Introduction
In this article, I examine Christian democratic political theory and practice beyond the postwar party-political moment. I situate my account in the late Cold War, when Christian democracy in Western Europe was experiencing an electoral crisis and ideological fatigue,Footnote 1 as it grappled with new political formations on the right, party system realignment, and the gradual weakening of its associational support.Footnote 2 I turn to Eastern Europe, focusing on Czechoslovakia during the communist autocratic opening known as perestroika (1985–1991), a period that ultimately led to the implosion of communist regimes across the region.Footnote 3 Although the local Communist Party (KSČ) hardliners resisted Moscow’s reforms, the regime’s weak economic performance, dysfunctional welfare, and the expansion of democratic opposition ultimately led to its downfall in November 1989.Footnote 4
The perestroika era marked the first significant spillover of contentious politics beyond the most prominent platform of the Czechoslovak counter-elite movement, Charter 77 (1977–1992).Footnote 5 Charter 77 was a civic, self-described nonpolitical initiative that documented domestic human rights violations and noncompliance with constitutional and international law, serving as a broad umbrella for ideologically heterogeneous opposition currents.Footnote 6 Perestroika, however, brought previously muted conflicts within the expanding anti-regime networks to the surface. Christian democrats articulated the most pronounced departure, advancing an alternative, non-Marxist political vision and strategy, forging an ideological framework to contest the socialist dictatorship.Footnote 7
Eclipsed by the emblematic Polish case, Czechoslovakia rarely figures in debates on the intersection of religion and politics in Eastern Europe.Footnote 8 Yet despite the profound influence of Christian democracy on local political language in the twentieth century, scholars continue to portray Czechoslovakia , particularly its Czech landsas secular. In contrast to this view, I suggest that Christian democracy should be recognized as one of the most consequential intellectual and political traditions in Cold War Czechoslovakia. Moreover, exploring Christian democracy in one of the region’s most repressive autocracies sheds light on the central themes and enduring interpretive puzzles that lie at the heart of contemporary debates on Christian democracy: the tradition’s historical singularity, conditions of emergence, geographies, and relationship to liberal democracy. Through this case study, I highlight the limitations of the Western-centered model and recover the history of political and intellectual style we are cautioned not to expect in Eastern Europe.Footnote 9
I argue that the difficulty of recognizing Christian democracy in late Cold War Czechoslovakia is rooted not only in the case itself, but also in the categories through which scholars have trained their gaze to identify the tradition. These categories direct attention to party formation, postwar compromise, and Western European trajectories, thereby making it difficult to register Christian democracy where it appeared without democratic institutions, free party competition, and autonomous churches, and without the explicit use of the Christian democratic brand itself.
The systematic study of Christian democracy in the European Catholic belt has unfolded in two waves. The first gained momentum in the 1990s, a period widely seen as a watershed for once-dominant Christian democratic parties. This scholarship was largely institutionalist, focusing on the long organizational transformation of confessional parties into Christian democratic ones from the late nineteenth century to the postwar period, and on how this transformation influenced the secularization of European politics.Footnote 10 A second, revisionist wave emerged in the 2010s in conceptual and intellectual history. It was driven by renewed attention to Christianity’s role in shaping the foundational principles and practices of postwar political regimes,Footnote 11 as well as by a broader search for usable liberal conservative legacies to address the contemporary ethnopopulist and illiberal assaults on the liberal democratic order.Footnote 12
While these approaches have significantly expanded our understanding of Christian democracy, they have consolidated a Western-centered, party-political image of this tradition, making it difficult to capture other configurations. Indeed, much of the literature makes sense of Christian democracy through transhistorical conceptual markersFootnote 13 or strategies,Footnote 14 flattening the complexity of twentieth-century Christian and, at the same time, democratic mobilization, as well as the actual horizons and dilemmas faced by historical actors. In this article, I adopt a different perspective. Rather than treating it as an ideal type and a party-political phenomenon fixed by an uppercase “Christian Democracy,”Footnote 15 or as a political project ground down by accommodating liberal modernity,Footnote 16 I approach it as a heuristic category shaped through pragmatic ideological adaptation. I therefore analyze it relationally, tracing how Christian political theologies confronted and accommodated competing modern ideologies—not only liberalism, but also forms of socialism, nationalism, and conservatism—in both democratic and autocratic contexts. A relational understanding of Christian democracy, in turn, calls for an “actor-centered” reconstruction of the settings in which its meanings were forged.Footnote 17
In this article, I focus on four dramatis personae recruited from the underground Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Catholic exile,Footnote 18 highlighting the lay, clerical,Footnote 19 transnational,Footnote 20 and intergenerational character of the local Christian democratic movement.Footnote 21 Assuming that different Christian democracies can coexist at different tempos and generate distinct intellectual canons, vocabularies, and practices,Footnote 22 I reconstruct how these protagonists selectively transmitted, hybridized, and innovated the Christian democratic script.Footnote 23
Conceptually, the Christian democratic restatementFootnote 24 centered on articulating the theory of totalitarianism and Christian humanism, long-standing ideological pillars of the Western Christian democratic model. Concerning the former, I build on James Chappel’s account of the Catholic interwar origins of totalitarian theory,Footnote 25 which reconstructed it through the work of Jacques Maritain and other European Catholic intellectuals, showing how they articulated the kinship thesis between communism and Nazism and, contra Carl Schmitt, rejected the autonomy of the political but bounded politics of Thomist metaphysics and ethics. Chappel argues that this theoretical intervention helped catalyze a Catholic conceptual shift from antimodernism to antitotalitarianism, thereby opening a path toward Catholic accommodation with Cold War liberalism.Footnote 26
I shift the focus from the origin story to late Cold War reactivation in Czechoslovakia, where Christian democrats did not simply inherit the Catholic model reconstructed by Chappel, but reworked it. While continuing to emphasize the similarity thesis between communism and Nazism and the primacy of ethics, they drew on a different intellectual canon and responded to distinct political and historical pressures. I demonstrate how local Christian democrats reformulated Catholic totalitarian theory through what I describe as “post-totalitarian” and “gnostic” models. These rested on “nonconformist” ecclesiology, anti-gnostic Christology, and a communitarian civil society. The paradox of this Christian democratic relaunch was that the same anti-utopian imperative that sharpened its diagnosis of totalitarianism also limited its positive theory of democracy, which remained underdeveloped, leaving a lasting, if ambivalent, imprint on democratic transition and the post-socialist political order in Eastern Europe.Footnote 27
