3049-3.) Patrick Lacroix has written an important work of revisionist scholarship. Indeed, he argues—for the most part quite convincingly—that scholars of American religion (and of U.S. Catholicism in particular) have largely gotten the "secular sixties" completely wrong. As Lacroix argues the case, most previous scholars studying the contours of twentieth century American religious history have taken it as axiomatic that the famous "religious revival" of the 1950s ended with Dwight Eisenhower, and that the election of JFK in 1960 ushered in both the end of anti-Catholicism as a mainstream American pastime and the beginning of the era of waning religiosity during the 1960s and 1970s. But according to Lacroix, there was no "secular sixties." And Lacroix points to the person Kennedy himself and his presidency for understanding the quite important intersection of religion and politics at the beginning of the 1960s. He argues that scholars studying American [End Page 636] religion have tended to echo (far too uncritically) the Christian right's own assertion that the "secular sixties" were a decade of waning religiosity in which faith-based groups largely eschewed political engagement. In this quite mistaken periodization, the naked public square that Kennedy's presidency ostensibly ushered in itself helped the forces of conservative religion to build up steam to emerge in the 1980s as the "New Religious Right." But from Lacroix's vantage, "the Kennedy years represent an important moment in the arc of U.S. religious history, connecting the religious revival of the 1950s to the conservative religious activism of the last quarter of the twentieth century" (2). As Lacroix shapes the story, both Kennedy himself and his presidency were key factors in a decade when "progressive religion"—far from staging a retreat—played a key role in politics and the public square. Indeed, the author constructs a narrative that seeks to displace most previous histories of U.S. religion that have largely ignored Kennedy's impact on faith-based activism. The creation of the Peace Corps, as well as his growing appreciation for the social vision of Pope John XXIII (documented in papal encyclicals like Pacem in terris) illustrate Kennedy's growing commitment to utilizing inter-denominational faith-based groups in realizing his social vision in civil rights and economic aid initiatives, both in the United States and abroad. And the author is at pains to document how Kennedy's own commitment to the causes of civil rights and the work of young people in the Global South were rooted in his own "progressive" Catholic values and moral sense, values seemingly given official church approbation by the "other John." Lacroix argues that religion was "repurposed" during the Kennedy presidency: religion certainly had been instrumentalized at the beginning of the Cold War in the late 940s in the U.S. battle against "godless communism." But both the tone and location of that marshaled faith was relocated after 1960: the religious faith of the American mainstream was utilized under JFK to promote liberal reform both domestically and abroad, specifically around the issues of racial justice, arms control, and U.S. contributions to developing countries in organizations like the Peace Corps. And the author argues that it was Kennedy himself who functioned as the center of gravity for this new ("progressive") religious activism, all the while espousing a firm commitment to a high wall of separation between church and state, the latter rising more from Kennedy's own deeply-held understanding of constitutional principles and from his "realist" recognition of anti-Catholic impulses on the Protestant right, rather than from his ostensibly secular values. [End Page 637] Lacroix's study is rife with historical ironies, not the least of which was that it was the Catholic candidate in 1960 who played a key role in uncovering and deepening the rift between the "Seven Sister" mainstream Protestant groups affiliated with the National Council of...

Disfellowshipped!

