A
communist state is a
state with a
form of government which is characterized by the
one-party rule or the
dominant-party rule of a
communist party which professes allegiance to a
Leninist or
Marxist–Leninist communist ideology as the guiding principle of the state. The founder and primary theorist of
Marxism, the 19th-century German thinker
Karl Marx, had an ambivalent attitude toward religion, which he viewed as "the
opium of the people", simultaneously "the sigh of" and a source of moral agency of the "oppressed creature" against their suffering. To Marx, religion was not the ideological expression of those in power, and he did not see it needing abolishing. Instead, he saw the communist state as creating conditions where the consolation provided by religion would not be needed. In the Marxist–Leninist interpretation of Marxist theory, developed primarily by Russian revolutionary
Vladimir Lenin, atheism emanates from its dialectical materialism and tries to explain and criticize religion. Lenin states: Although Marx and Lenin were both atheists, several
religious communist groups exist, including
Christian communists.
Julian Baggini devotes a chapter of his book
Atheism: A Very Short Introduction to a discussion about 20th-century political systems, including communism and
political repression in the Soviet Union. Baggini argues that "Soviet communism, with its active oppression of religion, is a distortion of original Marxist communism, which did not advocate oppression of the religious." Baggini goes on to argue that "
Fundamentalism is a danger in any belief system" and that "Atheism's most authentic political expression... takes the form of state secularism, not state atheism."
Soviet Union '' in 1929, the magazine of the Society of the Godless. The first five-year plan of the Soviet Union is shown crushing the
gods of the
Abrahamic religions. State atheism (
gosateizm, a
syllabic abbreviation of "state" [
gosudarstvo] and "atheism" [
ateizm]) was a major goal of the official
Soviet ideology. This phenomenon, which lasted for seven decades, was new in
world history. The Communist Party engaged in diverse activities such as destroying places of worship, executing religious leaders, flooding schools and media with anti-religious propaganda, and propagated "scientific atheism". It sought to make religion disappear by various means. Thus, the USSR became the first state to have as one objective of its official ideology the elimination of the existing religion, and the prevention of the future implanting of religious belief, with the goal of establishing state atheism (
gosateizm). After the
Russian Civil War, the state used its resources to stop the implanting of religious beliefs in nonbelievers and remove "prerevolutionary remnants" which still existed. The
Bolsheviks were particularly hostile toward the
Russian Orthodox Church (which supported the
White Movement during the
Russian Civil War) and saw it as a supporter of
Tsarist autocracy. During the
collectivization of the land, Orthodox priests distributed pamphlets declaring that the Soviet regime was the
Antichrist coming to place "the Devil's mark" on the peasants, and encouraged them to resist the government.
Political repression in the Soviet Union was widespread and while
religious persecution was applied to numerous religions, the regime's anti-religious campaigns were often directed against specific religions based on state interests. The attitude in the Soviet Union toward religion varied from persecution of some religions to not outlawing others. From the late 1920s to the late 1930s, such organizations as the
League of Militant Atheists ridiculed all religions and harassed believers. The league was a "nominally independent organization established by the Communist Party to promote atheism". It published its own newspaper, and journals, sponsored lectures, and organized demonstrations that lampooned religion and promoted atheism. Anti-religious and atheistic propaganda was implemented into every portion of soviet life from schools to the media and even on to substituting rituals to replace religious ones. Though Lenin originally introduced the
Gregorian calendar to the Soviets, subsequent efforts to reorganise the week to improve worker productivity saw the introduction of the
Soviet calendar, which had the side-effect that a "holiday will seldom fall on Sunday". 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 1,200 priests were killed (a much greater number was subjected to persecution). Most seminaries were closed, and publication of religious writing was banned. A meeting of the Antireligious Commission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (
Bolsheviks) that occurred on 23 May 1929 estimated the portion of believers in the
USSR at 80 percent, though this percentage may be understated to prove the successfulness of the struggle with religion. The Russian Orthodox Church, which had 54,000 parishes before World War I, was reduced to 500 by 1940. Overall, by that same year 90 percent of the churches, synagogues, and mosques that had been operating in 1917 were either forcibly closed, converted, or destroyed.
