RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

...Understanding this central reality of religious experience admittedly challenges all the deeply ingrained egocentric habits and methods of our time...

...All of us, finally, shape our lives with reference to whatever we experience as the dominant presence within those lives...

...They represent not THE GREAT TRUTH but a homely truism, capable of winning economic arguments yet incapable of capturing the imagination of humans preoccupied with concerns more basic than the economic—the need for a sense of personal identity and of social integration, for centering and homecoming...

...This, basically, means taking as the starting point for inquiry precisely those constant structures of subject experience of which subjects are directly aware (albeit in ordinary experience only marginally), isolating and describing them and interpreting the actual phenomena through them...

...Even in purely anthropological terms, what separates the human in the full sense of the word from the naked ape, or even a lavishly dressed one, is the act of worship in which the subject bows before something that transcends and challenges the self-enclosed preoccupation with needs and satisfaction— the encounter with the Good, the Beautiful, the Holy...

...Success or failure during that period cannot be measured in terms of socialism's ability to bring commissars to power but rather in terms of its socioeconomic impact...

...Socialism's appearance on the stage of world history is as fleeting as the special phase of socioeconomic development whose by-product it is—it is religious faith, rooted in the very condition of being-human, that is perennial...

...That initial impression, however, 177 will bear only little critical examination...

...For anyone not swayed by the messianic rhetoric of the revolutionaries, the Revolution and its aftermath brought few real surprises...

...Again, it is a theory incorporated into rather than originating with Marxism...

...Those reflect far more our confusion than our understanding...

...That is why, unlike in secular or secularized creeds, the core of the religious outreach is not the teaching of specific doctrines but rather the opening of the eyes of fellow humans to the Presence of God...

...What humans say is secondary: the fundamental reality is what God does...

...It is quite possible that the 12 percent of committed believers—a far greater force than a disoriented and unconcerned 88 percent—will yield to temptation and replace Marxist autocracy with an Orthodox theocracy, restarting the vicious cycle of discredited religion and secular messianism...

...Here—not in the naive tale of bounty appended to it—is the real resolution, the fundamental transformation...

...Yet, each year there are many more applicants to the seminaries than the seminaries may accept or the churches may place...

...Marxism in the role of a mystified ideology has utterly 174 discredited not only itself but all ideology, all ideals, all beliefs...

...The constant structure of the subject wayofbeing that we describe as "religion" is also the key to religion as a social phenomenon...

...In conversation after conversation, the same tacit assumption emerges...

...It is to the point...

...To them the church appeared, not without reason, as an obstacle and a particularly greedy competitor...

...The dual need for centering and homecoming follows rigorously from that basic trait of our being as we actually live it as first-person subjects...

...Certainly, the emergence of spontaneous religious faith in lands where it long had been preempted by established hierarchies, as in Russia or the Ukraine, together with the tenacity of religious faith in such lands as Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, or East Germany, will offer the possibility of a rational and democratic socialism in the future...

...But why in the world should such an offering, promising no advantages and exacting a heavy cost, hold any appeal to anyone in a society that has been thoroughly secularized, permeated by cynicism and corruption, and driven into an escape from a mandated ideology in the quest for the three keys...

...In that respect, the antiecclesiastical rhetoric of socialism echoes a genuinely prophetic critique of the priestly establishment...

...But in the West belief, not cynicism, is the accepted posture—be that belief ecological, political, social, or religious...

...Socialism can be "democratic"—that is, rational rather than messianic, solving specific problems rather than attempting global transformations— only where a vital religious faith effectively confronts and resolves the pressing needs for centering and homecoming, and their reconciliation...

...The profound, perennial truth is that the success of socialism in its appointed task of secular economic reform does depend on the stability of personal religious faith...

...Our objectifying methodology might be adequate for the natural sciences...

...Even the few well-meaning adolescents who start out wanting to believe in Marxism soon lose their faith in the abyss between the lifeless theory and the vicious praxis...

...Nothing is changed yet everything is transformed...

...That obscure theological recognition again points to an all too ordinary experience...

...For a believer, this is a non-question, showing utter incomprehension...

...The believer does live in two dimensions, one sacred, the other profane, drawing on the former for the strength and perspective to cope with the weariness of the latter...

...I AM THAT I AM: that basic, inescapable, radically transforming realization is an attempt to articulate the awesome experience of standing in the presence of God...

...More specifically, for a subject who cannot imagine things being other than they are, whatever happens to be actual also appears as necessary, a "matter of course...

...In justice to the social sciences, their analyses, though dealing with the social uses and abuses of religion rather than with its essence, were frequently quite accurate...

...The vitality of that faith surprises even Western observers by its contrast with the negligent unconcern of the West and the corrosive cynicism of the "objective socialist" societies in East and Central Europe...

...Vice versa, the same is true of mass movements that promise their followers a sense of homecoming, of belonging and having a place, such as Marxian or national socialism, or various quasi-religious "crusades...

