Todays New Atheists appear to hate religion with the desire to destroy and degrade it. An earlier man with the desire to destroy religion was Karl Marx. The Eastern European and Asian nations that rose to power in the Twentieth Century followed his design of communism and their master’s desire to suppress religion. The results of their efforts to destroy religion in those Eastern European countries seems to have backfired.
In 1961, six couples from a small college, today called Abilene Christian University, moved to Vienna, Austria. They purchased a printing press and began printing the New Testament and the Bible in the languages of the communist nations. This was followed by smuggling efforts to place these printed books into the hands of the people of the Eastern European countries. This endeavor became known as the Eastern Europe Missions (EEM). After the failure of the communist governments in those countries, the people living there contacted EEM requesting Bibles. “In 1998, a Russian government official, Vladimir Skovorodnikov, approached EEM with a way to get Bibles into the hands of 436,000 students and 80,000 teachers — by producing a ‘morals and character’ curriculum for his country’s Altai region.” Since then, it has mushroomed to the point that “EEM gives Bibles and Bible-based literature to all 763 schools in the Ivano-Frankivsk school system. To date, the ministry has provided biblical texts to more than 2 million children in 9,201 public schools in Ukraine and Russia.” The Bibles and teaching materials are not designed to teach religious doctrine but Christian principles of ethics and how it relates to daily living
This effort by EEM is not the only one in Eastern Europe. Other Christian groups have received similar request and provided Bibles and assistance in teaching Christian principles in the public schools. This effort appears to be accomplishing its goal. “School officials point to studies in other Ukrainian cities that show juvenile delinquency rates declining where schools teach ethics.” Maybe we should try this in the USA.
Christians in China, and other atheist countries that suppress, religion, have increased despite the suppression. Even though suppressed by their government, they have sent missionaries to other countries to spread the Good News. That seems amazing. Perhaps the New Atheist should pay more attention to history. Observation shows that suppression and attempts to destroy Christianity strengthens it and increase its growth.
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“The Church is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.” Let’s hope that the increasing economic disruption ahead will contribute to a religious resurgence as such periods often–but not always–have in the past.
I’d rather “unalienable rights” conferred by God than merely politicians’ promises to protect my freedom…
When I first saw the title of this piece, I thought, “Uh, religion actually thrives under persecution.” and the body of the article kind of bears this out. For totalitarianism of any sort to work, the governing body must be everything to the people and that means that any alternative authority must be destroyed. For an atheist, religion is seen as such an authority.
In the case of the communists, they seemed to want ethical breakdowns in societal thinking. Other totalitarian regimes wanted completely the opposite. What sounds like is happening from the information presented here is that the people in charge of the education system in the eastern European countries recognize that some amount of ethics needs to be put back into the social system, not so much an establishment of religion.
Truth be told, I knew a woman in another life who grew up in Odessa and worked in Moscow. While officially, religion was dead in the USSR, she claimed it really was still active, just that people of all faiths celebrated each others’ together so that it could happen fairly undetected. Once religion exists, it doesn’t really disappear.
OTOH, with prosperity and “knowledge” in the mix, laxness and the idea that one knows better starts to appear and even believing Christians and Jews and whatever other faiths start to fall away and become less feverent, especially when it comes to picking and choosing what to believe and how to go about practicing faith. We’ve seen that without a doubt in recent years in many countries.
Christianity does thrive with adversity but that should be understood by Christians. Once the adversity is lifted, it thrives with renewed vigor. As seen in the history of Christianity. The article indicated that once the ethical principles are taught and the people begin to read the Bible, they wish to learn about becoming a Christian. When the curtain opened after the fall of communism, physician went to Russia with missionaries. The medical situation was bad and the physicians came back and asked that donations of used equipment be made. The Russians still used the cone shaped steticope of the 1920. Hospitals did not have antibiotics. Each time the missionaries returned to Russia I would sent large containers of antibiotics which they gave to hospitals and physicians thus opening the door to share the gospel.
At the time the curtain fell, etc., I was working in one of the USA’s major medical centers and they cleaned out store rooms to send obsolete equipment to Russia where it was a godsend, so I know about all that. But, I must say that the human condition asks the question, What can religion do for me? I will argue that without a concrete answer, all the Scripture reading cannot in and of itself does not do it.