Disfellowshipped! Peter Heinegg Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life. By Amber Scorah, New York, NY: Viking, 2019. 279 pp. $28. The (sometimes sudden) gain or loss of faith, the religious or philosophical aha‐moment, is one of the great recurrent themes of western literature. On the positive side of the ledger, we immediately think of St. Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Pascal, Rousseau (who got his dramatic political prophetic calling en route to Vincennes to visit Diderot in prison) or John Stuart Mill (saved from the sterility of Utilitarianism by the beauty and warmth of Wordsworth's poetry). On the negative side, once the topic of atheism ceased to be taboo, books from ex‐believers began tumbling from the press: Renan, Nietzsche, Edmund Gosse, Joyce, Mary McCarthy, Fawn Brodie, et al. Though the dramatic models of Paul and Augustine, fusing a complex evolutionary process into an instant crystallization or bolt from the theological blue (or empty heavens) always had a undeniable seductive appeal, the simple fact seems to be that erecting or exploding a body of belief always takes time. But once the person involved realizes the immensity of the change that has taken place, he or she may well feel, in one way or another, thunderstruck. Amber Scorah started out as a Jehovah's Witness in Vancouver (throughout the book she is stingy with dates), indoctrinated not by her badly matched and lukewarmly practicing parents, but by her devout grandmother. She followed all the rules, crazy as many of them seemed, sitting through long, boring services in Kingdom Hall, avoiding outsiders, not celebrating birthdays, Christmas, or Easter, refusing blood transfusions, obeying the inerrant dictates of the patriarchal “Governing Body,” and buying into the absolute veracity of the Bible and the approaching apocalyptic Armageddon that will destroy all non‐Witnesses. College education is forbidden, and so Scorah never got past high school. Her story begins when, stuck in a loveless, lifeless marriage, she looks for adventure by becoming a missionary to China (legally forbidden, of course). She first spent three years or so in Taiwan, learning Mandarin and preparing herself for her underground assault on godless communism. Her earliest efforts were floundering, given her still imperfect Chinese and the vast cultural distance between the Watchtower and Shanghai (or anywhere else in China), and eventually (since she has to support herself), she got into producing and appearing in podcasts teaching Mandarin and various puzzling features of China to foreigners. All the while she had to disguise her proselytizing as harmless friendly contacts (which is what they mostly were) with random Chinese persons. She made no converts (her message was hopelessly foreign to them), but a few friends and engaged in modest amounts of touristic discovery, which were all the more stimulating after her hopelessly drab and narrow earlier life. In the meantime, the figure of her (unnamed) husband and theoretical fellow missionary is practically invisible and non‐existent. Her life takes on a radical shift when she starts exchanging emails with “Jonathan,” an LA‐based fan of her “Dear Amber” podcasts, who proceeds to mix flirtation with an extended tutorial on the cultic qualities of the Jehovah's Witnesses. This is, needless to say, an inappropriate relationship, but Scorah had already violated the JW code by engaging in a teenage premarital affair back in Vancouver. She gradually sees that he's right about the oppressive irrationality of her religion and even flies to California to meet and have a predictable, brief affair with him (he eventually dumps her). Now that she has seen the light, Scorah takes the fateful step of publicly announcing her apostasy to the Shanghai Witnesses, for which she is ruthlessly “disfellowshipped,” leaving her severed for good from “family members, all of my friends, my future, my past, my life with friends and family in it, my faith, my certainty, my hope, my purpose in life.” Physically speaking, her devastation is less than total because she still has “a rented apartment, a job, in China, people at my work who knew I existed and would notice if I disappeared, at least,” a handful of personal items, plus “my health, a couple thousand renminbi in...

Presidential Evangelist for War

Presidential Evangelist for War Francis X. Kroncke America, land of the evil ones “America, Land of the Evil Ones.” Sounds like a bin Laden rant. Yet, it should be a common image for national self‐reflection. That it is not is a prophetic charge laid against America's presidents. “America, Land of the Good Ones” marks their bully‐pulpit evangelism. It is a homiletic theme oft orated by American presidents when drumming for wars, domestic and foreign. The striking spiritual characteristic of Americans is that we claim to have no dark Shadow side, no demonic traits, that evil is something which non‐Americans do. This characteristic is not trivial. It is not superficial. Truly, we believe that Americans can never be Evil Ones. As Bush‐43, “The Appointee,” (George Walker Bush, 43rd President of the United States) claimed, we Americans are the Light to the world. Heed his homily. During the Vietnam War, the image of Good Ones was tarnished. However, broad cultural acceptance of America's evilness is always kept in check by recalling the World War II generation who still remain convinced that their Good War was morally unsullied. This has become a dogma of Cold War theology. Such is held notwithstanding The Atomic Bomb which—for the first time ever—vaporized humans, “Poof!”…yet to come, again? The Appointee represents those who aggressively proclaimed the rightness of the Vietnam War—as an extension of the Good War, fought against godless Communism. Yet, few Americans, then or now, grasp why all presidents must go to war. Why it is their commanding spiritual as well as political altar call. Why warring is the bedrock American ritual, part of our cultural and spiritual DNA. For all presidents, “America, Land of the Good Ones,” has been a self‐conscious prophetic charge, in that the President believes he is authoritatively foretelling the future of his People. He continually reasserts that as Good Ones we Americans are moral models, and ours, the framework for every other culture's development. Civil religion The President is a prophet of a religion about which most Americans are not formally educated. It is a hybrid, theologically secular “Civil Religion”—and it is the mightiest, most evangelical, conquering creed of all times. Yet, its lack of clerical ceremony and classical religious imagery leads most to the conclusion that it is more a loose collection of patriotic, nationalistic, and holiday hoopla than a religion: the Flag, “one nation under God,” “in God we trust,” the Declaration of Independence, and holidays such as July 4 and Memorial Day. Nevertheless, it is a religion because it defines and determines how the individual and the group understand and value sacrificial bloodshed. The fundament of this Civil Religion is that America is a Chosen People—a covenanted People journeying through a Frontier land of promise. On this Frontier horizon Good slays and conquers Evil. This story of origin reveals a People set upon a Manifest Destiny. One set apart from “the Old World”—in parallel to St. Paul's Old Man/New Man imagery. All other cultures are judged fallen, lost, depraved. America, in contrast, is “exceptional” and seen as “A nation with the soul of a Church.” Ritual and liturgized bloodshed is a core religious belief and practice. Animals for the Hebrews. Jesus for the Christians. Although its ceremonial garb is solely militaristic and no longer clerical, Civil Religion sheds the blood of the “un‐American Other.” Denial of biblical fundamentals Civil Religion has clear Biblical roots. Yet, it is the denial of Biblical fundamentals which defines its essential beliefs and doctrines. Doctrinally, Original Sin gives way to a belief in the Perfectibility of Man. Americans are no longer judged unfaithful and in need of prophets to call them back to Righteousness. Rather, Divine Providence has granted them a Manifest Destiny—a companion to the British “White Man's Burden.” This denial differentiates the Civil Religion from mainstream Christianity. It is a splinter sect of the broader Protestant movement—for whom faithfulness to God is fully expressed through faithfulness to civil authority, here, the Democratic State. There is a transfer of power from the clerical, sacral realm to the civil realm of...