...The common denominator of all the lands of the Soviet empire is that here people simply do not believe...

...For, stripped of its messianic appeal, what does socialism have to offer...

...That thesis is, after all, basically a formula for a rebirth of the faith...

...Socialism can capture that imagination by promising to meet those needs, but whenever it or any secular movement makes that promise, posing as the Great Truth, it becomes The Great Lie...

...It is a belated recognition of what is perennial and what temporal...

...A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, or, more prosaically, a bowl of lentils and a fire: it takes so little to assure physical survival even at a reasonable level of comfort...

...God in His majesty becomes that...

...It is in extremis that humans most urgently turn to their God: in the face of death, guilt and meaninglessness...

...Here, then, the privileged perspective is that of the believer rather than of an observer, though of the believer as acting out a type of experience rather than in terms of his idiosyncratic ways of acting out that (type of) experience...

...In standing out into freedom, we win freedom at the cost of losing the peace of a center, of a home: centering and homecoming become the pressing preoccupation of the human in his humanity...

...What must I do to be made whole...

...Then who (or what) is God...

...Unquestionably, the thesis about the "sin of the churches" was crucial for the survival of religious communities under Communist rule...

...churches have been communities of believers rather than power hierarchies...

...It is, rather, the confidence and the freedom of knowing what matters—and what infinitely does not...

...Who we shall be is no longer something that happens to us, it is something we choose...

...Here, too, socialism—the assurance of individual security and the control of economic aggregates—seems likely to be realized at the smallest human cost, in the name of economic rationality rather than of a secular faith...

...What I have offered so far is, admittedly, a very limited sample of our usual misconceptions about religion...

...Being human means being self-chosen...

...For that matter, you can pass lightly over Job's debate with his three counselors and the young zealot Elihu...

...Such systems remain the vain "cunningly devised fables of men" of which Apostle Paul speaks...

...To understand phenomena so structured we need a radically different methodology, one that would describe the "inner logic" of such acts as love, hate or, for that matter, worship...

...There is no evidence of a corresponding faith on the Communist side...

...Borrowing from the terminology of recent thought, we can identify that basic awareness as one of existing or, more precisely, of eksisting, of standing out of the self-confining cycle of "natural necessity" into the openness of freedom...

...Even so, the average age of the membership of all Communist parties in power goes on rising...

...Of course it is impossible to believe in anything—but, if you must believe, then religious belief alone is not subject to universal scorn: if anything, religious believers command a certain respect...

...This, too, is a non-question, requiring a degree of detachment that is utterly incongruous within the experience of God's presence...

...In standing out into freedom, we lose both the unproblematic, unquestioning assurance of our identity and the easy, unquestioned sense of belonging...

...Seen from without, it might appear as humility, but that is not quite accurate...

...We have discarded any attempt actually to understand such phenomena from within, as subjects actually live them, as hopelessly tainted by private bias...

...In cultural or political opposition, such movements can be quite appealing: alleged "enemies" or "lack of power" absolve them from having to fulfill their promises while their emphasis does compensate for the solipsistic egoism of an open society—just as the solipsism of psychohygienic cults compensates for the conformism of mass culture...

...Having failed to distinguish between private, relative subjectivity and the necessary, transcendental structure of subject being, we have discarded all subjectivity as suspect, setting as the goal of our research the construction of objective models of social phenomena as of something "out there," analogous to thunderstorms and earthquakes...

...It meets none of the needs that the system recognizes or creates...

...We might, of course, postulate a psychological explanation, claiming that in any given population there will be a constant proportion of compulsive believers—and it might even be true...

...Both of these, to be sure, are entirely reasonable goals—and even urgent ones...

...Through countless millennia of human history, religious faith has been humankind's most persistent and pervasive trait...

...As with Paul on the road to Damascus, the "teaching"—really the articulation of the confrontation with God-comes later...

...The element of relief from the strains and cares of this world in the "peace that passeth all understanding" is a genuine dimension of religious experience...

...This tolerance, to be sure, is seldom as benign nor are the churches as vestigial as theory would have it, but that is another matter...

...Paul, Dietrich Bonhoffer or Jaroslav imsa in their prison letters, as countless humble believers in their daily lives—the believer achieves a centering that is not contingent upon the vicissitudes of a personal Ego: in God the believer finds a center impervious to the clamor of the world...

...Even upon the most superficial purview of the history of religion—such as Kautsky's—it becomes evident that religion has given humans the vision to revolt against oppression as frequently as it gave them the patience to bear it—or, from a sociological perspective, that religion has served as the ideology of revolution as often as it served as an ideology of oppression...

...In far less dramatic terms, it is this transformation that shines forth from the lives of the saints of our latter day, from the prison letters of a Bonhoffer or a imsa, from the daily life of the countless witnesses whose lives God has touched and transformed...

