Communist Perspectives on Atheism in the Twentieth Century

This book offers an analysis of the wide range of attitudes that communist movements and regimes adopted towards atheism during the 20th century. Despite the well-known violent fight of the Bolsheviks against believers, for example, and religious persecution in communist regimes at different times, being a communist did not always go hand in hand with being an atheist oneself or with the will to actively spread atheism. The reasons for the changing links between communism and atheism, ranging from militant atheists to communists presenting themselves as defenders of the authentic religion, deserved precise, in-depth investigation. The book's case studies on Greece, Albania, Italy, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Slovenia, Afghanistan, and Vietnam and its common focus on the causes of atheism will be of interest to scholars of these areas but also of atheism and secularism, religion, and politics. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons-Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Eva Guigo-Patzelt is an associate member of CéSor - Centre d'études en sciences sociales du religieux (EHESS/CNRS) in France and a project lead within the Explaining Atheism Programme led by Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland.

Foreword: The Spectre of Atheism (Pierre-Antoine Fabre); Introduction: Investigating Causes of Atheism and Atheisation in Communist Contexts (Eva Guigo-Patzelt); SECTION 1: THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNIST ATHEISM IN INTERWAR AND POST-WORLD WAR II EUROPE; Chapter 1: "Sacred Parasites" or "People's Allies": The Greek Socialist Movement between Christian-Socialism and Bolshevik Anti-Clericalism (1880-1940) (Kostas Paloukis); Chapter 2: Technocratic Secularism and Religion in Communist Albania (Artan R. Hoxha); Chapter 3: "Is Marxism Necessarily Atheistic?" Gustav Wetter, the Holy See and the Condemnation of Communism (Marie Lucas and Mikhail Velizhev); SECTION 2: EASTERN EUROPEAN AMBIVALENCES IN THE 1970S AND 1980S; Chapter 4: Formation and Dissolution of the Museum for the Development of Social Consciousness in Bratislava (Jan Tesar); Chapter 5: New Thinking in the Nuclear Age? Marxist-Leninist Conceptions of War and Peace in the GDR in the 1980s and the Dialogue with Churches and Christians (Stephen G. Brown); Chapter 6: Shifting Paradigms: Religiosity and Atheization in Socialist Slovenia (GaSper Mithans and Mateja Rezek); SECTION 3: REALIGNMENTS OF COMMUNISM AND ATHEISM IN VARYING RELIGIOUS EXTRA-EUROPEAN CONTEXTS; Chapter 7: "Muslim Communists": Afghan Atheism in the 20th Century (Sayed Hassan Akhlaq); Chapter 8: Navigating "Superstition", Science, and (Non-)Belief: Religious Engineering and Dynamics of Secularism in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1955-1975 (Thao Nghiem).