Chapter 141. ‘The Opium of the People’: Marxism, State Atheism and the Persecuted Churches

The French Revolution’s Cult of Reason lasted barely a year. The Marxist-Leninist states made atheism a permanent doctrine of state for most of the twentieth century. This chapter starts from Marx’s own sentence and its misreadings. It then follows state atheism through the USSR, communist Romania, Albania and China, and weighs two kinds of testimony: the witness of the persecuted, chiefly Richard Wurmbrand, and the record of hierarchies that collaborated. It gives the claims of the Romanian defector Ion Mihai Pacepa as his own testimony. It closes with readings of communism as a secularised religion and with Mehran Keshe’s rejection of both church and party.

The sentence and its misquotation

The passage comes from the introduction to Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, written in 1843 and published in February 1844 in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” The journal printed 1,000 copies, and the phrase became widely known only in the 1930s [Wikipedia: Opium of the people]. Christopher Hitchens calls the common reading “probably the most popular misquotation of modern times”. Marx, he says, “took belief very seriously”. The misquotation is “a very crude attempt to misrepresent the philosophical case against religion” [Hitchens, God Is Not Great, #65383, ch. “The Brothers Karamazov”]. Mark Skousen cites the line and treats Marxism as a “quasi-religion, with its slogans, symbols, red banners, hymns… apostles, martyrs, bible”. He quotes Robert Wesson: “Marx was to lead the Chosen People out of slavery to the New Jerusalem… Becoming a Marxist or a Communist is like falling in love” [Skousen, The Big Three in Economics, #3930, Marx chapter].

According to the reference shelf, Marxist-Leninist “scientific atheism” grew from Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Lenin and “informed public policy” in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Latin American liberation theology rejected it, and Vietnam, Laos and post-Fidel Cuba later abandoned it [Wikipedia: Marxist–Leninist atheism]. Pacepa’s notes quote Edward Luttwak: “Marxism-Leninism has become… an official religion, since its propositions have become dogmas; Soviet Marxism-Leninism now has its ceremonies, rituals and idols, chiefly the figure of Lenin himself” [Pacepa & Rychlak, Disinformation, #76607, ch. 7, n. 1].

The Soviet model

Gregory Freeze’s entry in the Encyclopedia of Russian History gives the institutional record. The Bolsheviks abolished the Church’s legal status, banned clergy from education and nationalised church assets. The civil war brought “the arrest and execution of clergy”, and by 1921 “the church as an institution had virtually disappeared”. In 1922 the regime used the confiscation of church valuables “to precipitate a schism” with the pro-Soviet “renovationists”. In 1929 it “declared open war on the church”: “By 1939 all but 1,744 churches (of the 28,560 in 1928) were closed.” The war forced concessions, including the “election of a new patriarch in 1943”. Khrushchev’s campaign then “reduced the number of churches from 13,414 (1958) to 7,773 (1964)” [Freeze, “Russian Orthodox Church”, Encyclopedia of Russian History, #6957]. The same encyclopedia records that the League of the Militant Godless, founded in 1925, claimed 5.5 million members in the early 1930s. It calls the League “one of its most dismal failures”, a “Potemkin village” whose members often joined “without their knowledge” [Encyclopedia of Russian History, #6957, “League of the Militant Godless”]. The editor’s introduction adds a long view: “Historically, the Russian Orthodox Church has successfully resisted attempts to separate church and state and has offered support and justification for autocracy in return.” The Soviet era “differed only in that all religions were persecuted in the name of official atheism” [Millar (ed.), Encyclopedia of Russian History, #6957, Introduction].

Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the Romanian intelligence service, writes with Ronald Rychlak. Their title page names both authors, though the library catalogue gives none. They argue that Hitler and Stalin “based their tyrannies on theft. Hitler stole the wealth of the Jews. Stalin stole the wealth of Russia’s Orthodox Church”, and that “both replaced God with their own cult” [Pacepa & Rychlak, Disinformation, #76607, ch. 7]. Their notes state that Khrushchev’s campaign forced “the closing of about 12,000 churches” and was renewed in 1958 [ibid., ch. 17, n. 1]. That figure is higher than the roughly 5,600 implied by Freeze’s numbers. They also describe how, on 8–10 March 1946, Soviet authorities “forcibly convened an assembly of 216 priests” at Lviv, where the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church “was forcibly ‘rejoined’ to the Russian Orthodox Church” after its bishops, including Josyf Slipyj, had been sent to the Gulag [ibid., ch. 12].