Armenia,
Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan,
Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan,
Belarus,
Moldova,
Georgia,
Ukraine and
Lithuania have diverse religious affiliations. Russians have primarily returned to identifying with the Orthodox Church; by 2008 72% of Russians identified as Orthodox - rising from 31% in 1991. However, Professor Niels Christian Nielsen of philosophy and religious thought of
Rice University has written that the post-Soviet population in areas which were formerly predominantly Orthodox are now "nearly illiterate regarding religion", almost completely lacking the intellectual or philosophical aspects of their faith and having almost no knowledge of other faiths. In 1928, the
Jewish Autonomous Oblast was established by
Joseph Stalin, acting on an idea proposed by Lenin in order to give the Jewish population in Russia more personal autonomy, as reparation for
antisemitism in the Russian Empire. Along with granting Jewish autonomy, Stalin also allowed
Sharia law in the majority-Islamic countries of the Soviet Union. "The Soviet Government considers that the Sharia, as common law, is as fully authorized as that of any other of the peoples inhabiting Russia" (statement by Stalin during the Congress of the Peoples of
Dagestan, an autonomous republic in Russia). Art. 135 of the
1936 constitution of the Soviet Union protects individuals from religious discrimination.
Albania In 1967
Enver Hoxha, the head of state of Albania, declared Albania to be the "first atheist state of the world" even though the Soviet Union under Lenin had already been a
de facto atheist state. The 1998
Constitution of Albania defined the country as a
parliamentary republic, and established personal and political rights and freedoms, including protection against coercion in matters of religious belief. Albania is a member state of the
Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and the 2011 census found that 58.79% of Albanians adhere to
Islam, making it the largest
religion in the country. The majority of Albanian Muslims are secular Sunnis along with a significant
Bektashi Shia minority.
Christianity is practiced by 16.99% of the population, making it the 2nd largest religion in the country. The remaining population is either
irreligious or belongs to other religious groups. In 2011, Albania's population was estimated to be 56.7% Muslim, 10% Roman Catholic, 6.8% Orthodox, 2.5% atheist, 2.1% Bektashi (a Sufi order), 5.7% other, 16.2% unspecified. In the
Gallup Global Reports 2010 survey, when asked whether religion is an important part of daily life, 39% of Albanians responded "yes" and 53% "no", which placed Albania in the lowest quartile of countries ranked by "yes" responses. The U.S. state department reports that in 2013, "There were no reports of societal abuses or discrimination based on religious affiliation, belief, or practice."
Cambodia bullet holes left at the
Angkor Wat temple The
Khmer Rouge actively persecuted
Buddhists during their
rule of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Buddhist institutions and temples were destroyed and Buddhist monks and teachers were killed in large numbers. A third of the country's
monasteries were destroyed along with numerous holy texts and items of high artistic quality. 25,000 Buddhist monks were massacred by the regime, which was officially an atheist state. The persecution was undertaken because
Pol Pot believed that Buddhism was "a decadent affectation". He sought to eliminate Buddhism's
1,500-year-old mark on Cambodia. Under the Khmer Rouge, all religious practices were banned. According to
Ben Kiernan, "the Khmer Rouge repressed
Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism, but its fiercest extermination campaign was directed against the ethnic
Cham Muslim minority."
China China has adopted a policy of official state atheism. Art. 36 of the Chinese constitution guarantees
freedom of religion but it only allows members of state sanctioned organizations to practice religions. The government has promoted atheism throughout the country. In April 2016, the
General Secretary,
Xi Jinping, stated that members of the
Chinese Communist Party must be "unyielding Marxist atheists"; in the same month, a government-sanctioned demolition work crew drove a bulldozer over two Chinese Christians who protested against the demolition of their church by refusing to step aside, resulting in death of a woman. Two members of the church demolition crew were later detained by police. Traditionally, a large segment of the Chinese population practiced
Chinese folk religions and
Confucianism,
Taoism and
Buddhism. As a result, all of these religions had played a significant role in the everyday lives of ordinary people. After the
1949 Chinese Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party took power. For much of its early history, that government maintained under Marxist thought that religion would ultimately disappear, and characterized it as emblematic of
feudalism and foreign
colonialism. During the
Cultural Revolution, student vigilantes who were known as
Red Guards converted religious buildings into buildings which were used for secular purposes or they destroyed them. However, this attitude relaxed considerably in the late 1970s, during the
reform and opening up period. The
1978 Constitution of the People's Republic of China guaranteed freedom of religion with a number of restrictions. Since then, there has been a massive program to rebuild Buddhist and Taoist temples that were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. The CCP has said that religious beliefs and membership in it are incompatible, and requires its members to be atheist. Party regulations state that religious members are to be given a chance to renounce their beliefs and be expelled if they do not. However, the state is not allowed to force ordinary citizens to become atheists.
