From ‘Opium of the People’ to Savior : Religion: The conversion of Mikhail Gorbachev to the virtues of spiritual life may backfire. After all, true belief also seeks true social justice.

There’s a perhaps apocryphal story of a high-level Soviet official pleading with an American religious society to send Bibles to the Soviet Union. It seems that research on the characteristics of efficient factories had found in them a high percentage of serious Christian workers who were honest, came to work on time, were sober and generally gave a full day’s work for their pay. Intrigued by this, the researchers pressed further. These Christians, they found, were guided by a code called “The Ten Commandments,” found in the Bible.

Mikhail Gorbachev himself seems to be a recent convert to the social utility of religion. In promising to relax oppressive restrictions on religion, he almost paraphrased our own George Washington’s opinion that religion and morality are the twin pillars of healthy national life. Other Communist leaders of the East Bloc are offering similar opinions and making similar moves. The leaders who once condemned religion for being an opiate that diverted the attention of workers from unjust social conditions are now intent on using religion to rescue their societies from calamity.

Will such a strategy work? Or is it an opiate of the leaders themselves, diverting their attention from other, less “socially useful,” effects of religion?

There is a great likelihood of major religious renewals in the Eastern Bloc countries. The human spirit’s aspiration for transcendent truth has been bottled up for decades by ideological and social practices that have attempted to reduce the human horizon to a drab one-dimensionality. The religious bodies that have resisted this pressure and kept the faith have gained enormous respect from the people and now offer them a liberating alternative to a failed Marxist vision. Catholics in Poland and Hungary, the Eastern Orthodox in Russia and Lutherans in East Germany have remained credible islands of moral and spiritual transcendence in a flat sea of state-enforced materialism. Indeed, it seems as if the non-coerced materialism of the West is far more lethal to religion.

No doubt these revivals will produce more productive citizens. The Soviet “researchers” were right. Religious renewal will strengthen the moral fiber that holds together marriage, family, workplace, voluntary association and, yes, even the nation. But the essence of religion is that it marches to the beat of a different drummer. Authentic religion “obeys no other God.” It shapes a morality not in order to be socially useful to the state, though it may in fact be so, but rather to become obedient to God. Further, obedience to God does not end with private, personal morality. It extends, as indeed the prophets extended it, to the public life of the society. The prophetic call for justice is discomforting to every nation.

Among Eastern European peoples, particularly the Poles and the Ukrainians, this prophetic impulse is closely intertwined with aspirations for national self-determination. Religious fervor will intensify the nationalism of those peoples and provide a volatile mixture that should awaken Communist leaders from their drugged illusions about the irenic qualities of religion.

Religion at its best, however, maintains a distance from every national movement or achievement, lest it be reduced to a sacred tool for secular purposes. It presses for justice and peace within nations, as has already been demonstrated by the long-standing peace movement among East German Christians. The nascent ecological movements in several East Bloc countries are led by Christians. Human-rights activists are likewise drawn heavily from religious communities, particularly Jewish.

Religion is a source of discontent in all societies because it operates from a frame of reference that transcends earthly accomplishment. This has been borne out not only in communist societies but in every society where human possibilities are severely repressed. Witness the role of religion in Central America, the Philippines and the Islamic countries.

All of this should not prompt too much celebration among those of us in the “successful” West. The “victory” of democratic capitalist ideas should be greeted by no more than one cheer. For the moral foundations of the West, which make both democracy and capitalism viable, are eroding. We will need as much religious renewal in the long run as the East Bloc needs right now. We will all need a measure of what the Russians call dukhovnost-- the spiritual life of the people.