Romania: the underground church and the official church

Wurmbrand was kidnapped from the street by the Securitate on 29 February 1948 and spent fourteen years in prison. He divides Romanian Christianity into an underground church and “the official Church, that of the collaborators of the communists”. He traces the latter to the Soviet “Active” (Living) Church “led by a bishop named Sergius”. “One of his collaborators declared that ‘Marxism is a gospel written in atheist letters’.” Wurmbrand continues: “We had a Sergius in every country”. He names Father Balogh in Hungary and the priest Burducea in Romania, who smiled while Vyshinsky promised “a terrestrial paradise, so that a heavenly one is no longer necessary”. He reports that the Adventist president Tachici confessed to having been a Securitate informer from the first day [Wurmbrand, Strigătul Bisericii Prigonite, #20685, pp. 116–117]. Infiltration also ran the other way: “some Christians entered the Securitate, put on the most despised uniform in the country, so that they could inform those working underground”. A Christian doctor joined the secret police only to search the cells for Wurmbrand [ibid., p. 38].

The reference shelf supplies the institutional frame. The Greek Catholic Church, with 1.5 million faithful and 1,725 churches, was abolished on 1 December 1948, and its property was handed to the Orthodox Church. Only 430 of its 1,800 priests signed the act of union. Patriarch Justinian Marina, the “Red Patriarch”, argued in Apostolat Social that “socialism is an integral part of Christianity”, and none of his statements mentioned the political prisoners. Between 1958 and 1963 about 2,500 priests, monks, nuns and lay people were arrested and half the monasteries were closed. In 1959 the Holy Synod accepted restrictions on monasticism. A Securitate officer in Timișoara later estimated that 80–90% of priests were collaborators [Wikipedia: Romanian Orthodox Church in Communist Romania]. The Pitești “re-education” experiment (December 1949–September 1951) sought to make prisoners, Christian seminarians among them, “discard past religious convictions”. Solzhenitsyn called it “the most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world” [Wikipedia: Pitești Prison].

The historian of religion Ioan Petru Culianu, writing in exile, drew a political conclusion in his essays of 1974–1991. The Romanian Orthodox Church, “so grievously compromised with all the dictatorial regimes that followed one another in Romania from 1937 to the present”, should “in no way be privileged” by the post-communist state, and “any concordat would be unacceptable” [Culianu, Păcatul împotriva spiritului, #15190].

Albania and China

Albania went furthest. The 1946 Agrarian Reform began the confiscation of religious property. In 1967 Hoxha “declared Albania an atheist state, in which public religious practice was prohibited”, and “by May 1967, all 2,169 religious buildings in Albania were nationalized”. Restrictions eased only in 1985 and were lifted in 1990 [Wikipedia: Irreligion in Albania]. Muslims were 72% of the population in 1945, and Islam was hit hardest. A cultural revolution “based on the Chinese model” from 1965 destroyed most minarets. “Muslim clergy became imprisoned, most minarets, mosques, tekkes and Sufi shrines were destroyed” [Wikipedia: Islam in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania].

The library’s own holdings on China are thin, so this section relies on the reference shelf. In 1949 the Party denounced religions as “foreign cultural imperialism”, “feudalism” and “superstition”, and it suppressed new religious movements as “reactionary secret societies”. From August 1966 the Red Guards’ “Four Olds” campaign imposed “a nationwide ban on both public and private religious practice”. Reportedly “only eleven of the 6,200 Tibetan Buddhist monasteries survived” [Wikipedia: Antireligious campaigns in China]. On 20 July 1999 the Party launched its campaign to “eradicate” Falun Gong, run by the extra-constitutional 6-10 Office. Reports cite at least 2,000 deaths under torture by 2009 and allegations of organ harvesting [Wikipedia: Persecution of Falun Gong].