A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura by Eileen Markey

Reviewed by: A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura by Eileen Markey Michael E. Lee A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura. By Eileen Markey. New York: Nation Books, 2016. 336pp. $26.99. Recalling El Salvador of the 1970s and 1980s, the legacy of martyrs carries important symbolic weight. In the United States, the “four American churchwomen,” who were raped and murdered by Salvadoran soldiers on December 4, 1980, possess that symbolic power. Yet, decades later, there is a danger in how symbols (and collective labels like “churchwomen”) can gloss over real lives. Jean Donovan, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Maura Clarke have an important legacy. [End Page 82] Thankfully, Eileen Markey provides not just Maura Clarke’s remarkable story in these pages, but also a thought-provoking study on the kind of faith that would inspire her courageous life’s journey. This book demonstrates that Maura Clarke’s faith was “radical” in the fullest sense of the word. While she dedicated her life to participation in progressive and even revolutionary social change, Clarke did so deeply rooted in family and a desire to respond to God’s calling. The text is a conventional biography that begins with Clarke’s childhood in New York, through her formation in pre-Vatican II religious life, and into her pastoral work in the United States, Nicaragua, and finally El Salvador. Each location provides Clarke an opportunity to connect her rich personal faith to a commitment to serve others and better the world she lived in. These locations also provide the author a way to pose a central question to Christianity today, “What if following God means not so much attempting to order one’s life into fidelity to rules, but working to change the circumstances of a world that insults the sacredness of most men and women?” (10) Of course, that question has been the source of much debate, and one of the great contributions of this book is to demonstrate how radical political commitment can blossom from an authentic faith. The book begins with an account of Clarke’s childhood that offers readers a lively portrait of Irish immigrant Catholicism. It functions as a social history of a period that will surprise those who think Catholic engagement with the world begins only after Vatican II. Though bordering on heavy-handed, the numerous references to the Irish revolutionary struggle foreshadow the circumstances that Clarke would deal with in Central America. More importantly, they interrogate the blurry line between one person’s freedom fighters and another’s godless communists. Despite these impulses to transform the world that were present, the description of pre-conciliar religious life makes clear the rigidity and lingering influence of the fuga mundi (flight from the world) ideal. As the book moves from Clarke’s work in an urban U.S. parish to [End Page 83] forming base communities in Nicaragua, the reader gets a vivid sense of her widening horizons and deepening commitments. Several times, the phrase “changing sides” is used to describe her work. The stories of Clarke’s involvement in Nicaragua bring rich characters to life, and more significantly, demonstrates how committed Christians could find themselves participating in a revolutionary struggle without leaving their faith behind. These are committed people of faith inspired by rich prayer lives who understood their faith demanding their participation in social change. In contrast, the account of El Salvador feels a bit anticlimactic, but this is no surprise since Maura lived there only months before her murder. One only perceives the sense of lost potential for what her commitment there would have meant long-term. The book is more a journalistic piece than a scholarly one, which presents strengths and weaknesses. The prose is crisp, and the book never gets bogged down in theoretical flights of fancy. It is engaging, readable, and well-suited for the undergraduate classroom. The numerous footnotes demonstrate that Markey has done her homework. Yet those notes also reveal why it is not an academic book. It never engages the scholarship—historical, social-scientific, or theological—about El Salvador’s civil war and the role of the Catholic Church. Rather than present a new way of...

Christ vs. Communism: Communism as a Religious Social Problem in Finland's Proto‐Fascist Lapua Movement in the 1930s

AbstractThis article traces the emergence of religious anti‐communist discourse in Finland's proto‐fascist Lapua Movement in the 1930s. Applying constructionist social problems theory, it discusses the constructions of communism as a religious social problem, Christian piety as a solution to the problem of godless communism, and the religious legitimation of violence. The article argues that by identifying Christianity with the Finnish nation the construction of communism as a religious problem—itself an outcome of the influence of revivalist Lutheran ministers in the leadership of the movement—resonated with the broader audience, but that this indigenous religious nationalism lost support with the increasing belligerence of the movement.

