The rise and fall of the Soviet Union and communism in the Eastern European countries provides an interesting backdrop in which to explain and test general principles in a relatively new sociological science, religious market economics.  A brief history of the discipline is given, including five of its basic principles.  Then, the rise and fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries is analyzed as to how the basic principles perform in modeling reality.  Even though at first it seems actual experience contradicts some of the principles, further analysis of extenuating circumstances allows the basic principles to stand.  It is concluded that economic models are a simplification of the real world, meant to aid understanding of tendencies, but should not be counted on to predict actual events.

Although religion as a social system has been studied for centuries, sometime in the mid-twentieth century, religion and sociology fields of study began to consider religious institutions as making up a religious market economy.  In 1967 Peter Berger wrote a book called The Sacred Canopy, which asserted that people of faith are better off in a monopolistic religious environment, as competition and pluralism is bad for the health of religious society as a whole.  His opinion was that not only is competition wasteful, but it is bad for unity.  This was at odds with the prevailing opinion about business and the financial market economy.

Growth of the Scientific Study of Religion

This scientific treatment of religion continued to develop until, in the 1980’s, there were some laws, or generally agreed upon principles at play.  However, the prevailing ideas had evolved in just the opposite direction and were now more in line with typical financial market economy principles regarding competition and monopoly.

There were several sociologists that worked in this field of the religious market economy, including Roger Finke of the University of Chicago and later Purdue University, as well as Rodney Stark and Paul Froese of the University of Washington.  Although I have reviewed several other contributors in this field, these are the ones that are referenced most often in this paper.

Although Finke and Stark admired Berger as one of the first sociologists to use market model economics to analyze and discuss religion, they continued to assert that, like any business, competition is good for the growth and preservation of an industry (i.e. religious institutions in in this case) (Finke & Stark, 1988).  They asserted that a pluralism of institutions is necessary to properly serve the religious market, because an institution cannot be “both worldly and other-worldly” (Finke & Stark, 1998, p. 42) and different people are seeking different degrees and types of worldliness.

Pluralism (or the degree of competition) is so important in the field of economics that researchers have a specific measurement for it, called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, which is the sum of the squares of the market shares of the 50 largest firms within an industry (IMF, 2004).  Religious market economists also use this index to measure competition between religious institutions or denominations.

According to Stark and Bainbridge (1987), as in a market economy, monopolies repress religious pluralism.  Usually with government backing, regulation lowers pluralism, thereby hurting the religious economy because it reduces the ability of the institutions to serve the market.  In addition, according to Finke and Stark (1988), monopolies become lazy because they are not exposed to market forces and, over time, they poorly serve even the markets that they initially served well. 

In addition to the Hirfindahl-Hirschman Index, researchers use a Religious Diversity Index (Finke & Stark, 1988), which is similar to a measure used in the field of linguistics.  Since repression affects the all-important pluralism, religious market economy researchers sometimes use a Religious Repression Index developed by Paul Marshall, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom (Marshall, 2000).

Over the years, a few religious market economic principles have been promoted (summarized by Finke & Stark, 1998, p.762):

Principle 1:  Because pluralism has a direct effect on competition and regulations have an inverse effect on competition, when pluralism is higher, or when regulation is lower, competition will be higher and religious commitment will be higher (Finke & Stark, 1988).  “The more pluralism, the greater the religious mobilization of the population – the more people there are who will be committed to a faith” (p. 43).

Principle 2:  Religious institutions that have lower market share will be more hungry, will be more evangelical, and generate higher levels of religious commitment.

Principle 3:  Under certain conditions, conflict or persecution will have the same affect as competition in garnering religious commitment.

Principle 4:  As in mass customization, the ultimate pluralism asymptotically approaches a market of one.  However, like any business/financial market, it becomes saturated when the number of businesses become more than adequate to serve the market.  So, as the number of suppliers becomes larger in a religious market, eventually, more pluralism does not increase religious commitment (Finke et al., 1996).

Principle 5:  Because applicable diversity is limited to an easily traveled area, urban environments encourage pluralism and, therefore, higher levels of religious commitment.  It is a general belief that cities are the "den of iniquity", but Finke and Stark (1988) assert in their study of 1906 religious affiliation data in American cities that proximity and size of market in cities encourage more religious affiliation and commitment than rural areas.