China's five officially sanctioned religious organizations are the
Buddhist Association of China,
Chinese Taoist Association,
Islamic Association of China,
Three-Self Patriotic Movement and
Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. These groups are afforded a degree of protection, but are subject to restrictions and controls under the
State Administration for Religious Affairs. Unregistered religious groups face varying degrees of harassment. The constitution permits what is called "normal religious activities," so long as they do not involve the use of religion to "engage in activities that disrupt social order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the state. Religious organizations and religious affairs are not subject to any foreign dominance." Article 36 of the
Constitution of the People's Republic of China of 1982 specifies that: Most people report no organized religious affiliation; however, people with a belief in folk traditions and spiritual beliefs, such as
ancestor veneration and
feng shui, along with informal ties to local temples and unofficial
house churches number in the hundreds of millions. In its annual report on International Religious Freedom, the
United States Department of State provides statistics about organized religions. In 2007, it reported the following (citing the Government's 1997 report on Religious Freedom and 2005 White Paper on religion): :*Buddhists 8%. :*Taoists, unknown as a percentage partly because it is practiced along with Confucianism and Buddhism. :*Muslims, 1%, with more than 20,000
Imams. Other estimates state that at least 1% of China's population is Muslim. :*Christians,
Protestants, at least 2%.
Catholics, about 1%. To some degree, statistics which are related to
Buddhism and religious Taoism are incomparable to statistics for
Islam and
Christianity. This fact is due to the traditional Chinese belief system which blends Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, so a person who follows a traditional belief system would not exclusively identify as a Buddhist or a Taoist, even though he or she would attend Buddhist or Taoist places of worship. According to Peter Ng, Professor of the Department of Religion at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, , 95% of Chinese were religious in some way if religion is believed to include traditional folk practices such as burning incense for gods or ancestors at life-cycle or seasonal festivals, fortune telling and related customary practices. The U.S. State Department has designated China as a "country of particular concern" since 1999. Freedom House classifies
Tibet and
Xinjiang as regions of particular repression of religion, due to concerns about separatist activity.
Heiner Bielefeldt, the
UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, says that China's actions against the Uighurs are "a major problem". The Chinese government has denounced the report, stating that China has "ample" religious freedom.
Cuba Until 1992, Cuba was officially an atheist state. In August 1960, several bishops signed a joint pastoral letter condemning communism and declaring it incompatible with Catholicism, and calling on Catholics to reject it.
Fidel Castro gave a four-hour long speech the next day, condemning priests who serve "great wealth" and using fears of
Falangist influence in order to attack Spanish-born priests, declaring "There is no doubt that
Franco has a sizeable group of fascist priests in Cuba." Originally more tolerant of religion, the Cuban government began arresting many believers and shutting down religious schools after the
Bay of Pigs Invasion. Its prisons were being filled with clergy since the 1960s. In 1961, the Cuban government confiscated Catholic schools, including the
Jesuit school that Fidel Castro had attended. In 1965 it exiled two hundred priests. In 1976, the
Constitution of Cuba added a clause stating that the "socialist state...bases its activity on, and educates the people in, the scientific materialist concept of the universe". The 1976 Constitution also stated that the Cuban government "recognizes and guarantees liberty of conscience, the right of each to profess whatever religious belief and to practice, within respect of the law, the worship of their preference." In 1992, the
dissolution of the Soviet Union led the country to declare itself a
secular state.
Pope John Paul II contributed to the
Cuban thaw when he paid a historic visit to the island in 1998 and criticized the
US embargo.