The latter category, Christian humanism, emerged in the context of this totalitarian diagnosis and drew on the Thomist theory of human rights. The human rights history, I reconstruct here, belongs to a wider historiography on the origins and development of human rights in the twentieth century. The first wave of revisionist scholarshipFootnote 28 challenged longue durée genealogies by locating the emergence of human rights not in a deep history, but in the 1930s and 1940s, with further breakthroughs in the 1970s and 1990s.Footnote 29 Among other themes, revisionists emphasized how Christian democrats after 1945 utilized human rights to reformulate and course-correct conservatism, and also how the new conservative strands in the late Cold War recast human rights in narrow political terms, displacing their egalitarian potential.Footnote 30 The second, “post-revisionist,” wave has broadened the field toward global (semi)peripheries,Footnote 31 examining human rights-framed struggles over decolonization, national self-determination, and economic redistribution, while also questioning Western diffusionist narrativesFootnote 32 and examining the human rights legitimacy strategies of socialist dictatorships in Eastern Europe.Footnote 33
The Czechoslovak case both confirms and expands this historiography. It confirms it insofar as the country occupied a prominent place in the global “breakthrough of human rights” in the 1970s,Footnote 34 and has been described as one of the central stages that made “human rights activism exciting.”Footnote 35 Yet the existing historiography on Czechoslovakia has largely overlooked the emergence of an independent Catholic, let alone Christian democratic, human rights discourse, focusing instead on liberal,Footnote 36 socialist,Footnote 37 phenomenological,Footnote 38 civic,Footnote 39 or even republican languages.Footnote 40 I therefore reconstruct how late Cold War rights talk was remade as a “performative” language of human rights: a language that could contest socialist autocracy in emancipatory terms while grounding rights in practice and an antiliberal Catholic account of personhood.Footnote 41
The Christian democratic movement was not an armchair intellectual project. It translated theories of totalitarianism and human rights into issue-specific campaigns that unsettled the fragile human rights consensus among Charter 77’s ideological currents. From the mid-1980s, this consensus began to fracture as Christian democratic circles gained influence and pushed disputes over human rights beyond the protection of prisoners of conscience or declaratory claims against the regime. Divisions crystallized around the meaning, scope, and implementation of rights in campaigns over historical memory, abortion, and religious liberty. These campaigns showed that Christian democrats deployed the language of totalitarianism and Christian personalism not only to contest state power and defend individual autonomy, but also to advance illiberal claims about bioethics, gender, and social order. In doing so, they introduced novel elements into the Christian human rights repertoire, including “female dignity,” the rights of the “unborn person,” and “conscientious objection.” These campaigns, however, lie beyond the scope of this article.
I organize the paper as follows. First, I introduce the biographies and intellectual background of the selected protagonists. Second, after outlining the article’s methodological approach, I trace how Christian democracy was re-canonized after Jacques Maritain no longer served as its central reference point. Third, I examine the local conceptual innovations through which Christian democrats reworked totalitarian theory and Christian personalism. I conclude by outlining promising avenues for future research beyond the Christian democratic confrontation with Soviet-style communism.
Cast of characters
Christian democracy in late socialist Czechoslovakia emerged in the context of institutional weakness. Unlike in Poland, where the Roman Catholic Church retained a prominent public position, the official Church in Czechoslovakia had been hollowed out by decades of state control and repression.Footnote 42 In response, Czechoslovak lay and clerical activists established an alternative infrastructure, known as the Underground Church.Footnote 43 Its emergence was reinforced by the amnesties of Catholic political prisoners in the 1960s, the reception of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council,Footnote 44 and Catholic participation in the Marxist–Christian dialogue.Footnote 45 Organized through small, parish-based “circles,” it consciously continued the pre-communist-era Catholic Action, emphasizing the role of the lay apostolate and public engagement, a trajectory further strengthened by the pontificate of John Paul II (1978–2005). The Underground Church engaged in independent theological training and ordination, as well as in the circulation of foreign literature and the production of samizdat.
Václav Benda (1946–99) occupies a central position in the Christian democratic milieu, linking the Underground Church, human rights activism, and the post-1989 political transition. A Czech lay Catholic, he was among the first signatories of Charter 77, edited several samizdat journals, and maintained close ties to the circle around Czechoslovakia’s only archbishop, František Tomášek (1899–1992). In 1978, Benda cofounded the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS), the most prominent local human rights watchdog, which monitored political trials and provided legal assistance to political prisoners. For these activities, he was repeatedly imprisoned. After 1989, Benda played a key role in the democratic transition and founded and chaired (1989–93) the Christian Democratic Party (Křesťansko-demokratická strana), served as a member of parliament and later as a senator, and in 1995 became director of the Office for the Documentation and Investigation of Communist Crimes, the central state institution mandated to investigate and prosecute communist-era human rights abuses.
The second protagonist, Josef Zvěřina (1913–90), a Catholic priest and the unofficial leader of the Underground Church, was a key intermediary between the Underground Church and secular dissent. Zvěřina is often considered one of the most influential Czech theologians.Footnote 46 During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia (1939–45), he was interned in Dachau for his anti-regime activities. After 1945, he became active within the Prague Catholic Action academic circle, contributing to the movement’s ecclesiological program. Under Stalinism, Zvěřina spent thirteen years in prisons and labor camps (1952–65) for organizing clandestine Catholic Action, outlawed by the regime. After his release, he was barred from pastoral work; nevertheless, he played an active role in the Council for Work Renewal (1968–9), a local initiative aimed at implementing the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
In the 1970s, he organized secret seminars that brought together theology, philosophy, and political theory. In 1980, he became one of the three spokesmen of Charter 77. He also informally trained a young cohort of cadres within the regime-controlled Christian Democratic Party (Československá strana lidová).Footnote 47 In the final weeks of communist rule in November 1989, he was one of the key speakers during the mass rallies that symbolically toppled the regime. In 1990, he was appointed dean of the only Czech theological seminary. He also founded the Czech Christian Academy, the key platform of Catholic intellectual life and ecumenical dialogue. Through these activities, he helped shape an entire generation of Czech Catholic intellectuals, among them a Templeton Prize laureate, Tomáš Halík.
