This spring I returned to the Soviet Union. I had first visited in 1973 as an emissary of President Nixon to negotiate for the release of Soviet Jews. This time my mission was not political, but spiritual. Russian Christians had contacted Prison Fellowship for help; I hoped we could help open the Soviet prisons to ministry.
I was surprised how much the USSR had changed between my visits. It is still, of course, a totalitarian society, but it is no longer tight and buttoned-down. In fact, it is coming apart at the seams. The legacy of 70 years of communism is rampant crime, corruption, and an economy in shambles.
But what surprised me even more was the Soviet reaction. Officials there, for the most part self-proclaimed atheists, are looking for spiritual solutions to their social and moral chaos.
I saw this firsthand when I met with Vadim Viktorovich Bakatin, minister of internal affairs and head of the Soviet prison system.
Bakatin, a charismatic Gorbachev confidant, began our meeting by candidly explaining that crime rose 38 percent in the Soviet Union in 1989—because, he said, of economic, political, and ethnic problems.
My turn to speak came. I told Bakatin that, tempting as it is to believe—especially in a communist system—crime is not caused by economic or political or ethnic factors. At root, its cause is moral—the sin in the human heart.
In a system that asserts there is no God, there can be no transcendent values of authority to which people are accountable—so there is no moral force to restrain human behavior. “As your own writer Feodor Dostoevski put it in The Brothers Karamazov,” I said, “when there is no God, everything is permitted. And that means crime.”
Then I described Prison Fellowship’s ministry: how Christian volunteers go into the prisons sharing Jesus Christ, who can change an offender’s heart and therefore his behavior. He listened intently. “That’s what we need,” he said.
“Mr. Colson,” he continued, “we will welcome you and groups like yours in our prisons. We need your kind of help.” He paused, smiled, and concluded, “And God be with you.”
A Failed God
Delighted as I was, I’m not so naïve as to believe that Soviet officials have all suddenly been born again. But what is obvious is that they recognize the failure of the communist system to provide any moral undergirding for their society.
According to Vladimir Shlapentokh, who conducted public-opinion polls for Pravda and Izvestia before emigrating from the Soviet Union in 1979, the country is “immersed in a moral crisis.… Pilfering from businesses has long been a national sport. Lying to one’s superiors, subordinates, colleagues, spouses and children is considered a normal feature of everyday life.”
So Soviet leaders are looking for help, says Shlapentokh, “in the form of the restoration of old religious norms … compassion, grace, forgiveness, charity, and other virtues previously presented as elements of bourgeois decadence.” Leaders see religion “as a means of halting Soviet society’s accelerating demoralization.”
This is why Soviet educators would make the unprecedented move of inviting a group of American Christians to show the Jesus film in schools in Soviet Georgia—and allow them to distribute freely copies of the Gospel of John. And this is why the Soviet Academy of Sciences has asked several American evangelicals to help them study the impact of the Ten Commandments on individuals and society. According to Dr. Paul de Vries of The King’s College in New York, this Ten Commandments project reflects a desperate search in the Soviet Union for a value system to fill the void communism has created.
During a recent U.S. visit, one of the Soviet scientists told a Washington, D.C., congregation, “We have seen that totalitarianism cannot destroy spiritual life; and now as totalitarianism itself is being destroyed and people move from slavery to freedom, we need a new system of values, spiritual values.”
Who Is Godless?
The irony is exquisite. While formerly “godless Communists”—albeit for practical reasons—are looking to religious values to undergird their deteriorating social structures, the ostensibly “Christian” West is doing everything it can to purge itself of those same values. And doing so without pretense: It was only last year that Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for the majority in the Allegheny County crèche case, described America as a “secular nation.”
Each day brings new examples of secularization. Zion, Illinois, is forced by court order to purge its city seal of religious symbols. The ACLU, ever vigilant, fights to have a cross taken off the chapel of Arizona State University and braves the waves to call for the removal of a 17-foot statue of Jesus in an underwater sea park off Florida’s coast. Even a media hero like Vaclav Havel is “degodded” for Western consumption: In a reprint of his magnificent New Year’s Day address, the New York Times claims that for the sake of space considerations they had to excise Havel’s references to “Jesus” and “the Christian spirit.”
And in a most exquisite irony, all the while Soviet scientists are thoughtfully searching the basic tenets of Judeo-Christian belief for help, cable king Ted Turner has flatly announced that we in the U.S. should dispense with the outmoded and irrelevant Ten Commandments altogether.
“I bet nobody here even pays much attention to ’em, because they are too old,” says Turner, less than eloquently. “Commandments are out.”
Turner, who has called Christianity a “religion for losers” (although he later apologized), advocates instead his own “Ten Voluntary Initiatives,” which include helping the downtrodden, loving and respecting planet Earth, and limiting families to two children.
Many “gatekeepers” of American culture—those who determine access to our country’s airwaves and thus shape public opinion—are even more directly hostile than Ted Turner, who merely seems to find absolute values the ultimate snooze.
Today, however, as I saw in my meeting with Vadim Bakatin, the Soviets are actively affirming such values: They have seen the dark side of totally privatized religion. It is a lesson we pray the United States will never have to learn firsthand.