Pope Benedict XVI visited Cuba in 2012 and
Pope Francis visited Cuba in 2015. The Cuban government continued hostile actions against religious groups; having ordered, in 2015 alone, the closure or demolition of over 100
Pentecostal,
Methodist, and
Baptist parishes, according to a report from
Christian Solidarity Worldwide. While the Cuban Constitution now recognizes
freedom of religion, the law is still silent on the issue of church construction. This vagueness allowed authorities in some areas to prohibit the construction of new churches, but allowing to lead services inside their homes and in religious buildings erected before the
Cuban revolution. Despite the difficulties in constructing new churches, there has been a boom in
evangelical worship, with tens of thousands of Cubans worshipping unmolested across the island each week.
East Germany Though Article 39 of the
GDR constitution of 1968 guarantees religious freedom, the state's policy was oriented towards the promotion of atheism. Eastern Germany practiced heavy secularization. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) generated antireligious regulations and promoted atheism for decades which impacted the growth of citizens affiliating with no religion from 7.6% in 1950 to 60% in 1986. It was in the 1950s that scientific atheism became official state policy when Soviet authorities were setting up a communist government. the area of the former German Democratic Republic was the least religious region in the world.
North Korea The
North Korean constitution states that freedom of religion is permitted. However, the North Korean government's
Juche ideology has been described as "state-sanctioned atheism" and atheism is the government's official position. According to a 2018 CIA report, free religious activities almost no longer exist, with government-sponsored groups to delude them. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom stated that assessing the situation in North Korea is challenging, but reports which state that DPRK officials repress religious activities have surfaced, including reports which state that the government forms and controls religious organizations in an attempt to restrict the performance of religious activities. In 2004, the Human Rights Overview reported that North Korea remains one of the most repressive governments, with isolation and disregard for
international law making monitoring almost impossible. After 1,500 churches were destroyed during the rule of
Kim Il Sung from 1948 to 1994, three churches were built in
Pyongyang. Foreign residents who regularly attend services at these churches have reported that the services which are performed there are staged for their benefit. The North Korean government promotes the
cult of personality of
Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung, described as a
political religion, as well as the
Juche ideology, based on
Korean ultranationalism, which calls on people to "avoid spiritual deference to outside influences", which was interpreted as including religions which originated outside Korea. Since 2001, the U.S. State Department has designated North Korea as a "country of particular concern", due to its violations of religious freedom.
Cardinal Nicolas Cheong Jin-suk has said that, "There's no knowledge of priests surviving persecution that came in the late forties, when 166 priests and religious were killed or kidnapped," which includes the
Roman Catholic bishop of Pyongyang,
Francis Hong Yong-ho. In November 2013, it was reported that the repression of religious people led to the public execution of 80 people, some of them were executed for possessing
Bibles. There are five Christian churches in Pyongyang, three of them are
Protestant, one of them is
Eastern Orthodox, and one of them is
Catholic. President
Kim Il Sung and his mother were frequent patrons of the
Chilgol Church, one of the Protestant churches, and that church can be visited on tours. Christian institutions are regulated by the Korean Christian Federation, a state-controlled religious organization.
Chondoism is an indigenous religion in Korea, and the
Chondoist Chongu Party is part of the ruling front in North Korea, but the number of Chondoists in North Korea is unknown.
Mongolia The
Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) propagated atheism until the 1960s. In the
Mongolian People's Republic, after it was
invaded by Japanese troops in 1936, the Soviet Union deployed its troops there in 1937, undertaking an offensive against the Buddhist religion. Parallel with this, a
Soviet-style purge was launched in the People's Revolutionary Party and the Mongolian army. The Mongol leader at that time was Khorloogiin Choibalsan, a follower of Joseph Stalin, who emulated many of the policies that Stalin had previously implemented in the Soviet Union. The purge virtually succeeded in eliminating Tibetan Buddhism and cost an estimated thirty to thirty-five thousand lives. More than 700 monasteries were demolished.
Vietnam Officially, the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam is an atheist state as declared by its
communist government. Art. 24 of the
constitution of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam recognizes religious freedom. ==Non-communist states==