The Slovak Christian democracy is best captured through the figure of Ján Čarnogurský (b. 1944), a Catholic lawyer and a central figure of the counter-elite. In the 1970s and 1980s, he publicized cases of religious discrimination and defended politically persecuted individuals, using procedural law. Čarnogurský was active in the Underground Church and anticommunist campaigns, and he was one of the few Slovaks to cooperate with the Prague-based Charter 77. He edited the first Slovak political samizdat journal, Bratislavské listy (one of the titles initially considered was Christian Democratic Lists). After 1989, Čarnogurský founded the first major postcommunist Slovak Christian democratic party (Křesťansko-demokratické hnutie) and served as prime minister of Slovakia during the early transition.
The last figure, Rio Preisner (1925–2007), is a representative of the Czech Catholic exile who, unlike actors at home, advanced his intellectual work beyond the constraints of the autocratic regime.Footnote 48 The Czech exile encompassed those who left the country in successive waves after the communist takeover in 1948 and again after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion.Footnote 49 Many had been active in pre-communist Christian democratic parties and Catholic Action circles. Through publications, correspondence, and personal networks, these émigrés supported the domestic opposition, lending it transnational visibility and providing it with financial and intellectual resources that contributed to the theoretical and ideological consolidation of homegrown Christian democracy. The exile included a reform-oriented Catholic network centered around the Christian Academy in Rome, which helped transmit the reforms of the Second Vatican Council to Czechoslovakia. By the 1980s, however, a staunchly anticommunist wing broke off.Footnote 50
Preisner belonged to the latter current. Trained as a German literary scholar, he was detained in communist labor camps between 1952 and 1954. In the 1960s, he gained recognition for his translations of Hermann Broch, Erich Auerbach, and Karl Kraus. He began publishing political theory only after emigrating to the United States in 1969, where he lectured on German literature at Pennsylvania State University until 1992. Despite living in exile, Preisner remained closely connected to the intellectual ferment of the domestic opposition, contributing extensively to Czech exile and samizdat periodicals and debates. After 1989, he joined the Czechoslovak People’s Party (Československá strana lidová) as a rank-and-file member and, in the year 2000, he received the Medal of Merit from President Václav Havel.
Methodological approach
This section turns to the analytical approach that guides the reconstruction of the conceptual work of the Christian democratic protagonists conducted under conditions of repression and exile. I employ the re-canonization approach,Footnote 51 which provides a way to analyze how historical actors produce or rework political traditions by curating specific corpora of texts, canons and anti-canons, selecting which philosophical legacies, historiographies, and movements are definitive for the tradition, and devising authoritative interpretations of these resources. The re-canonization approach has primarily focused on first-rank thinkers and liberal traditions, and has tended to proceed in a deductive, nominalist manner. By contrast, I adopt an inductive perspective, treating political traditions as produced and sustained even when actors do so unwittingly, or deliberately silence established ideological brands for strategic reasons.Footnote 52
The local Christian democrats were neither professional philosophers nor social scientists and largely refrained from producing systematic treatises. I therefore broaden the scope of the re-canonization approach to include genres beyond conventional social and political thought. In the absence of independent Catholic publishing houses, journals, and academic research in the humanities and social sciences, samizdat circulation and the smuggling of books and periodicals assumed a central role in information dissemination and mobilization.Footnote 53 To reconstruct the canonicity of Christian democratic tradition, I closely read commentaries, samizdat essays, letters, campaign memoranda, op-eds, nonfiction, and editorial notes. These genres served as vehicles for establishing reference frames and historical analogies, offering causal explanations of contemporary political conditions.
In the 1970s, the homegrown Christian democrats focused on transmitting the theology of the Second Vatican Council, including that of Henri de Lubac, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Rahner, and Johan Baptist Metz. Since the 1980s, however, due to the increasing support and influence of the traditionalist exile circle, the UK- and later also USA-based Jan Hus Foundation,Footnote 54 the French Esprit journal,Footnote 55 and the Pan-European Movement,Footnote 56 local Christian democrats have also turned to the neoconservative canon, including Eric Voegelin, John Finnis, David Levy, and Leszek Kołakowski.
Alongside the foreign influences, Christian democrats drew selectively on the phenomenological thought of Jan Patočka (1907–77). A student of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Patočka was the most prominent noncommunist Czech philosopher of his generation and a founding figure of Charter 77; he died shortly after a police interrogation following the publication of the Charter’s Declaration, which he drafted. Christian democrats engaged particularly with his reflections on “truth,” “alienation,” and “authenticity.” A further point of reference was the political thought of the playwright Václav Havel, a central figure of the democratic opposition, and, after 1989, a president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic.
In the two sections that follow, I demonstrate how the four Christian democrats of this article strategically assembled and interpreted this canon to develop a novel interpretation of totalitarian theory and Christian humanism.
Two models of totalitarianism
Totalitarian theory provided the primary conceptual framework through which Christian democrats made sense of politics under late socialist dictatorship. I begin with a brief genealogy of the local totalitarian theory and then examine how Christian democrats innovated it in the 1980s. Shaped by the anti-utopian logic of totalitarian theory, the Christian democrats did not articulate a positive theory of democracy; instead, they conceptualized the political alternative only in negative terms, in relation to both the communist regime and Western political systems.
