Theology Today - Vol 39, No. 1 - April 1982 - BOOK REVIEW - Soviet Believers: The Religious Sector of the Population & Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II

103 - Soviet Believers: The Religious Sector of the Population & Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II

Soviet Believers:
The Religious Sector of the Population
By William C Fletcher
Regents Press of Kansas, 1981. 259 pp. $27.50.

Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II
By Walter Sawatsky
Scottdale, PA, Herald Press, 1981. 527 pp. $19.95

These two books admirably complement each other. The book by William Fletcher, Director of Soviet and East European Studies and Professor of Religion, the University of Kansas, is the more comprehensive. It covers the course of religious belief in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1981, and it does so by examining data provided by official atheists, representing the Marxist view that religion is an epiphenomenon of class oppression.

Since, in theory, classes have disappeared, or, at least, workers and peasants through the Communist Party are represented in politics and government, the persistence of religion becomes increasingly baffling. If not a threat to the regnant ideology, it is an annoyance all the more profound in that the investigators are aware of the fact that many who are not believers in religion are also not any longer committed to the official ideology of the Soviet Union and its constituent republics.

104 - Soviet Believers: The Religious Sector of the Population & Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II

Consternation has indeed reached such a point that the atheist propagandists in the years after the Revolution have evolved into veritable sociologists of religion, using many of the field techniques and interpretative models of their Western counterparts. Indeed, Fletcher is prepared to say that in the careful reading of the official documentation we are in possession of the most intimate knowledge possible of the state of religion for individuals and different elements of the population.

Although the book concentrates on data worked up into publications since 1945, the author makes good comparative use of earlier materials collected with less sophistication. Moreover, since 1945, the author can examine data assembled and interpreted by Soviet sociologists of religion (as indeed they may be designated) in areas acquired by the Soviet Union by that date, namely the three Baltic Republics, Byelorussia (west), the Ukraine (west), Carpathian Ukraine, areas where religion remained undisturbed, respectively, in inter-War Poland and Czechoslovakia, also Bessarabia (formerly part of Rumania).

Fletcher finds that the Slavic part (as of 1982 slightly less than half the total population) of the Soviet Union has suffered greater losses, especially the Great Russians, representing slightly less than half of the Slavic population although supplying the official language of the Union. The Ukrainians and the Byelorussians may still be as much as 35% religious, most intensely so on former Polish territory. The three Baltic republics remain up to 60% religious, although the percentage approaches for largely Catholic Lithuania would be almost like Catholic Poland, (90%), while in the other two Baltic republics, where Lutheranism once prevailed, the percentage of religious persons of all kinds is now more like the average in Slavic USSR. In areas where Christianity and culture are closely interrelated, as in Soviet Armenia and Georgia, the percentage of religious remains as high as 90%. The same holds true of the large Muslim and shamanite populations. Where the official language of the Union is a secondary language, atheism has made less progress. All told, with the help of reluctant and discouraged Soviet atheist sociologists of religion, Fletcher is able to surmise that possibly 45% of the entire Soviet population, about 115 million people, remain religious in some degree, although seriously lacking in trained leadership and even minimal facilities for worship and study.

Fletcher is not very much interested in confessional differences, but his supplying the reader with the questionnaires of the sociologists helps make it clear that the level of belief is conceptually low, intermingled with superstitions more common among the old and the marginal peoples whether of the towns or the villages (in contrast to the higher intellectual level of religious peoples in cities). His work is invaluable, but it could have been strengthened if he had also used, for corrective and interpretative purposes, the official communications of the Patriarchal Church and other groups. He seems to confine himself in any case to sources in Russian. He makes it clear that religion is more connected in the mind of its devotees with morality than with immortality.

105 - Soviet Believers: The Religious Sector of the Population & Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II

Walter Sawatsky of the Mennonite Central Committee, although limiting himself to developments among Official Baptists, Reform Baptists, Mennonites, and Pentecostals, leaving out the Baltic Lutherans, gives us in full documentation the personalities, struggles, issues, missions, and spirit of his Evangelicals. The book is filled with names, places, pictures, and splendid footnotes in several languages. The book substantiates what Fletcher says about religion persisting, but it is clear that the "free" churches, which have a long history in the area of congregational self-discipline, are able to cope in an alien environment with more sense of purpose and spiritual energy than comes to us from the reports of Soviet sociologists of religion covering the whole religious spectrum.

The two books should be further complemented with a report on the two and one-half million Poles, the three million Lithuanians who remain Catholic (with their own internally exiled Cardinal), and perhaps a comparable study of the Baltic Lutherans who, because of their geographic location, can keep in touch by radio and TV with nominally Lutheran Scandinavia, the Baltic Republic of Estonia having the additional advantage of a kindred language beamed from Finland.

Sawatsky and Fletcher make it clear that conservative religion, in terms of ritual or close adherence to Scripture, speaking to the eternal in the human heart, can survive and be spiritually supportive for long periods of time under active persecution or harassment, without the benefit of sophisticated theology that tries to accomodate religion either to Marxism or modern science. Both also testify to the wistful yearnings for something Transcendent among the young, although the older generations predominate wherever the church becomes visible in assembly, whether liturgical or pentecostal.

George H. Williams
Harvard Divinity School
Cambridge, Massachusetts