...Indeed it has, as the prophet Amos pointed out long before Jan Hus, Hus before Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard before Marx...

...For two centuries and more, religious faith in America has been largely the property of believers rather than of ecclesiastical establishments...

...Religions" that are invented ad hoc, to serve a particular purpose—as August Comte's "Cult of Humanity"—have little vitality...

...Even if our alternatives are limited, even if we are simply reaffirming what we find ourselves being, we are still choosing...

...But while noble and desirable, such proposals will hardly fire a mighty movement of social transformation...

...Having themselves opted for what they took to be more "rational" and less demanding creeds—such as science, socialism, psychoanalysis, or a vague "humanism"—leftist intellectuals in the West tended to assume that religion would wither away in the life of humankind at large as it had in their personal lives, except perhaps among the infirm, the aged, and the ignorant...

...But does God "exist...

...It is a matter of the three keys...

...To be sure, Viterslav Gardaysk)", the Marxist philosopher who chose this for the title of his book, found himself transferred from the post of full professor at Prague's Charles University to that of a state-farm laborer, but that was to be expected...

...Democratic socialists, keenly aware of the ravages wrought upon their ideals by fanaticism, tend to be most wary of any such messianic appeal—and, as we shall argue, rightly so...

...The primordial reality is the recognition of God's presence, obscured in daily life by preoccupation, pride and guilt, breaking through them in moments of dramatic or quiet crisis, placing human life in a new perspective...

...More prosaically, if socialism can rely on the vitality of religious faith to resolve the basic human needs for centering and homecoming, it can remain free to cope with humankind's trivial yet urgent socioeconomic needs...

...Here America may prove the acid test...

...Paradoxically, I believe that this precisely is its strength: the religious appeal ignores the entire artificial system mandated by the state and the party, the cliches and commands of Marxism and common sense alike...

...That, finally, is the reason why religious faith rises ever again, renewed and purified, out of the destruction of the churches and the collapses of secular messianism...

...Being human means being responsible for who we are...

...But, even out of that limited sample, a clear pattern emerges...

...Again, it is no accident: among humans insecure in their identity and precarious in their freedom, belonging can be purchased only at the cost of conforming, subordinating the demands of centering to the exigencies of the integration that creates the illusion of having come home...

...We need to ask instead, what 181 does it mean to be human as this presence that I am aware of being...

...Theologians like Josef Hromadka could, with much justification, conclude that the intellectuals could expect and the Bolsheviks demand a demise of religion because the churches themselves had trivialized and perverted religion first...

...History provides the answer: the moment of triumph becomes the moment of disintegration...

...Not by accident, nor by ill will, but necessarily: under the conditions of estranged finitude, the conflicting demands of centering and homecoming are not reconcilable by human effort...

...Formally defined, the believer is one who lives his life in God's presence...

...When the Presence of God replaces the believer's petty cares and concerns as the central reference point, the believer finds a confidence and a freedom that no longer depend on this world—and so cannot be threatened by it...

...The son of man, the Bible tells us by contrast, has no place to lay down his head, and our experience confirms it...

...Here homecoming is bought at the cost of centering...

...The special rage that Communist interrogators reserve for imprisoned priests reflects the repressed realization that there will still be God's priests, prophets, and believers long after the world has forgotten the commissars and their evil genius...

...Standing in the presence—or, more accurately, God confronting the human is the innermost core of all religious experience, the given from which all else derives: the Presence of God...

...Rather, those follow rigorously from the distinctively human dimension of our being...

...It would be the first time in Russian history that Russia would have a secular—that is, nonmessianic— government and could at last take its place among the lands of the European heritage rather than hovering as a perennial threat on their periphery...

...Here humanity enters in as well, because among all that range we have to choose which shall become actual...

...God is: this is the startling, overwhelming recognition that opens a religious dimension before the human...

...Within the scope that such movements set for themselves, they achieve impressive results: their adepts, perfectly centered in their emotions, do experience a profound "inner peace"—while utterly oblivious to the desolation of wrecked lives and relations wrought about them by their solipsistic self-absorbtion...

...It holds, basically, that religion is an early and particularly inept attempt at constructing a theoretical explanation of natural phenomena and so can be expected to wither away as more adequate explanations, scientific or economic, become available...

...More basically again, the "primitive science" theory is marred by a particularly problematic assumption of its own—that the primordial stance of the human toward the world is that of a knower, whose primary task and concern is that of explaining it...

...We belong nowhere, we need seek a home, struggle for an identity...

...But between that future and the present there stands the future collapse of the Soviet empire...

...Here the Book of Job presents the classic paradigm: the confrontation with God's presence brings about a fundamental inversion of perspective...

...Where the writ of Karl Marx runs unchallenged, philosophers have indeed been silenced, but out of that silence the spontaneous vitality of religious faith has emerged as both an irrepressible and an incomprehensible fact...