Testing the Principles of the Religious Market Economy in the Soviet Union

The rise and fall of the Soviet Union and communism in the Eastern Block countries provides a very good opportunity to try to fit the religious market economic principles to actual events in the world.

Prior to the Russian Revolution in 1914-1918, many of the countries of the future Soviet Union hosted monopolistic religions, meaning that each country had a primary religion

supported and encouraged by their respective governments.  There were many reasons for this, historically, as well as politically and socially.  These religions were part of their respective national heritage.  The eastern countries (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) were primarily Muslim, Russia (and Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine) was primarily Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic church was prominent in Lithuania and Poland, and Lutheran churches were prominent in Estonia, Latvia, and East Germany.

The Soviet communist government, initially in 1918, and again in the 1950’s for the eastern European countries after WWII, encouraged what became to be known as "scientific atheism".  This was an organized campaign to abandon the Russian Orthodox religion and replace it with a fully secular view of the world that was compatible with their socialistic and materialistic philosophies, complete with a moral code of conduct, secular ceremonies, and full support in the entire educational system (Froese, 2004b).

Since the Soviet government was focused on the monopolistic religions in their eradication campaign (Froese, 2004a, p. 63), to the extent that any religions survived, minority religions increased to make the society more pluralistic (p. 67).  One way to look at the religious economy was that there was a new competitive religion, scientific atheism, and the government encouraged that competitor and discouraged the previous religious monopoly.  This allowed the other minority religions to thrive, increasing pluralism.  This was Principle 1 in action.

Nevertheless, scientific atheism was not entirely successful, with only about 25-50% of the people admitting that they were atheists or non-believers.  According to Paul Froese (2004b), this was mainly because it was forced onto the population by the government and the people resisted being told what to believe.

In Poland and Lithuania, the Roman Catholic church flourished, because it became the major channel through which people could oppose communism (Gagnere, 1993; Froese, 2004a, p.64).  After the transition, about 95% of the Polish people considered themselves Roman Catholics, and about 80-90% of those practiced by regularly attending church, even if underground.  In fact, according to Monsignor R. George Sarauskas, who was head of the Ad Hoc Committee to Aid the Catholic Church in Central and Eastern Europe created in 1990, in an interview published in U.S. Catholic (1995), said the Church grew during communism because it became a rallying organization where people could express their dissatisfaction with the government and get physical and emotional support.  Although religion was discouraged, a small number of priests could register with the government and shepherd a congregation.  The services were closely watched and the priest could be imprisoned or lose his registration if he spoke against the government.  Those priests and nuns that had lost their registration created an underground religious organization. (U.S. Catholic, 1995).

In addition, Muslims went underground during the reign of the Soviet Union (Froese, 2004a, p.63).  Froese (2005a) concluded that the Islamic faith is more compatible with communism, in that they mirror similar ideas of social justice and Muslims can more successfully practice their faith in private.  Kuran (1995) explains that Islam and Judaism include doctrines that allow believers to publicly denounce their faith as long as they practiced it in private, whereas Judaism and Christianity do not.

The Role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Fall of the Soviet Union

In Poland, in particular, the Roman Catholic church was more than tolerated.  Perhaps this was partly because the Pope at the time was Polish.  According to Jonathon Luxmore, who discusses early Wojtyla (the Pope's birth name) lectures in The National Catholic Reporter (1999), Pope John Paul II had always expressed a dislike for communism.  And when he visited Poland as Pope in 1979, he kindled a national unity movement against communism (Yergin & Stanislaw, 2002, p. 272).  And, since the Church continued to provide an infrastructure to support opposition to communism (Principle 3), this fueled an atmosphere of social revolution in Poland (Froese, 2004a).  According to Gagnere (1993), the Church collected Solidarity signatures after masses and blessed several candidates, and helped with the transportation and other logistical needs of the campaign.

According to Monsignor R. George Sarauskas, as cited in U.S. Catholic (1995), when the government officials saw the response of the Polish people to Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1979, they realized that the government and the concept of scientific atheist could never result in the loyalty the people had for the Church.  About 9 years or so before the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, the communist government officials had realized that they had been unsuccessful in promoting scientific atheism.  In some ways, they stopped pushing so hard and there appeared to be a lack of resolve in the communist leaders.