During the semi-authoritarian Third Czechoslovak Republic (1945–8), the Catholic totalitarian model, as described by Chappel and others,Footnote 57 occupied a prominent place in the ideology of local Christian democratic parties.Footnote 58 In the early Cold War, émigré Christian democrats continued to mobilize antitotalitarian language to internationalize their struggle against Soviet communist hegemony, working through party internationals and USA-financed agencies and lobbying for the liberation of Eastern Europe. By the 1960s, however, Catholic activists had largely set aside totalitarian theory, particularly during the 1968 Prague Spring,Footnote 59 as the emphasis shifted toward “dialogue” and “convergence” between East and West, and between Marxists and Christians. In the 1980s, the totalitarian paradigm resurfaced, regaining traction among homegrown and exiled Catholics, but also Protestants and reform Marxists.Footnote 60 In what follows, I reconstruct how the protagonists of this article reworked Catholic totalitarian theory into “post-totalitarian” and “gnostic” models.
Post-totalitarianism
The Christian democratic post-totalitarian model drew on broader intellectual currents in Western political theory that emerged in the 1960s, fracturing the hegemonic status of the statist, anticommunist totalitarian paradigm.Footnote 61 These new non-statist and non-anticommunist approaches shifted attention away from the state apparatus toward society and the problematization of “cultural conformity,” emphasizing psychological manipulation of individuals and social inertia.Footnote 62
It was Václav Havel who channeled this trend into Czechoslovakia through the concept of “post-totalitarianism” in his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” in which he sought to explain the persistence of autocratic rule in Eastern Europe. He argued that post-totalitarian systems (post-totalitní systémy) operate through automatism and primarily aim at self-preservation. Ideology functions to obscure the system’s mechanisms and objectives, rendering power anonymous and producing a “world of appearances.” Havel thus described the ideological conditions as a form of “false consciousness” that alienates individuals from the “lifeworld” and from “authentic existence,” enabling them to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position in the system.
In Havel’s telling, the post-totalitarian system incorporates individuals through banal, pro-regime rituals, transforming them into loyal participants who actively reproduce the system and thus become co-responsible for its endurance.Footnote 63 Havel portrayed society as suffering from a “deep moral crisis,” populated by uprooted and indifferent individuals. The counterstrategy should lie in reclaiming responsibility through moral acts, thereby negating participation in the system and enabling autonomous political action. Escaping the post-totalitarian structures required a revolt against ideology and alienation through practicing “living in truth” (authenticity), set against “living in a lie.”Footnote 64
The Catholic restatement of Havel’s post-totalitarian model was most systematically developed by Václav Benda, who linked it conceptually to his communitarian vision of the “parallel polis” (paralelní polis). In his responses to Havel, Benda used the framework of “co-responsibility” (spoluodpovědnost) but reoriented it toward the categories of Christian moral subjectivity, placing the struggle against the system in the human “soul” (duše) and “conscience” (svědomí). He reformulated co-responsibility as a process of conscience examination, the recognition of individual “sin” and “shared guilt” (spoluvina) and its redemption through acts grounded in “solidarity.”Footnote 65
In his 1979 essay “Catholicism and Politics,” Benda argued that “evil” was clearly identified along the lines of the interwar and early Cold War anticommunist papal encyclicals because it was still possible to assume an unambiguous Christian position in the global “Manichean struggle.” This “old Catholic social doctrine,” Benda argued, no longer holds under the conditions of late socialism, where communist “evil” appears as a “binding burden, which every citizen already carries on himself and in himself.” He emphasized that Czechoslovak believers were irreducibly “within” the system and therefore could not practice any clear-cut anti-communist crusade. While Benda believed that the core totalitarian objective remained stable, “the absolute rule over every most fleeting tremor of our body, over the most hidden corner of our soul,”Footnote 66 its mechanisms that perpetuate the post-totalitarian power configuration had shifted due to the combined operation of “repression” and “consumerism.”
The local regime, Benda argued, is cemented by fear that builds “mini-iron curtains” around individuals, isolating them and breaking natural communities and trust in society. The strategy is centered on “the atomization of society, the mutual isolation of individuals, and the deliberate destruction of all ties and realities that could overcome the loneliness and thus the manipulability of the individual.”Footnote 67 Unlike many dissident intellectuals across Eastern Europe, Benda rejected the assumption that the communist regime would collapse of its own accord.Footnote 68 He argued instead that only active “civic” resistance could erode it. Since totalitarianism was sustained by the systematic destruction of individual responsibility for the “common good” (společné dobro), Benda repeatedly argued that the regime is based on generating responsibility-free zones by compelling obedience and discouraging personal moral judgment. The key first step in the resistance, he argued, is thus the “struggle for one’s soul” that in the autocratic conditions “becomes an explicitly political and even a creatively political act.”Footnote 69
Although Benda relativized the binary of Cold War totalitarian theory between the individual and the state, and the distinction between the public and the private through the concept of co-responsibility, in his other essays published during the perestroika years he also emphasized several of the then influential neoconservative features of totalitarian theory.Footnote 70 These included the irreformability of state-socialist systems, the incompatibility of socialism and democracy, the kinship between Nazism and communism, and the central role of the state’s repressive apparatus. Benda argued that state violence had to be contested, since it was the last key apparatus through which the regime sustained itself after the Communist Party, he believed, had lost any remaining legitimacy.Footnote 71 Benda insisted that although the totalitarian state claimed authority over all spheres of life, it lacked the capacity to control them fully, a weakness that allowed the opposition to “encircle totality with reality.”Footnote 72
Benda’s insistence on the limits of totalitarian power also pointed toward another key late socialist idiom of the democratic opposition: civil society. Although the categories of civil society played a marginal role in the Catholic totalitarian model reconstructed by Chappel, in the Eastern European context the normative idea of civil society gained traction. Across Eastern Europe, dissident thinkers advanced diverse normative conceptions of “civil society”Footnote 73 as an alternative to Marxist–Leninist social ontology,Footnote 74 which dismissed civil society as a bourgeois framework that reproduces inequality under the guise of formal legal equality.
By contrast, Eastern European dissidents envisioned civil society as a sphere of spontaneous social order, individual freedom, associational life, and solidarity beyond the state’s bureaucratic reach. As a result, concepts such as “parallel structures,” “self-organization,” and “second culture” circulated widely across oppositional currents during the 1980s.Footnote 75 In the Czechoslovak context, Christian democrats were among the first to call for a shift from merely condemning the regime on moral–legal grounds to direct political confrontation.
