Of the various dimensions of the “European project,” the role of religion is one of the more controversial. East European religious traditions are often at odds with those in Western Europe, with lagging modernity and the fifty-year crucible of Communism cited as explanations for the asymmetries. Its borderland function and the challenges posed by European Union (EU) enlargement further heighten the relevance of these differences.
The present volume, a compilation of papers presented at conferences at Calvin College and the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, aims to enhance the understanding of this religious legacy in Eastern Europe, with some tentative implications for Europe as a whole. The organizers and editors, Bruce Berglund and Brian Porter-Szűcs, seek to “look beyond the narratives of resistance and collaboration” (book jacket) that have typified many works on religion and church-state relations in Eastern Europe. In his introduction, Porter-Szűcs sets out the goal “to restore the complexity and human agency that had been muffled” (3) and to “flesh out complexities and subtleties of church-state relations for four decades” (21), which all of the contributions do most admirably. Some other secondary goals—to challenge the secularization thesis prevalent in Western Europe (4–5), to debunk the notion of a clash of civilizations (12–13), or “decenter the nation from the investigation of Christianity in Eastern Europe” (343), for example—are pursued more inconsistently across the contributions.
Most states in the region are covered in the form of narrow case studies, employing new archival sources and oral history. Some focus on the very portentous interwar period. On Hungary, for example, Paul Hanebrink explores the contribution of both Catholic and Protestant churches to an exclusionary Hungarian culture between the wars. Similarly, Martin Putna investigates the divergent strains of political thought among Czech Catholic intellectuals.
Others treat the early post-World War II period and the impact of the advent of Communism. James Felak's well-researched analysis of the political dilemmas facing Slovak Catholics after the collapse of the Tiso regime underscores the distinctive roles of activists and hierarchy in the partisan maneuvering before the 1948 Communist coup. Natalia Shlikhta revisits the issue of the absorption of the Uniates into the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in western Ukraine after 1945.
Some of the studies address specific issues to illustrate the argument that churches could sometimes influence the implementation of Communist religious policy, particularly at the grassroots. Ancu Sincan finds that local officials were susceptible to bribery and that the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC) was able to manipulate state officials to build new churches in Transylvania, although overstating the importance of this finding given the nationality policy of Bucharest. Religious limitations to state power and seeds of future protest were present in the GDR as well, as shown in David Doellinger's study of its 1962 law on conscientious objection and its role in fostering later social protest.
Some of the contributors draw conclusions that challenge standard interpretations. For example, Shlikhta sees the Uniates pursuing a strategy of passive resistance, subverting antireligious and assimilationist policies and even aspiring to Ukrainianize the ROC. Although she rejects the view of contemporary Russian scholars that the ROC was forced to eliminate the Uniates by Stalin, Shlikhta describes the ROC's stance as complying with the state in order to survive. Regional variations in religiosity lead James Bjork to conclude that Poland's reputation as a Catholic bulwark was not historical, but derived from nation-building efforts by the postwar episcopate. Another author, Katharina Kunter, intriguingly concludes that the Czech Protestants' experience as a minority in a historically Catholic setting predisposed them to stronger advocacy of human rights than the majority GDR Protestants. Perhaps most unusual is the argument of Galia Valtchinova that the religious revival in late Socialist Bulgaria was spearheaded by a seer, Vanga, whose fortune-telling was apparently coveted by Communists themselves and served as a substitute for religion.
Most ambitious theoretically are the three essays that bookend the contributions. Contemplating Islam in contemporary Europe, Patrick Patterson analyzes a distinctive East European response critical of Islam, serving to revitalize political Christianity in otherwise secular Western Europe. Porter-Szűcs sees Eastern Europe challenging the accepted paradigms, be they the secularization/modernization thesis or the clash of civilizations concept, and calls for serious consideration of theological and subjective motivations, not simply ethnoreligious explanations. Berglund hails a “new conceptual geography” (459), in which peripheral Eastern Europe provides the deeper spiritual foundation that the European project is lacking.
The high standard of historical scholarship, the variety of cases, and its interdisciplinary emphasis make the volume quite rewarding for the academic and lay reader alike.