According to Sawatsky (1992), even Yeltsin was agreeing that, by 1991, many Russian Republic political leaders were admitting some Christianity.  Yeltsin admitted that he was led to baptism by his grandmother and “[took] a candle” (p.59) while he was at church.  However he said that he could not bring himself to publicly make the sign of the cross with his hands.  He expressed remorse about the atheistic educational system in the Soviet Union.

For at least two years following the transition, the Czech, Slovak, and Polish bishops encouraged people to vote according to their Christian beliefs, something they would not publicly do during the Soviet rule (Gagnere, 1993).

 

The Affect of the Fall of the Soviet Union on the Churches in the Soviet Countries

After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a surge in religious revival in almost all countries.  Most religious market economists expected that the religions in these countries would grow universally and become much more pluralistic after the removal of repression of the government (Principle 1).  In fact, in1988, Finke and Stark said that “whenever and wherever repression falters, lush pluralism breaks through.” (p. 42).

However, although they initially grew fast, they did not become more pluralistic.  In fact, by 2004 more than half of the former Soviet Union countries had Herfindahl-Hirschman Indices of greater than 5,000, which means those countries tended toward religious monopolies (Froese, 2004a).  It seemed that at least some of the five principles were in jeopardy.

In 2004, Paul Froese from Baylor University indicated his theories of why this happened:

• Atheism needed to be considered a monopolistic religion in its own rite. Scientific atheism was a “Marxist – inspired faith in the moral superiority of belief in historical materialism” (Froese, 2004a, p. 66).  Previous pluralism measurements did not include atheism as a religion, as it was considered the lack of a religion.
• The new governments, wanting to encourage their own historical heritage, which was almost always associated with the previous monopolistic religion prior to communism, created new laws that encouraged the monopolistic religions again, giving them an advantage in competition (p. 68-69).

Also, other sources provide additional insight:

• Most of the people still had some beliefs in the previous monopolistic religions, even though they were discouraged from practicing them during communism (U.S. Catholic, 1999). There is great difficulty in getting people to admit their real beliefs in such an environment (Kuran, 1995), so the true lack of success of scientific atheism was almost invisible during surveys.

• New religions were promoted by the influx of missionaries who did not fully understand the history of the religions in the area that were, in fact, still being practiced. Therefore, they were less effective at converting the people. (Sawatsky, 1992; Elliot & Corrado, 1997, p. 338).  Even though the propaganda against the previous monopolistic religions stopped and the atheist competition began to fade, leaving an immediate market vacuum, it could not be filled by the ill-prepared minority religion missionaries.
• There is another principle of secularism at play here, which was especially prevalent in East Germany. Froese and Pfaff (2001) concluded that this was because of increased church taxes, of the devastating effects of the Lutheran collaboration with the communist regime after WW II, and other non-Lutheran religious institutions encountering resistance from the government.  In addition, there is a possibility that the establishment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) established by the European Union contributed to secularization (Herbert & Fras, 2009) because it provided an alternative solution to some of the social issues that religion historically tried to address during communism.  Whatever the cause, the World Values Survey 1995-1997 (as cited in Froese, 2005b) listed East Germany as having double the percentage of atheists (25%) as the next most atheist country in the world (Japan).

As a result of all these factors, instead of the religious societies becoming more pluralistic after the fall of Soviet Union, they became more monopolistic than while they were under communism.  And, the very same religious monopolies that were in place before the Soviet Union were reestablished.  These unique circumstances have combined to create fast religious growth without an increase in pluralism.

This seems to contradict the five basic principles of religious market economics.  But, when the issues are examined in more depth and detail above, it becomes clear that the principles stand.

Extenuating issues and circumstances have to be considered whenever “real life” doesn’t reflect predictions by existing theories and models.  Models are a simplification of the "real world", meant to aid understanding of tendencies, but should not be counted on to always predict actual events.  But, after subsequent analysis, the additional variables and issues can usually be brought to light, and sometimes used to improve the model.

 

References

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