Religion as a Cold War weapon

Pacepa claims the persecution had an offensive side. In 1968, he writes, “the KGB was able to maneuver a group of leftist South American bishops into holding a conference in Medellín”, with logistical help from his own service, the DIE. Its “undeclared goal was to legitimize a KGB-created religious movement dubbed ‘liberation theology'”. The conference “did indeed endorse liberation theology”, the delegates recommended it to the World Council of Churches, and, he alleges, the WCC “had already come under the control of Soviet foreign intelligence”. He cites Gleb Yakunin’s samizdat reports and the dispatch of forty-seven KGB agents to the 1983 WCC assembly [Pacepa & Rychlak, Disinformation, #76607, ch. 15 “Liberation Theology”]. David Kupelian repeats the charge. He writes that the Mitrokhin Archive, “smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1992, provides the identities and Soviet intelligence code names of many Russian Orthodox priests dispatched… to the World Council of Churches”. He names Metropolitan Nikodim, “agent ‘Adamant'”, as WCC president in 1972 [Kupelian, The Snapping of the American Mind, #67937]. These are defector testimony and secondary uses of it. They are presented as such.

Secularised messianism: Heisman and Keshe

Mitchell Heisman reads the conflict through Nazi ideology. He quotes Hitler: “The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.” Asking “what was it about Christianity that Hitler believed was so criminal?”, Heisman answers that “Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature”. Taken to its logical extreme, he argues, Christianity “would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure”, and Nazism set out to reverse it [Heisman, suicide note, #38252, part 273, “Absolute Purity”]. On this analysis communist egalitarianism is a secularised Christian ethic, and Hitler attacked the two as one target.

Mehran Keshe condemns institutional religion as fiercely as any Bolshevik, but on the opposite premise. In KSW 461 he calls churches and mosques constructs for “the abuse of man”. He cites priestly child abuse and Iran’s executions of demonstrators: “In God’s name, how can you execute someone as a protector of the name of God?… There is no religion.” The only valid intermediary with the Creator, he says, is the individual [Keshe, KSW 461, #378173, “Critique of Institutional Religion and the Path to Self-Governance”]. In KSW 629 he asks: “Then why does Man need an intermediary in a fake name of Prophets and ayatollahs to understand the work of his Creator?” He blames “the limitation of understanding of the Man” for “the abuses of the Soul of the Man” [Keshe, KSW 629, #378341]. He does not deny the Creator. He praises Gorbachev because he “reversed Lenin’s system without firing a single bullet” after Lenin “brought [it] with a lot of hardship” [Keshe, KSW 448, #378160].

Key points

• Marx’s 1843–44 passage calls religion “the sigh of the oppressed creature” as well as “the opium of the people”. Hitchens calls the short form the most popular misquotation of modern times [#65383].
• Freeze records Soviet church closures from 28,560 (1928) to 1,744 (1939), a new patriarch in 1943, and Khrushchev’s cut from 13,414 to 7,773 churches [#6957]. Pacepa gives about 12,000 closures [#76607].
• Wurmbrand separates the underground church from the collaborating “official Church”, “a Sergius in every country”, and records Christians who joined the Securitate to protect the persecuted [#20685].
• Romania abolished the Greek Catholic Church in 1948, ran the Pitești “re-education” from 1949 to 1951, restricted monasteries from 1959, and saw Patriarch Justinian accommodate the regime [Wikipedia].
• Albania declared itself an atheist state in 1967 and nationalised 2,169 religious buildings. China’s Cultural Revolution banned all practice, and the persecution of Falun Gong began in 1999 [Wikipedia].
• Pacepa and Kupelian allege KGB sponsorship of liberation theology at Medellín (1968) and KGB infiltration of the WCC [#76607, #67937].
• Heisman relays Hitler’s “Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child” and reads Christianity as “a rebellion against natural law” [#38252]. Keshe rejects both clergy and state atheism in favour of a direct link to the Creator [#378173, #378341].