In developing his post-totalitarian model, Benda articulated a vision of civil society rooted in communitarian resistance, crystallized in the concept of the “parallel polis.” Yet Catholic civil-society talk is difficult to capture without understanding the ecclesiology that underpinned it, above all Josef Zvěřina’s nonconformist conception of the Church.
Drawing on the assumptions of the Catholic totalitarian thesis and reflecting on the Church’s possibilities of survival under communist dictatorship,Footnote 76 Zvěřina conceptualized the Church as an “autonomous space of truth,” arguing for a strict institutional secularization of Church–state relations, which had been effectively undermined by the communist regime’s financial and administrative encroachment on the institutional churches. Drawing on the key ecclesiological innovations of the Second Vatican Council, particularly the role of laity,Footnote 77 in his 1979 essay “Courage to Be Church”Footnote 78 he offered his most radical redefinition of the Church’s role, emphasizing the nonconformist and communitarian character of the Christian faith.Footnote 79
In Zvěřina’s ecclesiology, the concept of “Church” is burdened by an unruly history and weak biblical foundations. The Church must be understood rather in what he called an “agapeic community,”Footnote 80 a lived practice that remains dynamic and open-ended, coming into being through “every good word or even in a silent deed.” Because the Church is born in every human being through baptism, Zvěřina argued, it cannot be reduced to an institutional form: “the Church is not a thing, a rigid organization. Being a Church means having the courage to reach out after God’s offer.”Footnote 81 Grounded in agape (spiritual love), the Church manifests itself in concrete relationships and communities: friendship, marriage, family, religious orders, and communities.
On this basis, Zvěřina projected a “Church of the future” as a small flock that would become “anti-consumerist,” “anti-materialist,” and “anti-class,” expressing itself through practical solidarity with the least well-off, borrowing Václav Havel’s vocabulary, participating in the “conspiracy of the powerless” against the alienating structures of the modern state.Footnote 82 The Church, he argued, should therefore take the form of a network of “agapeic communities.”Footnote 83 Zvěřina reinforced this vision by drawing on Paul VI’s understanding of the Church as a “missionary enterprise” tasked with re-evangelizing the secular world, as well as John Paul II’s call for a “new evangelization,” which placed renewed emphasis on the role of the laity in building and sustaining the Church.Footnote 84
Drawing on Zvěřina’s ecclesiology, Benda sought to construct a counterhegemonic structure to the communist regime, grounded in a network of a “parallel polis” of “organic” social units, especially those that had survived communist repression and cultural policies, principally the “family” and the “Church.”Footnote 85 These social intermediaries constitute the only resilient social spaces between the individual and the state and, for that reason, pose a persistent threat to the regime. Only these institutions, Benda argued, can restore social bonds, reinvigorate responsibility toward the “common good,” and initiate a Christian–spiritual renewal.Footnote 86 Benda viewed the Underground Church as the first step toward constructing a society independent of the state that can counter the “fear” imposed by dictatorship. On this basis, Benda rejected both liberal and socialist imperatives of religious noninterference in the public space, insisting that every historical epoch requires Christian norms to counter pervasive social nihilism and usher in social integration.Footnote 87
In Benda’s strategy, the parallel structures had to “multiply” to break out of the Charter 77 social “ghetto” and to emancipate and “antagonize” the “secular power” that acts “against divinely anchored natural law.”Footnote 88 Civil society thus did not appear in Benda or Zvěřina’s theory as an object of constraint, as it had for various Christian democratic projects in the early Cold War, but as a space of social, cultural, and political emancipation.Footnote 89
The final dimension of Benda’s political theory was his deep skepticism of the “dialogue” between the opposition and the state, which he regarded as mere “camouflage” concealing the regime’s “primary orientation toward violence and power.” To this end, Benda challenged the general Charter 77 oppositional strategy of dialogue and coexistence, describing it as an exercise in “abstract morality.” Instead, he advanced what he termed “radical conservative politics,” arguing that the unity of Charter 77 was inherently provisional and rested on a voluntary “resignation” from politics. By contrast, the emancipation of self-organized parallel structures and confrontation with the regime should become the central site of the new Christian-based politics.
Gnostic antitotalitarianism
The second model, which I call “gnostic totalitarianism,” was formulated by the exiled Rio Preisner. He summarized his political theory in the three-volume Critique of Totalitarianism (Kritika totalitarismu), written in Czech and published in exile between 1972 and 1986. Preisner’s Critique circulated in Czechoslovakia through samizdat journals and parallel Catholic educational networks.Footnote 90 He deliberately adopted a fragmentary writing style indebted to modernist literature, which he saw as the only adequate means of shattering totalitarianism’s fiction of unity. The resulting eclectic collage combined historical material with philosophical and theological framing.
Preisner’s primary target was contemporary political science, which he criticized for sidelining the concept of totalitarianism under the influence of what he saw as the “convergence” paradigm of the detente era, between Western liberalism and Soviet communism, and for narrowing it to a descriptive category of German National Socialism only. His political thought drew heavily on Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics (1952) and Order and History (1956). He adopted Voegelin’s key vocabulary, including “gnosis,” “metaxy,” “the structure of reality,” and “Occident.” Alongside Voegelin, another significant influence was Hermann Broch’s critique of utopia and the erosion of moral order in modernity, themes developed by Broch in Die Schlafwandler and Der Versucher, both of which Preisner translated into Czech in the late 1960s.
