Cold War

On the eastern side of the Cold War, atheism was state doctrine and the churches lived as suspects. The Soviet Union had already destroyed most of its religious institutions between the wars; the postwar decades added Khrushchev's renewed antireligious campaign of 1959 to 1964, which closed roughly half the Orthodox parishes that had reopened during the war, while the surviving hierarchy was penetrated by the security services and dissenting priests and Baptists filled the camps. Across the new satellite states the pattern repeated with local variations: the show trial of Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary in 1949, the imprisonment of Cardinal Wyszynski in Poland, the suppression of the Greek Catholic churches of Ukraine and Romania, which were forcibly merged into Orthodoxy and driven underground, and the League of Militant Atheists' successors teaching scientific atheism in every school.

Albania went furthest, declaring itself the world's first atheist state in 1967 and banning religious practice outright. In Asia the same decades brought the suppression of Buddhism in China and Tibet, the destruction of temples and monasteries in the Cultural Revolution, and the flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959.

Yet persecution nowhere produced the extinction it aimed at. Underground seminaries ordained in secret, Bibles were smuggled by the truckload, and the persistence of belief under pressure became one of the quiet facts of the confrontation, and one of the forces that ended it.

The West fought the Cold War partly as a war of faith. American public religion was rebuilt around the confrontation: the words under God entered the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and In God We Trust became the national motto in 1956, explicit answers to godless communism, while preachers from Billy Graham to Fulton Sheen made anticommunism a pulpit theme and the CIA and Western governments quietly funded religious broadcasting and emigre churches. The Vatican, which had excommunicated communists in 1949, moved in the 1960s and 1970s to the patient negotiation of Ostpolitik, trading recognition for breathing room for the churches behind the Iron Curtain, a policy argued over inside the church to this day.

The confrontation's turning point had a religious face. The election of Karol Wojtyla as John Paul II in 1978 put a Pole on the throne of Peter, and his 1979 pilgrimage to Poland, where a third of the country came out to see him, restored a public identity the state could not control; the Solidarity movement that followed carried the church's imagery through the shipyards. A decade later the East German revolution of 1989 gathered in churches, the Monday prayers at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig swelling into the demonstrations that brought down the wall.

After 1991 religion returned across the former bloc in force, rebuilt cathedrals and restored patriarchates alongside new entanglements of church and state, and the scholarship gathered by Dianne Kirby has made the Cold War's religious front a field of its own.