The Lasting Impact of the ‘Sociological Moment’ on the Churches’ Discourse of ‘Secularization’ in West Germany

This paper focuses on the effect of the religious sociology on the churches’ discourse of “secularization.” The research results refer to transformations within the Catholic and Protestant Church(es) in West Germany since the 1950s. At this point the purpose is not to give comprehensive insight into that topic. Rather, a few general trends are to be considered here. The secularization discourses within the West German Churches can be described as a periodization with three stages. In the period from 1945 to the late 1950s “secularization” was used to give an orientation after the devastating experiences of the Second World War. The concept was at that stage most understood in the classical meaning of a religious decline. “Secularization” was the mirror-image of past, present, and more importantly, the future. The chance of a religious revival on the one hand and the fear of a godless communism on the other hand were the main topics of the secularization discourse in the postwar period. In the 1960s we can find a kind of “theologization” of “secularization.” Based on the work of theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, and Friedrich Gogarten it was the aim to integrate a changed understanding of “secularization” in the sense of a necessary “Verweltlichung” or “Weltlichkeit” into a “modern” and future oriented church model. The churchly debate was influenced and inspired by the general politicization of the West German society. The third period began in the 1970s, but was fully developed in the 1980s. The secularization discourse followed the trend of a scientification of the Churches. The definition of “secularization” was more and more affected by sociological patterns and the theological dimension moved into the background. The churchly discussion benefited primarily from the extension of Church Sociology to Sociology of Religions. This impact of the “sociological moment” improved the future prospects of the Churches, as long as they were willing to adapt to modern society by changing their symbolic, ritual, and institutional form. Already, at the end of the 1970s the first indications of a changed perception of the significance of religion were seen. This also involved attempts to replace the theory of secularization with more plausible accounts of the future of religion.

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented America. By Kevin M. Kruse. (New York: Basic Books, 2015. Pp. xvi, 352. Paper, $17.50, ISBN 978-0-465-04949-3; cloth, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-465-04949-3.) Why do so many contemporary Americans believe that the United States of America has been and always should be nation? This question drives Kevin M. Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented America. The book ignores the question of whether the Founders intended the nation to be Christian. The author writes that most scholars agree that the Founders preferred a wall of separation between church and state (p. xiii). Instead, the book focuses on why and how religion has so prominently entered political discourse since World War II. Kruse agrees with those who have found that religious revival was fueled in part by Cold War conflict with the 'godless communists' of the Soviet Union, but he argues that the revival's roots extend back to the 1930s when corporate leaders allied with conservative clergymen to promote Christian libertarianism as an antidote to the perceived social, spiritual, political, and economic cancers spawned by the New Deal (p. xiv). Kruse argues that Dwight D. Eisenhower used the revival to unite constituencies as nation under God, while Richard M. Nixon used religion for political gain in ways that divided constituencies. The effects of those efforts linger into the present. Kruse presents his argument in three parts: Creation, Consecration, and Conflict. Creation explores the sources of what he calls libertarian alliance from the 1930s to the eve of the Eisenhower administration. In twist on Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms campaign, clergymen, business leaders, and politicians pursued freedom under campaign that was aimed at getting big government out of people's lives and off businesses' backs (chap. 1). Consecration provides detailed analysis of how conservative politicians, mostly Republicans, embraced religion in political discourse (sacralizing the state, as Kruse puts it) during the Eisenhower administration, paying special attention to the addition of one nation under God to the Pledge of Allegiance and of the motto In God We Trust to currency (p. 87). Conflict chronicles the resistance to this new religious political discourse. U.S. Supreme Court cases like Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) play important roles in this section, as does Nixon's divisive use of religion. …

The Mass-Clock and the Spy: The Catholicization of World War II

The religious history of World War II in the U.S. has long been dominated by the theme of pluralism. The trials of mobilization and battle fostered inter-religious cooperation. Against a backdrop of Nazi intolerance and godless communism, these collaborative experiences would, in the postwar years, help mute religious conflict and amplify a “Judeo-Christian” consensus. This framing, while compelling, has deflected attention from the distinctive modes with which religious Americans interpreted the war. The work of the National Catholic Community Service (the Catholic arm of the United Service Organizations) illustrates the ways Catholics framed the war as a religious matter. In seeking to build Catholic bridges across the separations of wartime, Catholics amplified the unique moral and spiritual means of their tradition. Two themes—sacramental presence and moral exceptionalism—dominated Catholics' efforts to Catholicize the war. Exploring these efforts reveals the religious arenas within which Catholic soldiers, war workers, and their families were invited to work out their sense of the war and their responsibilities as Catholics and Americans. The stories—often strikingly indifferent or even hostile to the pluralist “consensus”—shed new light on the war and on the history of religious difference in the U.S.