With Voegelin, Preisner’s theory of totalitarianism was based on the assumption that it had premodern, “gnostic” roots. In this sense, Preisner radicalized the Catholic antitotalitarianism, which had typically treated totalitarianism as a product of modern secular ideologies. In constructing his account, Preisner assembled an expansive anti-gnostic canon that went beyond Voegelin’s own, encompassing Plato; Joachim of Fiore; German Idealism, especially Hegel; and what he saw as Hegel’s ramifications into Marxism and later phenomenological and existentialist currents. He even included the key theologian for Czech progressive Catholicism and Protestantism, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom he portrayed as a Hegelian thinker and a “fashionable intellectual” of the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 91
The gist of Preisner’s concept of totalitarianism was that it is structural rather than confined to Nazi- or Soviet-style political regimes. He understood totalitarianism as the expression of a deeper spiritual decline in the West, a civilizational tendency toward “dehumanization” made possible by the loss of transcendence and by the recasting of the human person as an object of ideological, administrative, and technical manipulation. Thus the core issue with totalitarianism, he argued, is epistemological: gnosticism treats “objective” reality as a mere reflection of a priori ontology or ideological patterns and schemes. He saw this tendency as most clearly expressed in the Hegelian “heretical” notion of God as an object of theoretical knowledge, reducible to philosophical inquiry.Footnote 92 In Preisner’s view, this gnostic epistemology was ultimately atheistic because it foreclosed what, following Voegelin, he called “metaxy”: the possibility of the encounter between immanence and transcendence.Footnote 93
In the first volume of his Critique of Totalitarianism, Preisner identified this gnostic epistemology most clearly in the Marxist imaginary and the “communist-totalitarian lifeworld.” Marxism, he argued, erased the space for metaxy by subordinating reality to deterministic schemes of historical development and by dissolving the principles of natural order. In doing so, it alienated individuals not only from transcendence, but also from the immanent world and from history itself, producing what he called “abstract totalitarian utopia.”Footnote 94
Because Preisner treated Marxism as an idealist rather than materialist philosophy, and therefore as a mode of estrangement from reality, he turned to Thomism and Christology to recover the bond between transcendence and the material world.Footnote 95 The decisive categories were the Incarnation and the Crucifixion, understood not as abstract doctrines but as historical “events” through which transcendence entered immanent history. For Preisner, Christ’s “sacrifice” affirmed God’s relation to the world and refused any merely “abstract historicity.”Footnote 96 The Passion inscribed meaning into history itself, transforming the apparent meaninglessness of suffering into the possibility of acts of “agape.”Footnote 97
Preisner’s totalitarian prism structured his diagnosis of the late Cold War. By turning to the interwar and early Cold War intellectual canon, he could revive a moralized and civilizational framing of the geopolitical conflict. He restaged the struggle between the “democratic” West and the “totalitarian” East, and reaffirmed the impossibility of cooperation between these “civilizations.” Rejecting the notion of “convergence,”Footnote 98 he insisted that only moral absolutes of “good” and “truth,” and the uncompromising designation of Soviet Bolshevism as a “system of evil” and an “ideology of lies,” could generate political change,Footnote 99 contra “Western optimists” who ignored the suffering of “millions of slaves of totalitarianism” in Eastern Europe.Footnote 100
In his 1982 essay “Two Reflections on the Margins of Charter 77,” published in the exile journal Nové obzory (New Horizons), Preisner argued that the January 1969 self-immolation of Jan Palach—a twenty-year-old history student who committed suicide in a protest at the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia—has to become a general epitome of the Cold War struggle and the impossibility of any socialist project, which only induces “man’s annihilation,” as witnessed by Palach.Footnote 101 In this context, Preisner rebutted the Charter 77 emphasis on “dialogue” with power, arguing that it amounts only to a “police interrogation that repeatedly unfolds after the monologic declarations of the Chartists.”Footnote 102
Preisner equated Charter 77’s self-described “nonpolitical” strategy with the legacy of the “catastrophic” ideology of the Prague Spring. He understood the Charter’s “nonpolitical” aims as a refusal to organize politically and contest Communist Party hegemony, reducing opposition to legalistic and moralistic criticism of the system without an explicit effort to overthrow it. Such a strategy, Preisner argued, positioned Charter 77 against those who sought the regime’s destruction. He thus juxtaposed Charter 77 with the socialist reform project of 1968, which he saw as a contradictory attempt to combine pluralism with one-party autocratic rule and “human rights” with “socialist regime preservation.”Footnote 103 In contrast, Preisner insisted that democratic pluralism and human rights could be promoted only in opposition to both “socialism” and the communist “totalitarian party.”Footnote 104
Václav Benda responded to Preisner’s criticism of the homegrown opposition in a letter published in another traditionalist exile journal, Rozmluvy (Discourses). He concurred that Preisner’s approach was too radically anticommunist and therefore not Catholic.Footnote 105 Preisner’s “right-wing critique,” Benda wrote, amounts to the “collective guilt principle and Manichean, substantively conceptualized, deterministic evil, which means a factual negation of guilt and the reduction of an individual to a mere carrier of good and evil.”Footnote 106 In this sense, Benda argued, Preisner’s perspective denies the possibility of a Christian understanding of personal conversion, and social and political reconciliation.
For all its anticommunism, Preisner’s totalitarian model, however, unsettled the simple Cold War civilizational distinction. He recast the modern West, in Voegelin’s terms, as the “Occident” (okcident), which has developed in a form of “mirror parallelism” alongside “Christian Europe” or “West” (Západ), drawing on Michael Novak’s Catholic vision.Footnote 107 He projected the West as a space defined by democracy, civil liberties, pluralism, and human rights. Besides, Preisner’s civilizationism was both antinationalist and anticolonial. Czech nationalism appeared not as an antidote to communism but as one of the regime’s key legitimizing idioms, severing collective identities from their Christian, “organic” foundations.
