Religion in Communism

In the Communist Russia, Marxism-Leninism was considered as the basis for the perfect society. According to this philosophy, political leaders would quickly replace religious leaders, whose beliefs had no place in a scientifically managed nation. Lenin was highly critical of religion. Atheism is an essential and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific communism. In this system, each individual took responsibility for contributing to the good of all.

Because of this, Russia was the first state to have as an ideological objective the elimination of religion and its replacement with atheism. The state atheism was known as gosateizm. The communist regime confiscated religious property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in schools. Marxism–Leninism has always supported the control, suppression, and elimination of religion. Within about a year of the revolution, the state expropriated all church property, including the churches themselves, and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200priests were killed. Many more were persecuted but even with all this, according to various Soviet and Western sources, however, over one-third of the country's people professed religious belief. The role of religion in the daily lives of the Russian citizens varied greatly. Two-thirds of the Soviet populations were irreligious. About half the people, including members of the ruling Communist Party and high-level government officials, professed atheism. For the majority of the Russian citizens religion seemed irrelevant.

Marx said: “The religion is the opium of the people” This mean that according to the communist ideas the religion manipulates society, like for example in the catholic church that promised salvation and an afterlife in paradise for the people that do what the church says, as measured by the tenets of the Bible and what communism want is to be the only one that the society has to obey, but having to compete with something as big as what the church promises it was much easier to just eliminate it. Other reasons why communisms want to disappear the religion was that the church said they want the common good but under their own rules and the communism with its own idea of common good said that what the church told us are just lies and trick so we do whatever they want and that, according to the communist ideas, was just to make it bigger and stronger.

In conclusion we can say that the two mayor reasons of why having a religion or a belief was not an option for the communist society were: First, that religion gain more authority in the people than the government and like communism wanted to be the only authority they just eliminate it so there were no more competition. And second, were the two different ideas of collective good, the one of the church that was under tier own rule according to communism and the one of the communist system that wanted to make the country progress.

Written by: Maria Claudia Villar