Belief and Unbelief in Russia

Victoria Frede, Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia. xiv + 300 pp. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0299284442. $26.95. Avril Pyman, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius. The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia's Unknown da Vinci, xxiv + 304 pp. New York: Continuum, 2010. ISBN-13 978-1441187000. $29.95. Much 20th-century history writing was shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by the thesis, which maintains that religious beliefs and religious institutions are doomed by the advance of modernity to continuous and irreversible decline in their intellectual and social influence. Over the past 30 years, events have rendered this thesis distinctly less compelling than it once was, even to observers with no particular sympathy for religion. In many parts of the globe--including the former Eastern Bloc--ancient religious traditions have offered us vivid demonstrations of their adaptability and staying power. As secularization loses credibility as conceptual framework within which to understand the history of religion in the modern era, historians have begun to articulate alternative frameworks. (1) Historians who abandon the assumption that the waning of religious belief in modern societies is the ineluctable consequence of modernity itself are immediately presented with an array of exciting intellectual challenges. The phenomenon of religious unbelief in these societies can no longer be taken for granted; it must become the object of careful historical research and analysis. Some recent books in the field of modern Russian history have taken up these challenges in self-conscious and sophisticated way. One example is William Husband's Godless Communists, a study of the antireligious policies of the Soviet state in its early years and of the Russian masses' response to them. (2) Husband called attention to the complexity and ambiguities of ordinary people's attitudes toward religion and the church in the late tsarist period, then went on to argue that that such ambivalence persisted under Bolshevik rule. Without denying that religious observance declined in the early Soviet period, he argued that the Party's failure to understand the strength of the masses' traditional beliefs greatly limited the efficacy of its measures to promote atheism. A newer study, focusing on the elite rather than the masses, is Victoria Frede's Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia. Frede's book is an important contribution to scholarship on 19th-century intellectual history. It examines how and why religious doubt, and later atheism, became genuine intellectual options for members of the Russian intelligentsia between the 1820s and the 1860s. Some of the figures upon whom her narrative concentrates play prominent role in every study of the intelligentsia: Herzen and Ogarev, Chernyshevskii, Dobroliubov, and Pisarev. About all of these she has remarkably interesting and illuminating things to say. But the book also includes chapters on obscure radicals of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s whose intellectual adventures she regards as no less worthy of the historian's attention that those of the familiar heroes of the saga of Russian radicalism. Indeed, one of Frede's more piquant claims is that the first full-blown atheists in Russia were none of these mighty names, but three young men of the merchant class who hung out together at the end of the 1840s in the tobacco store which one of them owned in Petersburg (92). Frede's point of departure is the bold assertion that, at the beginning of the 19th century, atheism, in the strict sense, was position that was neither thinkable nor speakable by educated Russians (11). The notion that there have been cultural contexts in which it was impossible to be an atheist is, of course, not new. Those familiar with Lucien Febvre's famous book on Rabelais (translated into English as The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century) will hear an echo of Febvre's argument that 16th-century European intellectuals simply lacked the necessary materials--from an adequate philosophical vocabulary to modern concept of the impossible--with which to construct an atheistic worldview that could present itself as serious alternative to the Christian one. …

Public Policy, Popular Culture, Celebrity, and the Making of a Spiritual-Industrial Marketplace in Postwar America

Public Policy, Popular Culture, Celebrity, and the Making of a Spiritual-Industrial Marketplace in Postwar America Lerone Martin (bio) The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War. By Jonathan P. Herzog. New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. By Kathryn Lofton. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2011. Several trends hallmark religion in postwar America. Scholars have identified several major forces including: the increased vitality of “world” religions, suburbanization, the decreasing significance of denominationalism, the political emergence of the religious right, and the increasing popularity of therapeutic spirituality and religious commodities. Traditional sources, including denominational figures and studies, church mapping and architecture, nationwide religion polls, and the activities of iconic figures and commodities such as revivalists Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, and the success of the latter’s best seller, The Power [End Page 53] of Positive Thinking (1952), have been readily implored to describe how religion took shape during the era. However, recently scholars have increasingly turned to under-utilized sources in the study of postwar religion. Jonathan Herzog’s focus on government sources and the influence of public policy on religion following World War II and Kathryn Lofton’s study of the religious and spiritual affect of commercial icon Oprah are two intriguing examples of this trend. It has long been noted that President Eisenhower’s administration was wedded to the Cold War and the military-industrial complex following World War II. In his Presidential Farewell Address, the military hero stated that the dangers of the postwar world required the nation to no longer depend on the “makers of plowshares . . . to make swords.” Rather, in Cold War America, the nation had to “create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions”: a military-industrial complex.1 This pronouncement and the subsequent influence of the Cold War upon postwar American politics and foreign policy is well known. However, lesser known is the Cold War’s explicit influence in shaping America’s religious landscape. In The Spiritual-Industrial Complex, Jonathan Herzog painstakingly chronicles how the Cold War influenced religion in postwar America via what he refers to as the “spiritual-industrial complex”: the collective and deliberate leveraging of state, federal, commercial, media, and celebrity resources for national religious revitalization. The ultimate goal of this political, commercial, and theological composite was to create a resurgence of religiosity and religious adherence as a means to combat and eventually defeat godless Communism (6). For Herzog, this spiritual mobilization was “sacralization,” not to be confused with “civil religion.” Herzog defines civil religion as the “use of the sacred to legitimatize the secular.” Spiritual “Cold War Warriors,” however, did the opposite; they “used the secular to legitimize the sacred” through a “deliberate and managed use of societal resources to stimulate a religious revival in the late 1940’s and 1950’s” (6, 179). The author traces the genesis of this spiritual complex to the religious and political rhetoric of the successive presidential administrations of Truman and Eisenhower as well as a host of other political and cultural Cold War crusaders. These policy makers, religious professionals, and commercial icons boiled down the intricate nature of the Cold War between American and Soviet ideology into a series of simplistic dichotomies: American freedoms vs. communist slavery; good vs. evil; or faithful vs. faithless (81). Moreover, Communism was defined as a belief that was held by its communicants with “religious” fervor (197). As Herzog points out, President Truman aptly stated in one Christmas Eve address, “We are all joined in the fight against communism. Communism is godless . . . Democracy’s most powerful weapon is not a gun, a tank, or a bomb. It is faith—faith in the brotherhood and dignity of man under God” (79). Accordingly, Herzog displays how policy makers and clergy framed the Cold War not as an “economic and political struggle between the oppressed and the powerful,” but rather a holy war between traditional religious/Christian faith, freedoms, and [End Page 54] American livelihoods in opposition to the godless religious zeal of Communism (81, 126). The Cold War, at heart, was a spiritual battle. In 1933, President Hoover’s research committee noted, “The most fundamental change...

Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promises (review)

Reviewed by: Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promises Philip Gleason Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise. By Kevin M. Schultz. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp. x, 256. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-195-33176-9.) In part 1 of this valuable book, Kevin Schultz documents the origin, development, and general acceptance of the “tri-faith” idea in the second quarter of the twentieth century. “Tri-Faith America” meant that the country could no longer be understood simply as a “Protestant nation”; rather, Catholicism and Judaism had attained equal status as spiritual constituents of American identity. By the 1950s, that view shaped what Schultz calls “standard operating procedure” (p. 43) in American social thought. In part 2, he analyzes significant shifts in American thinking related to this development. The National Conference of Christians and Jews, formed in 1928 in reaction to Ku Klux bigotry, was the key agency in systematically promoting the tri-faith idea. Its message of tolerance and brotherhood was reinforced in the wartime years by the prevailing sense of cultural crisis and the conviction that America’s democratic values were rooted in the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” The NCCJ’s programmatic activities in training camps, enthusiastically supported by military authorities, made the organization “one of the most extensive propagandists for what the nation was fighting for” (p. 49). The same linkage of tri-faith/Judeo-Christianity with Americanism was carried over into the cold war battle against “godless communism.” Schultz’s account of how the “three faiths of democracy” (p. 50) came to be regarded as the leading markers of diversity in American society is well [End Page 173] researched and convincing. However, his treatment of Will Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, NY, 1955), the classic contemporary analysis of the phenomenon, is surprisingly ungenerous. His summary of its argument is incomplete; he calls Herberg’s critique of American religiosity cynical and characterizes his interpretation as derivative—Herberg was merely “the most famous of the bunch” of sociologists who had been theorizing along the same lines for years (pp. 88–89). This dismissive evaluation of Herberg’s work seems quite wrongheaded. However, Schultz’s review of the overall impact of the tri-faith idea is more rewarding. Here he argues, first, that the tri-faith vision legitimated “communalism”—that is, the right of minority groups to maintain a distinctive identity—and implicitly suggested that groups as such have rights. Second, it was associated with a shift in constitutional thinking whereby church-state separation was grounded in the need to protect minorities from discrimination. Third, by being associated with the Jewish campaign to exclude religious questions from the census, the tri-faith idea helped establish the principle that religion is a strictly private matter. Finally, it “softened the ground” for the civil rights movement by supplying a language that Reverend Martin Luther King and other leaders could “tap into” in their struggle for equality and by making “American pluralism an accepted part of the nation’s identity” (p. 185). However, the leaders of tri-faith America did not formally embrace the cause of racial justice until the 1960s, and Schultz is highly critical of the “sometimes willful blindness” (p. 194) that kept them from including racial minorities in their campaign for brotherhood and tolerance from a much earlier date. The broadly interpretive claims Schulz makes in part 2 are definitely provocative, but also plausible and well worth further investigation. There are, however, some disquieting errors of detail in part 1. Schultz mistakenly calls Whittaker Chambers a “Catholic convert” (p. 90); and he errs in respect to the dating of Father Charles Coughlin’s antisemitic agitation (p. 30), Carlton Hayes’s service as ambassador to Spain (p. 31), and Servant of God Fulton J. Sheen’s elevation to episcopal dignity (p. 63). To assert that Stuart Symington—rather than the courtly Joseph N. Welch—“famously asked [Sen. Joseph R.] McCarthy if he had any decency” (p. 90) has to be called a howler. Philip Gleason University of Notre Dame (Emeritus) Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press