...but, as Karl Marx tells us, the task of a Marxist philosopher is to change it— and the "objectively socialist" regimes know just how they want it changed...

...Predicting the future is a precarious undertaking but, even in the present, we can discern a perennial principle: the success of a secular reform movement is contingent on the stability of religious faith...

...More frequently, it ranged from a bored contempt to a patronizing indifference...

...Without the priestly compromises, the faith, like Kierkegaard's, would become pure, radical, and irrelevant for everyday life...

...These are perennial aspects of human life, not a function of a particular economic system...

...The religious experience that alone could even occasion the question for God is precisely one of an encounter with the overwhelming reality of God's presence...

...Facing their own failings, as HromSdka called them to do, may have been the most painful but the most authentically religious response believers could have made to the Communist onslaught—whatever we 176 may think of HromSdka's conspicuous silence in the face of the monstrous evil perpetrated by the new secular rulers...

...Reconciliation and, incidentally, the freedom of action that follows from it, become possible because the center of reference is no longer Job's plaint but God Himself, the perspective no longer finitude but eternity...

...For this experience is not something humans invent or do, it is something that encounters them, something to which they respond but whose core is still a passio rather than an act...

...There are no reliable figures but a rough average of the divergent estimates of party officials and of the believers themselves would seem to put the figure at some 12 percent of the population...

...is no longer a mildly amusing mixture of an old faith and a new...

...When young people do join the party, they speak apologetically of economic necessity, often reasoning that they do so for the sake of the children they hope to raise and send to school years hence...

...The czars had their Orthodox Church, the Austrian emperors their Catholic one, the Prussian kings the Lutheran one, even the English royalty had, albeit in a far more genteel fashion, its Church of England—and they all called upon their churches to sanctify their every whim...

...Admittedly, few nominal Marxists are as outspoken about their cynicism as Leonid Brezhnev who, at Dresden in 1968, interrupted the theoretical justification of the Czechoslovak reforms of the day with the bored remark, "That's ideology: the fact is, we've got you and we aren't letting you go...

...Nor was Czar Nicholas the first to discover that a single priest is worth ten policemen...

...If, however, socialism must address our basic human needs, it cannot but fail, as it has already and necessarily failed in the Soviet empire—while the economic problems that it might resolve successfully go unmet and so acquire overpowering proportions...

...GardayskY sought to understand reality...

...Believers, seeking to articulate that experience, usually grope for words, simultaneously generating religious "doctrine" and misleading readers into looking for a doctrinal "content" rather than to the existential stance of faith...

...But even if we were to accept the "wishfulfillment" or "opiate" theories at face value, they still would not warrant an expectation of religion's demise after an economic reordering...

...Sometime take a moment to watch a turtle sunning itself on a hot rock by a pool: it is hard not to envy it...

...Even in Genesis, the focus is on the meaning of the rainbow or of the creation or whatever, rather than on its origins...

...For consider, what is it that humans really need...

...At least since Galileo we have treated the perspective of the disinterested observer as privileged, the intentionality of the subject as biased and suspect...

...Now that those advantages have been replaced by a staggering personal cost, their spiritual heirs cannot understand it at all...

...The great appeal of religious faith is precisely the promise, demonstrably fulfilled in men like Bonhoffer or §imsa, of a great reconciliation, of centering and homecoming...

...As free, we stand out, alone and precarious...

...The reason for the expectation of religion's impending demise is more likely to lie in the failure of modern social sciences to grasp the vital reality of that personal faith...

...That is what makes it so utterly incomprehensible that religious believers do...

...This seems frequently as incomprehensible to intelligent Western observers as to the rulers of the Soviet empire, albeit for different reasons...

...It speaks clearly and specifically to the genuine human needs, beneath all our distractions and confusions...

...It is tempting to say that 20th-century social scientists—with such honorable exceptions as Weber or Berger—have utterly misunderstood religion...

...But what of our original point, the reemerging, self-renewing vitality of religious faith in the lands of "objective socialism...

...That, too, is an irrepressible fact but, from a Marxist viewpoint, it is not incomprehensible...

...But what if any such movement were to triumph...

...q 185...

...At the other end of the scale, it is in the act of worship, in the anguished prayer, "Thy will be done," that we humans rediscover ourselves when reality challenges our self-centered arrogance...

...This is the operative principle in the various psychohygienic movements that promise "peace of mind," such as transcendental meditation, Jungianism, or any of a number of pietistic cults using vaguely religious terminology...

...Only occasionally, in rather special circumstances—as in the picaresque confrontation of fundamentalism with Darwin—did some believers take their faith for an alternative to scientific theory...

...Given our empiricomathematical bias, this, as we have already noted, is not surprising...

...That is how things are, that is how we have always done it, that is what "everybody" does—and, unable to imagine aught else, that is what we shall go on doing, blindly, automatically...

...Since that homecoming is based on rediscovering and reconstituting the world as God's world rather than on conformity, it is compatible with centering...

