By Martin L. Smith
I was clearing out a drawer the other day and came across a stray slide from my travels to Russian and Ukraine in 1972. At this time the state was still relentlessly choking the churches to death with every kind of constraint and harassment and subjecting the entire population to atheist propaganda. Seeing the picture of myself as a rather nervous young man sporting his first moustache, I remembered my feelings of terror as I passed through customs in Leningrad with 20 copies of the New Testament in Russian concealed in my luggage, and my relief at getting away with my smuggling. It wasn’t until I reached Yalta that I finally passed them on, at the church where my grandparents had met. I suppose that impulse arose out of a grateful sense that I wouldn’t be here if my grandmother hadn’t left the family dacha to go to the service there one Sunday in 1914 and been noticed admiringly by my vacationing grandfather. But I could have left them in a church anywhere, since the state permitted so few Bibles to be printed that they were desperately sought after by spiritually parched Christians.
It’s hard for us to imagine the straits to which the church was reduced. Every kind of overt Christian activity was banned except the holding of church services. And what was most demoralizing were the consequences of the KGB policy of infiltrating its agents into the clergy at every level, from bishop to parish priest, in order to sap the church’s strength from within. Regular applicants to the few seminaries permitted to limp on were vetted to weed out the strong and bring forward the shaky, whose vulnerabilities could be exploited in due time. I remember comparing notes with an old mentor of mine, Dr. Nicholas Zernov, after he had returned from a visit. He told me he had visited a parish in Moscow and noticed after the service that everyone seemed to be very friendly to the young priest who had just been the chief celebrant, while coldly ignoring an elderly priest who had assisted. He asked one of the ladies of the congregation why this was so, and she replied that their new parish priest was an atheist KGB agent who had been planted on them, while the old priest was beloved, a man of God to his fingertips—but if they had appeared in any way to favor him, he would have been taken away.
Imagine worshipping week by week in the calm certainty that your parish priest had made hypocrisy a career and was a cynical enemy of the church! Perhaps we wouldn’t have the kind of faith that believed that the mystery of the Eucharist so entirely depended on the living action of the Holy Spirit that the celebrant might actually be an atheist and it wouldn’t matter!
Few people, however hard they prayed back then in support of their suffering fellow Christians behind the Iron Curtain, who had endured decades of persecution, could have predicted the reversal that lay just ahead. Now the churches are in full spate of revival, and it is the vast machinery of atheist propaganda and materialist ideology that has come crashing down into ruins. Not all is rosy: Russian Orthodoxy is always in danger of trying to gain a spiritual monopoly and revert to old authoritarian ways. But the historic reversal is staggering in its irony and its scale.
I think about these things under the heading: The Astounding Resilience of the Christian Faith. And they feed my reflections on a noticeable recent phenomenon, an outburst of books furiously denouncing religion as a toxic relic of the past and extolling the saving power of atheism. We all have seen them piled up in the mass market bookstores. Even those whose writers have the most intellectual credentials display a remarkably similar tone to those that are more propagandistic. They are strikingly shrill and caustic. They vigorously repudiate any kind of empathy with the religious impulse.
The content of these books have much to say that Christians must both hear and answer. But the tone is also fascinating in itself. Perhaps it is one sign that secularists are in fact baffled and exasperated by the fertility and resilience of religion. Shrewd observers are already talking of our contemporary world as the scene for a “crisis of secularism.” Those who dreamed that enlightened reason and science would be winning the day by now have to face a great deal of evidence that they have been just dreaming. In reality, spiritual belief and practice is proving to be globally resilient. The scathing tone of this “new atheism” might be the symptom of insecurity and frustration, rather than the confidence of those who have victory in their sights.
Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is the senior associate rector at St. Columba’s, D.C.