IMPERIAL LIBERALISM? RELIGION, EDUCATION, AND THE COLD WAR

A few years ago I found myself at the Ogden, Utah rodeo with thirty schoolteachers from all over the world. They were participants in a Fulbright-supported American studies institute, and the trip to Utah was part of a weeklong foray into a part of America quite different from Amherst, MA, where the bulk of lectures and discussions had taken place in the previous three weeks. Our visit happened to coincide with “Armed Services Day,” and the spectacle my students encountered proved even more impressive than the riding and roping they had expected. The principle feature of that spectacle had to do with the organizers’ almost total confounding of religion and patriotism. At the high point of the event, over the roar of military band music and military helicopters passing overhead, the booming voice of the announcer declared that “God's helicopters” were protecting America and the rest of the world from tyranny. The books under review here endeavor to explain the spectacle in Ogden on that summer day—along with the train of events that, over sixty years ago, launched a crusade against “godless communism” and, a few decades later, made “the Christian right” a major force in American politics.

Partia komunistyczna walcząca z religią i państwo komunistyczne gwarantujące wolność religijną jako teoretyczne podstawy marksizmu-leninizmu w walce z religią i Kościołem katolickim w krajach realnego socjalizmu

Marek Jędraszewski in his article The Communist Party fighting with religion and the communist state guaranteeing religious freedom, as theoretic background for Marxism-Leninism in fight against religion and Catholic Church in the countries o f real socialism, presents philosophical and ideological principles, which direct the course of politic of communists states in the battle against religion and Church, especially Catholic Church. The author shows sources of that in antireligious thoughts of the modem Europe: deism of Enlightenment and philosophy of Feuerbach for whom the sole condition of substantial human freedom was appreciation of radical atheism. Next, author presents the Marxist conception of religion as the “opiate of the masses” and “opiate for the masses”. On the end, is presenting Lenin’s distinction between antireligious program of party and worldview neutrality of state, which was the ground for cutthroat war against religion, both in the Soviet Union and other countries of People’s democratic so-called the Ostblock) in the period 1944-1989. Author resemble the main thesis of the Pius XI encyclical Divini Redemptoris from 1939, which shows antihumanistic, furthermore felon face of “godless communism”. The best example giving by the author, for the rightness of popes words, is abatement of the Catholic Church by the communist party in the Poland in the times of Polish People’s Republic. As a conclusion author is citing words of pope John Paul II from encyclical Centesimus annus: “Marxism had promised to uproot the need for God from the human heart, but the results have shown that it is not possible to succeed in this without throwing the heart into turmoil” (CA, 24).

“Godless communism” and its legacies

Al erican Atheists, an organization founded in the 960s by Madalyn Murray O'Hair, finds much to protest these days: classroom and workplace harassment of the godless, the Boy Scouts' exclusion of atheists, government funding of faith-based organizations, President Bush's incessant God talk, and an administration that responds to religious fanaticism by whipping up different religious fanaticism. American Atheists president Ellen Johnson borrows a phrase from the Christian right, which had borrowed it from other groups seeking rights and respect: "We want what Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition, said that he wanted for the religious right: a 'place at the table in the great discussion we call Democracy.'" Atheists today have an easier time than in decades past--one of O'Hair 's 1960s allies, Charles Smith, was jailed in 1928 for distributing atheist literature--but Johnson and her allies have a point. As late as 1930 the Supreme Court referred to Americans as "a Christian people." Seeking the presidency in 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke of our "Judeo-Christian" heritage. In his inaugural address in 2001, President Bush widened the circle further by referring to "churches, synagogues, and mosques." In this way, as Conrad Cherry notes, civil religion increasingly manages to ~'embrace a plurality of values," yet it still hasn't made room for ~'agnostic or atheistic elements.'" Although atheist leaders like to cite polls showing that many millions of Americans have little to do with organized religion, the unchurched are not necessarily godless. A large poll, the American Religious Identification Survey, in 2001 estimated that a mere 0.4 percent of Americans call themselves atheists and 0.5 percent agnostics. And they tend to be skittish about voicing their beliefs, according to Alan Wolfe's One Nation, After All (1998): "People who talked about their lack of belief in God did so hesitantly, even defensively, rather than as self-proclamation .... Militant atheists--those who insist that reason and rationality constitute the only sensible guides by which to live--are very hard to find in America." Maybe they've been cowed into silence. When the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life asked Americans about their attitudes toward various groups in mid2003, atheists ranked at the bottom, with 34 percent of respondents feeling favorable toward them and 52 percent feeling unfavorable. In the same poll, 41 percent of respondents said they would have reasons to vote against an atheist presidential candidate, a higher proportion than the survey found for a candidate who was Jewish (14 percent), Catholic (15 percent), Evangelical Christian (20 percent), or Muslim (31 percent). All in all. there's ample evidence that, as Wendy Kaminer put it a few years ago, "'Atheists generate about as much sympathy as pedophiles.'" In significant respects, I think, contemporary American attitudes toward atheists hardened during the Cold War 1950s. Get past what historian E.P. Thompson termed "the enormous condescension of posterity" and you'll find an era much like our own: a new and terrifying form of war, one that posed a particular threat to civilians; a suspicion that enemy operatives lurked among us; the necessity of balancing national self-protection with constitutional liberties; efforts to come to grips with religious diversity; and, especially, a spasm of vague but fervent public piety. During his years in office, President Eisenhower carried a silver coin, about the size of a half-dollar. The front bore a cross and the word God; on the reverse was an American flag above freedom. God and country, two sides of a coin. "I felt it was a strange, almost blasphemous combination of symbols," White House aide

