The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization (review)

The Soviet regime devoted huge energies to its attack on religion and religious believers. Millions were mobilized in the League of the Militant Godless; church buildings were destroyed; a vast campaign of propaganda, secular rituals, and re-education was implemented to convince the Soviet population of the futility of religion; believers were prevented from progressing in careers and education; and priests and their congregations were imprisoned, set to forced labor, and killed, as this book outlines in graphic detail.

It is tempting simply to state that the Soviet Union's war on religion failed. Paul Froese commendably does not succumb to this temptation. Instead, he provides a nuanced and detailed account of "the Soviet experiment in secularization," which notes the decline in religious belief and the ready defection of many priests and believers to the communist cause, alongside evidence of growth in particular denominations and descriptions of staunch religious commitment in the face of the regime's brutality. In addition, he brings the story up to date by setting out the persistence of religious belief across the territory of the former Soviet Union today.

Froese aims to apply current debates in the sociological study of religion to what we know about the Soviet Union. His main structural device is to assess the Soviet regime's war on religion from the perspective of six basic sociological assertions. The Plot to Kill Godaccepts, rather too easily, the "supply and demand" approach to religion and has no time for the argument that modernization produces secularization. He too simply, and mistakenly, states that "contemporary sociologists of religion no longer make this claim" (p. 25). Consequently, his list of six basic sociological assertions omits this staple notion of the link between modernization and secularization. This is a particular shame, since modernization was priority number one for the Soviet Union for the first several decades of its existence.

In discussing post-Soviet Russia, Froese declares—quite wrongly—that the Russian Orthodox Church wants to become the state church and that Russia's 1997 law on religion establishes three different categories of religion: Orthodoxy, other traditional groups, and the rest (p. 157). Neither of these claims is true. The Russian Orthodox Church has clearly stated that it does not want to become an established church. As for the 1997 law, it does not specify three categories of religious organization, and it contains only one mention of Orthodoxy, which comes in a preamble with no legal force. Froese gives the impression too that the Russian state is clamping down hard on non-Orthodox congregations. In fact, although religious liberty has come under threat in some specific cases and remains imperfect, religious organizations of many different types exist, are recognized by the state, and flourish in Russia. Combining these misperceptions with his commitment to the "supply and demand" approach to the study of religion, Froese concludes that a religious monopoly is being established that will reduce religiosity.

All in all, The Plot to Kill Godwould have been well advised to stay on the subject of the Soviet Union, and to avoid diversions into the post-Soviet world and later sections on church-state relations in Europe, the United States, and China, which cover only a few paragraphs each. These are too brief overviews sitting in uneasy detachment from the book's chief subject. The strength of Froese's book is that it provides a comprehensive overview of the Soviet approach to religion that goes beyond narrative history to explore how abstract sociological and ideological assertions about religion failed to comprehend faith and the faithful.