Preisner turned to the concept of “Central Europe” (střední Evropa) not simply as a historical region, but as a normative and political ideal. In the 1984 second volume of his Critique of Totalitarianism, entitled The Czech Existence, Preisner constructed a normative vision of the region imbued with a mission to “direct and neutralize irrational and destructive forces that beset the European core from the Orient, but also from the Occident.”Footnote 108 As the only “legitimate” and “nonideological” source of the federalization of Central Europe, Preisner romanticized the Habsburg monarchy. In his view, Habsburg tutelage secured a degree of democratic freedom and pluralism precisely because it avoided the construction of a centralized, sovereign nation-state and resisted the top-down imposition of modern, and at times totalitarian, political ideologies.Footnote 109
In his telling, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 and the creation of interwar nation-states shattered the “organism of the neighborhood,” casting Central European societies into an “ahistorical space.”Footnote 110 The end of the empire paved the way for the “colonial” domination of the region, first by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and then in the 1940s by Bolshevik Soviet communism. These two colonial powers effectively transformed Central Europe into a buffer zone of Soviet totalitarianism, which incrementally suffocates Western culture in general.Footnote 111
The Benda’s post-totalitarian and Preisner’s anti-gnostic models show that the totalitarian theory in the late Cold War was not a unified doctrine but an internally heterogeneous construct, shaped by competing canons, concepts, and strategies. What bound both positions together was a shared anticommunism and anti-utopianism, which enabled Christian democrats to diagnose the conditions of totalitarian domination far more fully than to articulate a positive theory of a democratic order.
Performative human rights
In this section, I trace how Christian democrats linked their models of totalitarianism to a performative conception of human rights, treating them as tools of political mobilization. They reactivated the human rights strategy that dated back to the pre-communist Third Republic (1945–8), when domestic Christian democratic parties employed human rights as a guiding principle, inspired by the then influential conception of Jacques Maritain.Footnote 112 These parties sought to constitutionalize human rights and ratify international human rights agreements to resist the communist state capture, but to no avail. Following the communist takeover in 1948 and the subsequent Stalinist period, human rights discourse remained marginal in Czechoslovakia until the 1960s.Footnote 113
At that time, the Communist Party’s legal experts deployed human rights language within the framework of rehabilitation commissions tasked with addressing Stalinist-era political trials.Footnote 114 In the socialist conception, rights were granted by the sovereign state rather than by international law, privileged collective over individual rights, and lacked any natural or inviolable character.Footnote 115 The emerging prominence of human rights was followed by the official publication in 1969 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).Footnote 116
However, the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968 halted the legislative process of enacting the covenant. Thus Czechoslovakia entered the international human rights regime only in 1975, after the signing of the Helsinki Final Act. From that moment, Christian democrats, alongside other oppositional currents, could newly incorporate into their repertoire claims about the regime’s compliance with international legal norms, in particular the covenant formulation of the “inherent dignity of the human person.”Footnote 117
In what follows, I demonstrate that the Czechoslovak counter-elite’s human rights vernacular drew not only on the well-documented natural human rights of the phenomenological tradition but also on the Thomist personalist lineage.Footnote 118 I reconstruct Czech Thomist personalism through four interrelated notions—human dignity, human rights, Christian conscience, and responsibility—and examine how these concepts were reworked into a performative logic.
Czech Thomist personalism was most comprehensively theorized by Rio Preisner. In his 1984 “Czech Question,” Preisner foregrounded Jacques Maritain’s conception of “Christocentric” personalism and formulated it as a key tool to contest Marxist “secular” or “anthropocentric” humanism, which in his view excluded the spiritual aspirations of a “person” as well as the value of individual freedom.Footnote 119 For Preisner, the defining universal and inviolable quality of human beings resides in “human dignity” (lidská důstojnost). Dignity is ontological and theistic, not merely a legal category; if dignity is detached from a Christian understanding of the person as “imago Dei,” it becomes vulnerable to being hollowed out and captured by ideological, totalitarian projects.Footnote 120
Unlike Preisner, Václav Benda and Josef Zvěřina drew more on the Second Vatican Council documents, especially Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatis Humanae, rather than on Maritain. They tied human dignity to human rights, especially to the concepts of responsibility (odpovědnost), to underline the performative dimension of Christian personalism. As Zvěřina put it, human rights could not be “granted” by any political system, since they belonged to the very structure of God-given and dignity-based personhood. The “natural,” “inherent,” or “inviolable” human rights had to be practiced rather than merely declared. Discussing Dignitatis Humanae, Zvěřina contended, “Human rights are not a privilege for us, for the Church, etc., but they are our duty towards others.”Footnote 121 Benda’s vision of the “parallel polis” represented the means by which individuals could transform the declaratory character of natural rights into reality by forming solidaristic relationships with the “persecuted” and “powerless” to weaken the state’s monopoly over political and social life.
The performative dimension of Catholic rights talk was expanded by the conceptual innovation of “freedom of conscience” (svoboda svědomí), used interchangeably with “Christian conscience” (křesťanské svědomí), which became central to it.Footnote 122 Catholic activists had begun to use the language of conscience already in the 1960s, after years spent in Stalinist prisons for faith-based activities. The immediate problem was the Vatican’s conciliatory turn toward Soviet communism under John XXIII’s Ostpolitik.Footnote 123 For those who had suffered imprisonment and exclusion, the Vatican shift raised a difficult question: how to interpret past resistance if the Church itself now sought accommodation with the communist state.
In response, local Catholics insisted that personal faith could not be reduced to institutional obedience or to formal membership in the Roman Catholic Church. They emphasized the “primacy of conscience in confronting the totalitarian regime,” presenting opposition as an autonomous moral choice grounded in individual “freedom” and “responsibility” of conscience rather than in directives from the Vatican.Footnote 124 This move also brought inductive theology to the foreground: faith was conceptualized as a lived, subjective experience, not simply as assent to the “objective” body of Church doctrine.Footnote 125
In the late 1970s and the 1980s, the concept of a Christian conscience gradually acquired a staunchly nonconformist and anti-regime meaning, becoming a site of individual but also collective resistance. Benda framed conscience as an instance in which a person encounters the truth (transcendence) and refuses to remain complicit with the totalitarian system.Footnote 126 He repeatedly framed responsibility toward one’s conscience and the “common good” as the core virtueFootnote 127 and a key ingredient of future political life that would depend on morally responsible citizens.Footnote 128 This responsibility, he believed, should be fostered by the renewed roles of parallel structures and should be practiced through “small, local, concrete” acts of service, solidarity, and truth telling, thereby creating citizens capable of freedom and moral reasoning.Footnote 129
The turn toward conscience as an emancipatory political strategy was expanded by its use as a legal category too. In the Charter 77 statements written by the Slovak Christian democrat Ján Čarnogurský,Footnote 130 the notion of individual freedom of conscience entailed an imperative to act in accordance with one’s subjective moral beliefs and intuitions against prevailing social norms, particularly in defense of the “oppressed” of any kind. Conscience thus functioned as the primary limit on state power, a “moral boundary” that could not be crossed. Čarnogurský described conscience as the “highest level of knowledge,” superior to rationality insofar as it enabled moral judgment. Yet the Christian conscience was not merely subjective; it was, ultimately, defined by official Church doctrine.Footnote 131
For this reason, Čarnogurský argued that freedom of conscience was unattainable without access to the theological and ethical instructions provided by organized and institutionalized churches. Therefore he repeatedly contested the 1949 package of communist anti-Church laws then still in force, which legally constrained the Church’s autonomy, limited religious instructions, banned religious orders, and nationalized Church property, among other things. He argued that, in this context, the right to freedom of conscience was inhibited also by the Czechoslovak penal code, which effectively violated the constitutional right to individual religious freedom. Čarnogurský underlined that the regime created a legal trap in which religious practice could be penalized through arbitrary legal decisions.
