Religious Movement in Czechoslovakia [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 109-119]

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PAUL WILSON
She sees church-going as a protest against the faithless materialism of
the official ideology, which has no answers to the questions young people
are asking about meaning, about the differences between right and wrong.
At the same time their behavior can be contradictory: they fail to draw
conclusions from it that apply to their private lives; they frequently make
little effort to live any differently from their peers, and see no problem
in reconciling Christianity with sexual promiscuity, drug abuse and even
the kind of staged suicide attempts that young people frequently use to
get out of military service. She calls this kind of faith "profoundly infantile"
and an example of "oral ethics." God is not a dominating father who
demands certain standards of behavior from them, but is more like an indulgent mother, loving, permissive and all-forgiving. One feature that most
of the young people she talked to have in common is that they want something for nothing, and religious faith is that little extra something, "the
cream in their coffee."
Siklova does not condemn these young people for their stance, and
admits that what she observes may only be a passing phase, not in the
sense that they will get over it, but that their faith may well deepen and
become something more adult, more profoundly rooted, more genuine.
"We have no idea," she says, "how they will respond to the system if it
changes its approach, or to increased repression, crisis or war. Perhaps
they would then behave as true Christians."
What are we to make of these two very different portraits of a revival
of interest in religion in Czechoslovakia? Benda, a practising Catholic layman, having participated in a mass demonstration of faith, feels that a
profound change has taken place in the membership of the Church which
will have far-reaching political consequences that are in harmony with
the political struggle for human rights represented by the existence of
Charter 77 and VONS, to name only two of the best known instances.
Siklova, having talked to young people in some detail about their faith,
refrains, like a good political scientist, from drawing any conclusions about
what it might lead to. Obviously the most an outsider can say-and it is
not a small thing-is that the future is entirely open and that the attempt
to make atheism the state religion seems to have backfired, probably because
it ignores the fact that people recognize the existence of mystery in the
universe and hunger after meaning. This recognition and this hunger, given
the proper circumstances, can have a political impact that would seem to
be in direct proportion to the efforts expended to supress it.
* * *
In practically every country in Eastern Europe, large political and
social events are usually presaged by apparently small and insignificant
events in the arts-the unofficial arts, of course, not state-approved culture.