...Throughout, it is their lived experience, seen from within, that is the key and the prerequisite to understanding religion in its living essence...

...it seems so utterly at one with itself, so at home and at peace in its world...

...Look to the Book of Job...

...The religious core of the book comes in Chapters 38:1 to 42:6, in Job's confrontation with God 180 and in the utter inversion of perspective in the last three verses cited...

...Any systems of belief or observance that humans invent of their own initiative—even though they may include counters like God, worship, prayer— are not yet religion...

...Yet precisely that freedom from the world enables the believer to accept the world and to act in it, for all its knavery and folly, as in a place of homecoming in a reconciling love...

...I know of no more agonizing experience than that of placing oneself under the perspective of the prayer of confession...

...Still, this is but a trivial truth...

...Not, to be sure, on the stability of ecclesiastical institutions: those are peripheral to religious faith and, in their secularized stability, can be detrimental to faith and reform alike...

...The need to understand poses a different question, that of the human's place in the cosmos and of the meaning and direction of human life...

...There is no other way for, in the perspective of estranged finitude, the reconciliation of centering and homecoming remains an unattainable goal...

...Even if we seek to hide from that responsibility and humanity by inventing factors that allegedly determine the course of our lives, DNA, IQ, class, or national consciousness, whatever, the actual lived situation remains that of freedom and responsibility: at this moment, I must choose—and even if in retrospect I convince myself that, given my DNA or my class background, I "could not have" chosen otherwise, this is no comfort in the agony of choosing—nor does it change the basic reality of choice, that is, of freedom as the basic trait of our distinctive humanity...

...Without that, they would be blind to the tragic dimension of life...

...If that impetus is genuinely religious, as in Kierkegaard's religion of "infinite resignation" (the "religious stage A"), they become a despairing recognition of the futility of all human efforts at religious self-help—at healing, making whole, "saving" (from salus, meaning both healed and made whole) a life that, under the conditions of estranged finitude, is inevitably broken and conflictridden...

...After all, the goal of such science is objectivity—and religious faith is intrinsically and profoundly a personal matter...

...The 179 lived truth becomes a spoken untruth unless the hearer recognizes the radically subordinate position of that "content" in religious experience...

...It is not a cheerful prospect...

...Within the methodological parameters of a social science conceived as a social physics rather than a social phenomenology, it was all that could be expected...

...Even if we were to assume that all priests are always and ex officio the agents of calculating oppressors, it would remain true that their tales have power to compel only because they find an echo in the hearts and minds of their hearers...

...On reflection, however, it is even more surprising that the persistence of religion should come as a surprise...

...Sixty years after the Bolshevik revolution, the rhetorical prayer "God help socialism...

...The triumphant messianic movement must first invent enemies to postpone having to make good its promises, then it must lie, claiming that the promise has in fact been fulfilled while silencing anyone who might note the Emperor's nakedness...

...This genuinely religious dimension, however, is trivialized when it is interpreted as an escape from a real to a vicarious fulfillment— whether by the observer or by the believer himself...

...Such tragic writers as Nietzsche or Camus are witnesses not to atheism but to a despair of religion, sensitive to the religious longing to be made whole, the longing for reconciliation...

...In a society that makes total demands while strictly rationing rewards—"from each according to his [fullest] ability, to each [only] according to his needs"—the believer must accept the lowest preference in the rationing system of employment, housing, travel permits, educational opportunities for his or her children—while barred by his or her religious convictions from utilizing the usual escape mechanisms of all "objectively socialist" societies, graft and extortion...

...For this they pay a high price...

...It becomes quickly evident that, for the most part, such "how it happened" stories are quite peripheral to religious concerns...

...Not without reason did the messianic mass movements rail against "individualism"—"Jewish" if rightwing, "bourgeois" if left...

...The latter is basically egocentric...

...Which it will be depends, I submit, on whether socialism can remain a useful (and urgent) truism or whether, having to pose as The Great Truth, it will become The Great Lie...

...They go on, repeating the prescribed phrases for the sake of the three keys—or to avoid "life in a single key," that to a jail cell...

...The privileged source of information, however, remains the confession of the believer, whether it is the classic confessions of an Augustine or a Kierkegaard, or the moving testimony of such saints and martyrs of our time as Dietrich Bonhoffer or Jaroslav Simsa—or the far less dramatic testimony provided by the lives and presence of the men and women among us whom God has touched with his hand, transforming their lives...

...For that matter, as Eric Hoffer wrote long ago, that essentially religious promise is the driving force behind all great ideologies, including socialism...

...But why should such putative believers turn, of all things, to religion, defying both the atheist propaganda and the pervasive personal, social, and economic sanctions...

...We have customarily dealt with religion in its manifestations rather than in its essence, approaching it as disinterested observers of social phenomena instead of inquiring into the lived experience that is expressed in and through such phenomena...

