The subtitle rather than the title describes Sonja Luehrmann's project: this is a study of the Soviet attempt to replace religion with scientific rationalism, and of post-Soviet efforts by Protestants and practitioners of Chimarij paganism to build congregations in the Mari Republic (or Marij El), her research site. In her telling, this is a single story in which atheists and preachers share a commitment to didacticism and are in fact often one and the same: many of her post-Soviet religious leaders are former atheist activists who now apply their Soviet-era didactic techniques to religious recruitment. In her view, they propagate post-Soviet religion in the same way they propagated Soviet atheism, by teaching their recruits doctrines and methods and then unleashing them to recruit others. She calls the resulting structures didactic networks. She suggests that this interweaving of the secular and the sacred is what Max Weber called an “elective affinity.” I would instead call it a homology rooted in the similarity of the tasks undertaken. Once the Soviet government abandoned the attempt to wipe out religious belief by brute force, and after World War II sought instead to demonstrate the foolishness of a religious interpretation of the world around us, it needed to mobilize and guide persuaders and outfit them with workable techniques of persuasion. That is just what post-Soviet Pentecostals, Lutherans, and Chimarij activists attempt to do. It is also, as Luehrmann points out, just what proselytizing denominations do all over the world, and proselytizers in the Mari Republic deliberately borrow techniques from them, too. Luehrmann in fact argues out that while there are fascinating similarities between Soviet atheist work and Pentecostal missionizing, there is nothing inherently Soviet about post-Soviet religious practices. On the other hand, when she discusses the possible genealogies of those practices, she sometimes gives the impression that they may indeed have Soviet roots.

It is not so much Soviet secularism as secularist activism that Luehrmann analyzes, and a question that immediately arises is how successful that movement was if so many of its participants shed their atheist commitment so easily. She certainly does show that many of those recruited to lecture against religion, or to perform scientific demonstrations of materialism's superior explanatory power, were not working from scripts handed down from Moscow. Rather, given a list of possible topics and some methodological guidance, they developed their own public presentations, and they derived personal satisfaction from their work. It is only a slight simplification of her argument to say that they became atheists by performing atheism. Given their life stories, it may be that they were people with activist inclinations, and that once the Soviet mission had been discredited they cast about for another. In the same way, it is sometimes said, many East German Nazis became East German Communists, and collaborators easily switched loyalties from Nazi to Soviet occupation regimes. Luehrmann points out that, as under other consciously secular regimes, secularist activists in the Soviet Union aimed at collective transformation of society, rather than at liberal individualism. Her atheist activists certainly subscribed to that program, but did it resonate with the Soviet public at large? Answering that question would require a rather different study. But Luehrmann does show that the audience the atheists addressed often misheard the message.

Luehrmann devotes considerable attention to the post-Soviet Orthodox Church. It does not fit neatly into her atheist-to-religious-activist paradigm, and to her credit she does not try to force the Orthodox into that box. The post-Soviet Orthodox have benefited from official favor, and they have restored and built churches, whereas Protestants and Chimarij rent space or worship in the post-Soviet equivalent of storefront churches, and often meet with official disfavor. The Orthodox do not proselytize as Protestants do and do not depend upon didactic networks for growth. Some former secularist activists have become priests in the Orthodox Church, but they are (on the evidence Luehrmann presents) less inclined to think that secularist didacticism provides any lessons for post-Soviet Christianity. When discussing the Orthodox, Luehrmann dwells chiefly on theology (icons, spirituality vs. sensuality) and liturgy, and she makes useful comparisons between Orthodox and Pentecostal practices and ideas. But we get less sense of the experience of post-Soviet Orthodox congregants than we do of Protestants and Chimarij.

For most readers, everything Luehrmann writes about the Chimarij religion will be new. Chimarij was not among the religions recognized (in the form of official registration) by the post-Stalin Soviet government, nor is it treated as a traditional and therefore entirely legitimate religion in post-Soviet Russia. In order to establish their legitimacy, Chimarij priests have collaborated with Mari ethnographers to produce something like holy writ, a prayer book, and a catechism, which they formerly lacked. It is probably for the best that Luehrmann does not dwell on encoded Chimarij doctrine, but I would have appreciated a more systematic description of their religious practice. At its center, in any case, are worship in sacred groves, seasonal worship festivals, and animal sacrifice; not surprisingly, it is a fundamentally rural religion. Because their priests were practically wiped out under Stalin, different priests offer different reconstructions of traditional worship. The chief Chimarij priest (not recognized as such by all Chimarij) employs didactic mobilization practices similar to the Protestants', but the religion's principal appeal seems to be its identification with Mari ethnicity, which sets it sharply apart from the Protestant denominations. Indeed, the Chimarij insist that their religion is as traditional as Orthodoxy.

Luerhmann provides some very sensitive extended analyses of particular meetings, ceremonies, and encounters, including the effort to mobilize support for closing the last Orthodox church in the republic's capital, Joshkar-Ola, in 1960. She offers insightful observations on activist Soviet secularists' views of their religious competition. She makes a suggestive (but, in my own view, unproved) argument that the notable Soviet-era fluctuation of religious practice over the lifetime—more at the very beginning and after retirement than during working years—was rooted in prerevolutionary rural religious practices, rather than being an opportunist exploitation of Soviet officials' relative indifference to infants and retirees. Some of her claims—on the propensity of atheist activists to reinvent themselves as religious proselytizers, for instance—might have been bolstered by statistics: among all the religious activists she encountered, exactly how many had begun their careers as propagandists of atheism? Among a sample of one-time atheist activists, how many later became religious activists? Nevertheless, the argument she makes is convincing, and it greatly enhances our understanding of the post-Soviet revival of religion.