Officials of the World Council of Churches, attending a central committee meeting in Nigeria, told the press they believe the new Soviet regime “may be undertaking a major conciliatory shift in its attitude toward Christianity.” Evidence presented to The Star indicates that the World Council officials, to put it bluntly, were talking through their clerical hats.
In their statement in Nigeria, the World Council leaders cited and quoted an article which appeared last fall in Kommunist, an official mass-circulation publication of the Soviet Communist Party. The author was M. Mchedloff.
The story from Nigeria, by the New York Times News Service, summarized the Kommunist article as “a call for a completely fresh re-evaluation of Christianity.” An emphasis on growing possibilities for cooperation between Marxists and Christians was cited. Some quotations were used.
The gist of the interpretation of the article was that official Soviet policy now finds that Christians are not such bad people, after all. One expression was that “The article appeared to go a long way in justifying Marxist tolerance of Christian churches within the Communist world.” Several churchmen at the meeting were said to have hailed the document “as signaling an increased relaxation of restrictions on churches in the Communist bloc.”
A friend has provided us with a full translation of the Mchedloff article, from the October issue of Kommunist. After reading it through, we wonder what on earth the World Council officials in Nigeria read, or what color of glasses they were wearing at the time.
The article does indeed suggest a new look at Christianity. The reasoning we find in the article, however, is far different from that which the churchmen seemed to find. Mchedloff does not speak of, or remotely suggest, any conciliatory shift of Soviet attitude! The exact opposite is the case. Mchedloff’s logic is that Christianity is falling apart and losing its adherents, and therefore Communists need no longer fear its influence.
“Side by side with the aspiration of the ruling capitalist circles to fully use clericalism in all its spheres of religious and public life,” he says in an early paragraph, “and with the outcome of capitalist reality itself, of the religious illusions in the consciousness of exploited people, one can see as never before an intensive process of failing and weakening of the traditional influence of religion upon the believers.”
“There is a straight breaking with the religion,” he says, “growth of atheism, anti-clericalism and free-thinking among different classes of the population, first of all among the working class.”
It is the clergy, he says, which is making a conciliatory shift. “In order not to lose definitively its control over the decreasing flock, the clergy is obliged to find a new approach, new ways and possibilities for the ‘dialogue with the world.’ ” This new approach, he says, is a discovery that Communism is not so bad, that it aims toward goals common with those of religion. This new attitude is supposed to enable the remnants of believers to remain despite their discovery that Communism is the real truth of life.
The Nigeria story quotes from the article. “A movement or an activity cannot be classified as counter-revolutionary or reactionary simply because it appears among Christians, runs one quotation,” “Such a simplification has nothing in common with the Marxist aim of an objective analysis of the facts.”
Our translation of that same passage goes like this: “It is impossible to consider every movement, every action or statement as anti-revolutionary, reactionary, only because they appeared among religious people. Such simplification has nothing to do with the objective, Marxist analysis of facts.” The difference is subtle, but it is meaningful. The meaning becomes more clear if we read on.
“Due to various reasons,” says the next sentence, “insufficient standard of consciousness, lack of knowledge of scientific theory, traditions of the present country, religious education, and so on, the democratic progressive motives or actions can take a religious form.” In other words, when the church is credited with progressive goals, it’s because people don’t know any better.
As the conclusion of the Kommunist article, the Nigeria story quotes this sentence: “The absence of the revolutionary role from religious ideology is no argument against close collaboration of Communists and believers in a common fight for progress and humanity.”
That sentence appears toward the end of the article. Again we find elucidation, suggesting a different interpretation of the conclusion, a little farther on. Consider this quotation:
“Being convinced on experience that the scientific socialism in fact is trying to obtain humanitarian aims of surpassing and elevating the man, to eradicate all kinds of social injustice, all the greatest masses of believers understand the necessity of close collaboration with the Communists. The ideologists of Christianity must admit that with regret.”
Kommunist does not say that Communism needs Christianity. It says that Christianity needs Communism. There’s a world of difference.
The November issue of Agitator, a party magazine for the leaders, rather than for the masses, also discusses the religious question. It has this to say:
“The religious moral is completely contrary to the Communist one.… The attempts of the supporters of religion to adapt themselves to the present epoch show that the positions of religion are weakening every day, that the number of believers is steadily decreasing.… The party and various public organizations, agitators, propagandists must perfect much more and enlarge the atheistic work, trying to obtain a complete overcoming of religious survivals.
“The religious ideology is strange to our society in any kind, any form. The task of our agitators, of all workers of ideological front, is to know how to tear down the rosy cover from the teaching of the ideologists of religion, unmask their time-serving, strengthen the Communist world outlook in all Soviet people.”
Does that look like a conciliatory shift? We fear the World Council leaders have looked at Communist writings and read into them what they wanted to read.
It wasn’t there.—Reprinted by permission from THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR, February 8, 1965.