...The ills from which humans have sought escape or comfort in religion have seldom been the trivial complaints that such a reordering can eliminate...

...Our ever expanding material desires can hardly be called "needs": if they so appear, it is because we are trying to satisfy, with a surfeit of material goods, needs that are no longer material but distinctively human, the needs for centering and homecoming, and their reconciliation...

...Basically, it is a proposal to use the 182 machinery of the state to assure certain socially desirable economic goals, namely, providing economic security to individuals in a fragmented yet interdependent society (the "welfare state") and preventing domination of the society by major economic aggregates (nationalization or control of basic industries...

...Yet someone else once said that, if men fell silent, the very stones would prophesy...

...The perennial "logic" of, say, jealousy is the same in the Biblical triangle of David, Bathsheba, and Uriah, in Shakespeare's Othello, or in the minor tragedies acted out in our domestic relations courts...

...Their reaction to religion, at least in recent decades, lacked the edge of confrontation...

...To interpret them simply as an escape and to identify that as the "essence" of religion suggests a rather shallow grasp of religious experience...

...Socialism can be a great force for freedom and justice—or it can be a particularly vicious tool of oppression, especially destructive because it can place a total monopoly of economic as well as political and cultural initiative in the hands of an oppressor...

...The believer, hitherto just a human tossed to and fro by every wind of fate and doctrine, finds himself standing in the presence and perspective of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Otto), in the presence of the Holy...

...I am not speaking now of the continued functioning of ecclesiastical organizations in East and Central Europe...

...His questions remain egocentric: why does God do this to me...

...This is the religious focus of the stories of creation, which a more adequate "scientific" explanation does not displace...

...A number of scholars have used such an approach in dealing with religion, as Rudolf Otto did in Das Heilige, William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, Gerardus van der Lieuw in Religion in Essence and Manifestation, or Paul Tillich in The Dynamics of Faith...

...Here, for a generation and more, Marxism has been the legitimating ideology of arbitrary power and the passport to the allimportant "three keys of life"—the key to one's own apartment, the key to one's own car, and the key to one's own dacha...

...They do believe, not simply in the sense of an intellectual assent to a set of creedal propositions but as a mode of life, a basic posture toward their God, their world and their neighbor...

...Here the Marxists were not alone: their explicit predictions grew out of a far less articulate but widespread assumption that religion is old-fashioned, on its way out...

...Could we really have expected that this primordial, persistent trait would wither away in a generation or two in the wake of what, from the perspective of history, are really some rather trivial readjustments in property relations...

...Religion, it 175 seemed to them, had simply ceased to matter...

...The self-renewing vitality of religious faith seems to be one of them...

...So they are—but only as long as they are not met—and they are so easy to meet...

...The comfort that religion offers speaks to the grief of the needless perishing of what is good and precious, including life itself, to the remorse of choices in which one good must be bought at the cost of another, to the weariness and futility of finitude...

...In our century, Edmund Husserl and his successors have developed a methodology for describing such constant structures under the forbidding title of transcendental phenomenology...

...Without the prophetic challenge of those compromises, faith would become domesticated, comfortable and vacuous: that, too, has been known to happen...

...They have understood religion, though from their special perspective, as a social phenomenon intelligible in terms of other social phenomena rather than in terms of its sui generis existential basis, personal religious faith...

...At most times and for the most part, however, the believers' questions were not scientific— "how did it come about...

...That, however, is something quite different from the desire to explain...

...As Kierkegaard, among many others, pointed out, the pretentious arrogance of the churches makes more humans atheists than science and secularism combined...

...A person who does not stand out in freedom, including, much of the time, our selves, is functioning on a less than fully human level...

...For giving up individuality, the personal centering of freedom and responsibility, is the price that must be paid for the illusion of homecoming achieved by human effort...

...Such "inner logic," while it can be said to be "subjective," is neither arbitrary nor private...

...Far more than any doctrines, practices, or "beliefs," it is the perspective of God's presence that the religious believer holds out to those about him, especially in lands where the churches have been stripped of anything else they might offer...

...Let us ask then, what does it mean to believe, and ask it no longer as a social scientist describing a phenomenon but as a believer living that experience...

...One thing alone remains, one thing alone the believer can offer—the recognition of the Presence of God...

...They speak falsely, God declares in the final chapter, but, more: in this debate Job is still not a religious man...

...To determine what our real needs are, we cannot look around, surveying our actual desires...

...The great strength of genuine religious faith—not of pietistic cults or ecclesiastical pretentions but of genuine personal faith—is that it alone, by replacing the perspective of Ego and finitude with that of God and eternity, makes a reconciliation of centering and homecoming possible...

...A good deal earlier, even before Emperor Constantine, the kings of Israel and Judah anticipated that discovery...

...The theologians, more prone to breast-beating than most of us, sought the reason in the "sin of the churches"—and not without justification...