Another of Čarnogurský’s criticisms was that although individual freedom of religion was nominally guaranteed, priests and even lay believers could still be prosecuted under ordinary criminal provisions whenever the regime chose to treat religious activity as a threat to public order or state interests. No less importantly, Čarnogurský contested the 1960 Socialist Constitution, which nullified the constitutional protection for religious organizations, despite these protections being guaranteed by international law.Footnote 132
In this section, I have shown that the Christian democratic dissidents did not simply adopt the human rights language that entered late socialist Europe through Helsinki, nor did they merely reproduce the phenomenological or liberal idioms usually discussed in the available historiography. They reworked Thomist personalism into a performative conception of human rights, in which dignity, conscience, and responsibility can acquire meaning through acts of solidarity. This rights talk was therefore both emancipatory and conservative: it challenged the totalitarian claim over individual life, while grounding freedom in a Catholic account of personhood. If antitotalitarianism provided the language through which these intellectuals diagnosed the pathologies of communist rule, civil society and human rights theories marked the strategy through which the dictatorship could be contested.
These findings refine Chappel’s binary model between paternal (anticommunist) and fraternal (antifascist) Catholicism.Footnote 133 If paternal Catholicism privileges traditional social hierarchies and authorities, and fraternal Catholicism foregrounds civil society, social solidarity, and democracy, then the Czechoslovak relaunch demonstrates convergence and that the boundary between the two is far less stable. Indeed, under a communist dictatorship, paternal Catholicism can appropriate strategies ascribed to the fraternal tradition and vice versa.
Conclusion
In this article, I have reconstructed an episode in the global history of Christian democracy in a context usually assumed to preclude it: Eastern Europe, a hollowed-out and state-controlled Roman Catholic Church, and the absence of free party competition. In this sense, my case study expands the geography and temporality of Western, and often German-centered Christian democratic model. I suggested that Christian democracy should be approached as a plural, context-bound tradition whose intellectual canons, principles, and values are continuously being transformed. By unearthing the late socialist dissent episode in Czechoslovakia, I have demonstrated how Christian democracy was reactivated not as a delayed imitation of the postwar model, but as a distinctive ideological response shaped by the specific experience of dictatorship and exile.
I reconstructed the Czechoslovak relaunch through the intellectual labor of four protagonists: Václav Benda, Josef Zvěřina, Rio Preisner, and Ján Čarnogurský. I explained how they revived Christian democracy through canon modification. Although Jacques Maritain and other postwar progressive Catholic political theorists and theologians were not abandoned, they were reread alongside homegrown phenomenology (Patočka, Havel) and, in part, against the neoconservative canon (Voegelin, Novak). Under such a re-canonization, Christian democracy became one of the central non-Marxist counter-elite strategies, grounded in the language of antitotalitarianism, either post-totalitarian or anti-gnostic, a communitarian civil society coupled with nonconformist ecclesiology, natural and performative human rights, and exclusionary civilizationism. By reconstructing the canonicity of these concepts, I showed that Christian democracy did not dissolve into the New Right but was instead reformulated for the late socialist autocratic opening.
I leave to future research the question of how Christian democratic language was adjusted to the 1980s anti-regime campaigns around memory politics, abortion and other bioethical questions, and religious liberty in Czechoslovakia. The same applies to the question of how this cycle of contention shaped post-1989 Christian democratic party formation and the character of democratic transition itself, including constitutionalism and some of the most stringent decommunization and transitional-justice schemes in post-socialist Eastern Europe. More broadly, the Czechoslovak case invites an inquiry into Christian democracy under autocracy and its cross-regional variations.
The late socialist Christian democratic episode complicates the genealogy claimed by contemporary transatlantic Catholic post-liberals.Footnote 134 In their historical narratives, they have recast Eastern Europe into a privileged place for staging what the allegedly exhausted secular West has lost: cultural and national cohesion, religious vitality, and the confidence to legislate morality. They portray the region’s Cold War insulation from the waves of cultural liberalism and “neo-Marxism” as a key advantage, one that preserved a supposedly authentic and unencumbered conservatism. For instance, Rod Dreher explicitly transposes the experience of Soviet bloc dissidents into a warning about a soft totalitarianism of the contemporary liberal order.Footnote 135 Yet the evidence from Czechoslovakia complicates such appropriation. It demonstrates that the Christian democrats were far from Western isolation. Rather than choosing the “Benedict option,” they directly confronted the dictatorship, formulating a political strategy based on pluralist arguments and emancipation. This activism, however, carried high stakes—exile, incarceration, and prohibition from exercising priestly ministry, among others—a horizon of risk that sharply distinguishes late socialist Christian democratic dissent from the contemporary Catholic post-liberal project.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Piotr Kosicki, Zsolt Enyedi, Samuel Moyn, Rosario Forlenza, Stathis Kalyvas, Marci Shore, Grzegorz Ekiert, Norbert Kmeť, András Bozóki, Mathias Riedl, and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and encouragement.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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