'Godless Communists': Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 by William B. s> Husband (review)

REVIEWS 757 been assured that there was intention to use them on active service. This broken promise was a measure of the Germans' determination to use the battalion to their own advantage. Even the timing of the battalion'seventual returnto Finlandwas dictatedby Germanpolicy. Lackmandescribesin detail the conflicts within the battalion, for example between its mainly Swedishspeakingleaders and their Finnish-speakingmen. The non-volunteerswere a particularlydiscontented element and the Russian Revolution exacerbated tensions. The battalion even formed a soldiers' council and in addition the working-classJagers formeda council of theirown. The apparently peaceful attainment of Finland's independence was a disappointment to many of the Jagers who had hoped to fight for that goal. The deterioratingsituation in Finland at the end of I9I 7 caused differences between the majoritywho objected to the fraternizationof Finnish socialists with revolutionaryRussian soldiersand the working-classJagers who did not want to fight against their own people. Nearly a quarter of the battalion refused to serve the Finnish government and thus returned to Finland only after the War of I9I8 (a term Lackman prefers to Civil War or War of Independence). He providesa thorough account of the fate of theJagers who did not fightin the war, some of whomjoined the FinnishCommunist Party. This is a long book which would have benefited from sub-editing to eliminate some repetition. The proof reading is poor. The chronology is not withouterrors;forexample, in I933 Mannerheimwas appointedfieldmarshal not marshalof Finland. Lackman'sconclusionshave upset those who cling to the formerofficialview of theJagers. And yet a more credible account of the movement and its members emerges than from previous studies. The Jagers appear as argumentativeand sometimes disobedient men of flesh and blood, drinking,womanizing, selling their equipment, even deserting. As members of the White Army in I9I8 some took terrible and unlawful revenge on Russiansand theirperceivedsympathizers.Lackmanrangeswidely into many relevant issues, including the comparison of theJagers with other 'liberation' movements and with the Finnish communists in the Soviet Union, the lawfulnessof the Finnish authoritieswho tried to combat the movement, the leniency of the Russians'treatmentof those arrestedand the role of theJagers in independent Finland.This provocativebook is a majorachievement. London J. E. 0. SCREEN Husband,WilliamB. 'Godless Communists'. Atheism andSociety in Soviet Russia, I9I 7-I932. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2000. XVii+ 241 pp. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. ?3o.50. THEhistoryof the Bolsheviks'imposition of atheismand of citizens'responses to it is a many-sided and complex affair,and here William Husband sets out to tackle head-on that very complexity. He upsets common assumptions according to which the earlyphases of the Bolshevikassaulton religionrested upon a very high level of agreement among the leaders;the sense of common purpose among them was far less than I myself had originally supposed. 'In reality, there would never be a unified Bolshevik position on religion and 758 SEER, 8o, 4, 2002 atheism, even among the leadership', asserts Husband (p. 37), and 'in this sphere the party reacted to events as much as it shaped them' (p. 38). Using an admirably broad range of sources and specific examples, he examines factors which either eroded the Soviet authorities'control of religious life at national and local levels or else frequently forced them into a pragmatic reconsideration of their strategic approach. A particular mistake of the authorities,Husband holds, was to assignresponsibilityforanti-religiouswork to so many differentbodies within government and society (p. 38 etal.), thus sacrificingcohesion and, at the same time, putting in question the very raison d'etreof the League of the MilitantGodless, led by EmelianYaroslavsky. In Husband's book the accent is less on the massive scale of martyrdom sufferedby clergyand laity, a point which distinguisheshis account from that of Dimitry Pospielovsky, than on closely examining the middle ground occupied by those countless people without a firm commitment to religious belief or atheism.He considersthe risks,pressuresand limitsof theirsituation, asalsothe unintendedbenefitsthatcame to themthroughsome miscalculation or lack of foresightby the authorities.Husband cites cases of parish councils managing deftlyto use officiallanguage and theirknowledgeof regulationsto secure favourable responses to their petitions (pp. 146-47). 'Working the system' naturallycame to be one of the favoured means of survival,and this became a prominenttheme in humourof the whole Soviet...