Religion and Socialism in the Long 1960s: From Antithesis to Dialogue in Eastern and Western Europe

Abstract

One of the most remarkable transformations of European society and politics during the Cold War period was in relations between socialism and religion. Extreme hostility between revolutionary socialism and Christianity had been a structural component of major political conflicts in the trans-war period of 1914 to 1945. With an eye to violence against churches in Mexico, Spain and the Soviet Union, Pope Pius XI had declared in 1937 that 'for the first time in history we are witnessing a struggle, cold-blooded in purpose and mapped out to the least detail, between man and "all that is called God"'. Upon the German invasion of his native Netherlands in 1940, Europe's leading ecumenical spokesman Willem Visser 't Hooft similarly spoke of the Christian struggle against godlessness as 'a war behind the war' that had begun 'long before September 1939 and will certainly go on long after an armistice has been concluded'. 1 This hostility flowed into the accelerating polarisation of European politics and diplomacy in the immediate post-war period that led to the Cold War. 2 Events such as the exchange of letters between US President Harry S. Truman and Pope Pius XII in 1946 confirming the Christian core of Western civilisation or the show trial of Cardinal Jzsef Mindszenty in Hungary in 1949 were moments of deep symbolic significance that welded religion to the solidifying political rhetoric. 3 As Dianne Kirby writes, 'for many who lived through the period, the Cold War was one of history's great religious wars, a global conflict between the god-fearing and the godless'. 4 In the 1960s, however, the situation changed dramatically. New encounters between Marxists and Christians challenged the militant anti-religious and anti-socialist rhetoric that had dominated Europe for almost half a century. If the American movie Guilty of Treason (1950) about the trial and torture of Cardinal Mindszenty encapsulates at least in part the place of religion in 1950s Cold War culture, the spirit of the mid-1960s was characterised by Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), for which the Italian Marxist director earned high praise from Catholic and Protestant critics alike and won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival. 5