...Basically, the "tool of oppression" theory utterly fails to account for the initial reality of religion as distinct from its particular uses...

...As for the clergy, they are restricted to a minimal stipend, subjected to constant harassment in the performance of their vocation, and ever under the threat of an arbitrary withdrawal of the required official "consent" to its performance...

...But the threat of fanaticism is one horn of a dilemma whose other horn is impotence...

...In such a context, the figure of 12 percent is not surprising...

...Nor is it an accident that in those countries where a powerful ecclesiastical hierarchy effectively preempted religious faith for itself, as in Italy or France, socialism assumed the messianic form of Communism...

...Those who hold out do little to hide their contempt for those who yield...

...Not that such believers constitute a majority or even a significant minority of the population: they do not...

...If these writers regard that tragic dimension not merely as real but as ultimate, it is because they despair of a fulfillment of that longing in a recognition that such fulfillment escapes human effort...

...This is not a conclusion but the starting point of religious experience...

...The old Bolsheviks were convinced that property is theft—and wanted a piece of the action for themselves...

...But it is a most problematic step from the claim that religion has been so used to the claim that such use is its very essence, so that religion could be expected to wither away as superfluous with the end of oppressive rule...

...While pietistic cults and mass movements shift perspective from one finite being to another, perpetuating the old conflicts in new forms, the profound religious inversion displaces the entire perspective of finitude with one of eternity, that of Ego not with singular or collective Alter-Ego but of God...

...Ignore the naive folktale of the good man tried and rewarded within which a later author set his distinctly religious statement...

...There is, to be sure, the other possibility— that the reborn faith, growing as it does from individual religious experience rather than from ecclesiastical momentum, will eschew the temptation of secular power and will address itself to the pressing need for reconciliation of centering and homecoming, leaving the secular arm free to deal with the mundane tasks of formulating rational solutions to social problems...

...But with each repetition they grow more cynical until cynicism becomes a way of life and, as such, wholly unselective...

...Faced with the agonizingly conflicting demands of this world, the human avoids subclinical schizophrenia by rejecting those demands and focusing on his "centering" with a solipsistic intensity...

...It is surprising that it should remain constant even amid the all-corroding cynicism generated by a mandated monopolistic ideology...

...Religious faith has to be there before it can be used to justify oppression: it cannot be simply invented for the occasion...

...The old Bolsheviks could understand church membership only in terms of its once considerable economic advantages...

...Confident in our ability to produce material goods, we have a vested interest in considering material needs as fundamental...

...What secular and secularized movements promise—a genuine reconciliation of centering and homecoming— becomes, for the believer, a lived reality...

...Today, in East Europe, I know of none who do, even among the active party members...

...In the Soviet Empire, push did come to shove, but it was not religious faith that crumbled away...

...If their impetus is sociological, as with Comte's "Cult of Humanity," they remain vacuous...

...Instead, over these 60 years, all the fashionable creeds disappeared in the acid cauldron of cynicism while religious faith alone emerged, purged and tempered, renewed in each generation...

...The second stock "explanation" of religion, the "primitive science theory," does attempt to deal with the point...

...What remains incomprehensible, however, is the utterly nonvestigial, self-renewing vitality of personal religious faith...

...Its purpose is to determine causal antecedents and structures to facilitate the manipulation of particular phenomena...

...That charmingly naive projection of the mentality of 19th-century scientists to the dawn of history builds on a basic misunderstanding...

...The genuine comfort that faith finds is inseparable from the stern demand it imposes...

...The Protestant Reformation may be the most notorious instance but it is far from being the only one...

...If, in that context, didactic discourse is still in order, it is in a different mode, asking not whether or what God is, but rather how God's presence transforms the human situation...

...This is why we can understand events long ago or far away: though the external trappings observed by the "empirical" sociologist may be vastly different, the patterns of relations, in the experience as subjects live it, remain constant...

...If Marx were right in his "opium" theory and rather more perceptive as to just what pain that opium deadens, he would have had to conclude that religious faith will be a perennial feature of human life, becoming, if anything, purer and more prominent in a socialist society that replaces the supportive system of family and kinship with a soulless "rational" ordering of production and consumption...

...Emperor Constantine's linking of the throne and the altar, lasting through the centuries down to the "established" churches of our time, subordinated the claims of faith to the interests of secular power...

...That is a most attractive possibility, though it would take a great deal of optimism to claim that it is a likely one...

...We could—and often did...

...But such a claim would be neither fair nor accurate...

...The churches of the suburbs, selling self-indulgence to finance their affluence much as the three competing popes in the early 15th century sold indulgences to finance their mutual wars, seemed to confirm the thesis that religion is a vestigial social convention that would crumble if push ever came to shove...

...Its appeal is entirely extrasystematic...

...In all likelihood, it is approximately the same percentage as that of religious believers (as distinct from nominal church members) in the West...

...Here freedom enters in, since we are no longer facing a single predetermined track but rather a range of possibilities...

