State atheism


State atheism is the incorporation of hard atheism or non-theism into political regimes. It is considered the opposite of theocracy and may also refer to large-scale secularization attempts by governments. To some extent, it is a religion-state relationship that is usually ideologically linked to irreligion and the promotion of irreligion or atheism. State atheism may refer to a government's promotion of anti-clericalism, which opposes religious institutional power and influence in all aspects of public and political life, including the involvement of religion in the everyday life of the citizen. In some instances, religious symbols and public practices that were once held by religions were replaced with secularized versions of them. State atheism in these cases is considered as not being politically neutral toward religion, and therefore it is often considered non-secular.
The majority of communist states followed similar policies from 1917 onwards. The Soviet Union had a long history of state atheism, whereby those who were seeking social success generally had to profess atheism and stay away from places of worship; this trend became especially militant during the middle of the Stalinist era, which lasted from 1929 to 1953. In Eastern Europe, countries like Bulgaria, East Germany and Czechoslovakia experienced strong state atheism policies. The Soviet Union attempted to suppress public religious expression over wide areas of its influence, including places such as Central Asia. Currently, China, North Korea, and Vietnam, are officially atheist.
Cuba was an atheist state until 2019, when a change in its constitution declared it a secular state.
In contrast, a secular state officially purports to be neutral in matters of religion; it does not support religion, nor does it support irreligion. In a review of 35 European states in 1980, 5 states were considered "secular" in the sense of religious neutrality, 9 considered "atheistic", and 21 states considered "religious".

Countries that currently practice state atheism

  • Countries that formerly practiced state atheism

Europe

  • from 1960

  • Asia

  • from 1966 to 1970

  • Africa

  • Americas

  • from 1959 to 1992

    Communist states

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

State atheism 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.
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 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. 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 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.
Since the end of the Soviet era, Russia, 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". 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. Marxist–Leninist authorities in Albania claimed that religion was foreign to Albania and used this to justify their policy of state atheism and suppression of religion. This nationalism was also used to justify the communist stance of state atheism from 1967 to 1991.
Article 37 of the Albanian Constitution of 1976 stipulated, "The state recognizes no religion, and supports atheistic propaganda in order to implant a scientific materialistic world outlook in people."
Catholic priest Shtjefen Kurti was executed for secretly baptizing a child in Shkodër in 1972.
In 1990, the policy of state atheism was repealed. 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, 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."