...But human acts (and so social phenomena) are different: what makes them intelligible is precisely the way subjects experience them in the perspective of their lived needs, hopes, and understanding...

...It would, for instance, be hard to gainsay the claim, incorporated into Marxism rather than originating with it, that religion has frequently been (used as) a mystified ideology to justify an unjustifiable social order...

...Not by accident did socialism remain a useful truism in those countries where religious faith had least been preempted and discredited by ecclesiastical pretentions—in the Scandinavian countries, in England, in America...

...To the believer, however, it is absolutely crucial...

...Had the Franco and Salazar regimes collapsed before the lessons of Hungary and Czechoslovakia sank in, I doubt the story would have been different in Spain and Portugal...

...They are plain economic rationality, no less evident to Bismarck than to Marx...

...Religious believers, including ever new converts, do believe, strongly, vigorously, sincerely...

...A less overt but no less profound cynicism pervades the Soviet empire...

...Seen from within, as I actually am that, what does it mean to be as a human...

...The human in his freedom is marked by the need to understand...

...But it had always been crucial...

...but intensely existential: "What does it mean...

...But it is more than that: it is also a key to the significance of religious faith for socialism and secular politics...

...Rather it describes, generically, any subject's way of being in a world and, as such, remains constant between subjects and through the ages while alleged "objectivities" vary widely...

...The believer differs because for him that presence is not some privileged yet still precarious segment of this world—but God Himself...

...As Job in Chapter 183 42:1-6, as St...

...A detailed analysis, recounting centuries of philosophical reflection, would be out of place here, especially since what concerns us is not the products of reflection but rather the immediate givens of direct awareness, the fact and task of being human as something in which we ourselves are engaged, seen from a first-person perspective, and that not in its multifarious contingent details but in the stark essential structure, being-human...

...Once, a revolution and countless purges ago, it was the Communists who believed...

...It is no longer Ego, I, the believer, who is the central point of reference, the measure of all things, the norm of joy and grievance...

...For all its apparent obscurity, that assertion points to the most ordinary of experiences—that of choosing who I shall be...

...Since ageold habits change slowly, the victorious vanguard of the working class, carrying out social changes that will render religion obsolete, finds it in the meantime less onerous to tolerate the churches as vestigial remnants of the old order than to suppress them outright...

...For Western observers, the reasons for incomprehension are more complex...

...The metaphors of centering and homecoming, though familiar, may seem arbitrary, but the needs they represent are not...

...The root of our incomprehension and fallacious 178 predictions is methodological...

...The "primitive science" theory wins some initial credibility by noting that most religions do include in their literature tales of the origin of the world or of some of its phenomena, as the account of the origin of the rainbow in Genesis...

...Wherever there is a vital religious faith to meet the most preoccupying human needs of centering and homecoming, socialism is free to be what it can and need be, an urgent truism providing rational solutions to specific problems...

...The principle holds there, too, though its implications are difficult to predict...

...God is the subject in faith, God the one who acts...

...The Communist party can offer generous rewards and threaten with grievous sanctions...

...Socialists in the free world have a vital stake in the reality of personal religious faith: it is their defense against messianic expectations and aspirations...

...For the moment, let us accept the continued functioning of ecclesiastical organizations after the revolution as comprehensible in Marxist terms...

...As another East European theologian, Jan MiR Lochman, pointed out, this does explain why the churches under Soviet rule have grown less vestigial with each new generation...

...Of all the stock explanations, it is the "wishfulfillment" theories—including Marx's statement about the "opium of the people"—that speak most specifically to the central question of why humans believe...

...A faith that radically challenges the world can survive only because priests make compromises and prophets chastise them for it...

...Since his freedom is won by turning to God rather than against the world, the believer's centering is compatible with homecoming...

...If, however, those two basic needs are not met, socialism finds itself forced into posing as The Great Truth—and so into becoming The Great Lie...

...The religious believer would agree with their assessment: for him, religion in the strict sense begins not with what humans do or fail to do but rather with what God does: when God enters in, touching and transforming a life that is trivial or desperate without Him...

...But, for all that, the "sins of the churches" thesis does little to explain the widespread expectation of religion's impending demise...

...The basic human experience is that of breaking out of such blind, automatic routine in imagining alternatives...

...The absolution, the "comfortable words," the "peace that passeth understanding" are a resolution of that agony, trivial without it...

...Shorn of the burden of power and glory, the churches have been thrown back on their strongest resource: the individual personal faith and the "secular witness" (Lochman) of the believers...

...The Weimar Republic and its aftermath present a graphic demonstration of the explosive social consequences of a failure to meet them...

...Whether it comes through Chinese intervention, internal economic strangulation, nationalist revolt, or some yet unforeseen cause, it will inevitably 184 be traumatic—and the cynicism bred for years by the Soviet regime will provide little material for building a new secular regime in the aftermath of the trauma...