by Rod Dreher
“That really happened,” he answers. “It was incredible. There was the sign I had prayed for. The prisoners shouted, ‘God exists! He exists!’ And that is when I knew that God was speaking to me too. He was telling me that he had a mission for me here in this prison.”
Alexander Ogorodnikov thus began his life hidden behind the walls of the Soviet prison system. But he was not hidden from God. And because of that, as the Christian dissident would learn, God manifested through his fidelity to those damned to die before a firing squad who were desperate for a sign of hope. Ogorodnikov’s connection to God would be, to these wretched men, their only lifeline.
See, Judge, Act
A time of painful testing, even persecution, is coming. Lukewarm or shallow Christians will not come through with their faith intact. Christians today must dig deep into the Bible and church tradition and teach themselves how and why today’s post-Christian world, with its self-centeredness, its quest for happiness and rejection of sacred order and transcendent values, is a rival religion to authentic Christianity. We should also see how many of the world’s values have been absorbed into Christian life and practice.
Then we must judge how the ways of the world, and its demands, conflict with what Christ requires of his disciples. Are we admirers, or followers? How will we know?
We will know when we act—or fail to act—as Christians when to be faithful costs us something. It may be a small thing at first—a place on a sports team because we won’t play on Sunday mornings, or the respect of our peers when we will not march in a parade for a political cause. But the demands made on us will grow greater, and the consequences for failing to submit to the world’s demands will grow more severe. Father Kolaković told his Family this—and in a way, he’s telling us the same thing today.
We serve a God who created all things for a purpose. He has shown us in the Bible, especially the Gospels, who we are and how we are to live to be in harmony with the sacred order he created. He does not want admirers; he wants followers. As Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God suffered with humanity to redeem humanity. He calls us to share in his Passion, for our sake and the sake of the world. He promises us nothing but the cross. Not happiness but the joy of blessedness. Not material wealth but richness of spirit. Not sexual freedom as erotic abandon but sexual freedom within loving, mutually sacrificial commitment. Not power but love; not self-sovereignty but obedience.
This is the uncompromising rival religion that the post-Christian world will not long tolerate. If you are not rock solid in your commitment to traditional Christianity, then the world will break you. But if you are, then this is the solid rock upon which that world will be broken. And if those solid rocks are joined together, they form a wall of solidarity that is very hard for the enemy to breach.
CHAPTER NINE
Standing in Solidarity
Now for the first time you were about to see people who were not your enemies. Now for the first time you were about to see others who were alive, who were traveling your road, and whom you could join to yourself with the joyous word “we.”
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN, ON ARRIVING IN ONE’S FIRST PRISON CELL, IN THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO1
The house is like every other house on this unremarkable street in suburban Bratislava. We walk through the back garden, past the lawn furniture and the children’s toys. Ján Šimulčik, a Slovak historian of the underground church, knocks on the door. He has arranged with the mother who lives here with her husband and kids to show his American visitor what makes this house different from all others in the neighborhood.
In the 1980s, this house was a headquarters for printing and distributing Christian samizdat—underground literature forbidden by the communist regime. Šimulčik, now in his fifties, was part of the movement as a college student. A Catholic priest posing as a worker lived in secret in the house back then. Šimulčik and a handful of other Catholic students would come there at planned intervals to sort and package samizdat documents for distribution.
Šimulčik leads me down a crumbling concrete staircase into a basement. It is plain, damp, and a bit chilly, like every other basement in the world. What is his point? I wonder.
Then the scholar removes a floor panel that had entirely escaped my notice. There is a hole in the basement floor big enough for a man to climb through, and iron rungs embedded in the concrete wall. Šimulčik turns around backward and descends into the hole, signaling for me to follow.
At the bottom there is a short tunnel. Crouching to make my way through the cramped space, I follow Šimulčik up the iron rungs in the exit shaft. We emerge into a tiny room, not much bigger than a closet. There is a table against the wall, upon which sits an offset printing machine of 1980 vintage.
In this secret room, underneath the house and behind a secret basement wall, accessible only by hidden tunnel, dissident Christians printed Gospels, prayer books, and catechism lessons for clandestine distribution throughout communist Slovakia. The printer was a gift to the Catholics from Evangelical Christians in the Netherlands, who smuggled it into the country in pieces and sent a second team to reassemble it in the underground room.
After communism fell in 1989, the operation ended and the undercover priest moved out of the house. But subsequent owners have maintained the secret room as a reminder of what it took to save the faith under the totalitarian yoke.
“There was a man at my university who worked as an elevator repairman,” Šimulčik tells me as we stand in the room, our heads almost touching the ceiling. “His hands were often stained. I thought it was from the grease and the grime of repairing elevators, but it was actually from the ink he used to print samizdat. His job was the perfect cover.”
As a student, Šimulčik knew that the elevator repairman had something to do with the Christian underground, but he wasn’t sure what. That was by design. The underground only shared information like that on a need-to-know basis, so those arrested by the secret police couldn’t compromise the operations if they broke under interrogation. What Šimulčik did not learn until communism fell was that for all those years he was upstairs in that house compiling samizdat, that elevator repairman was down below, spending hours in the tomblike room, printing the words of life at great risk to his own liberty.
In fact, everyone involved with the Christian samizdat project would have been sent to prison had the secret police ever discovered the network. As Šimulčik breaks down for me the complex moving parts of the operation, he emphasizes the extraordinary risks the underground Christians took for the sake of publishing these documents. Why did you get involved? I ask. You could have lost everything.
“When you ask that question, you are really asking about where we find the meaning of the underground church,” Šimulčik replies. “It was in small community. Only in small communities could people feel free.”
He goes on:
When you were with your friends in these communities, you had freedom. You knew that when you went outside, there was totalitarianism. It controlled everything and oppressed you. People like me who wanted knowledge and freedom, and wanted to know more about our faith, depended on these small communities. They were well organized, and we had strong leaders. This was the only place to find that. First, I did it because I wanted to experience personal freedom, but this was connected to Christ. After we tasted freedom in these communities, we gradually came to want to fight for freedom for everyone.
Šimulčik tells me that he and his cell of several other young Catholic men were all afraid. You would have been crazy not to have fear.
“The question is, which is going to win: fear, or courage?” he says. “In the beginning, it was mostly a matter of fear. But once you started experiencing freedom—and you felt it, you felt freedom through the things you did—your courage grew. We experienced all this together. We helped one another to gradually build up the courage to do bigger things
, like join the Candle Demonstration.”
“With this courage also developed our sense of duty, and our need to be of service to other people,” the historian continues. “We could see the products of our work. We could hold these samizdat books in our hands, and we could see that people really read them and learned from them. We saw what we did as service to God and service to people. But it took years for us to see the fruit of our labor and to see our communities grow.”
Small Communities Can Rescue the Lone Individual
František Mikloško, now in his seventies, was a central leader of the second wave of the Slovak underground church. When we meet for lunch in a Bratislava restaurant, he is quick to offer advice to the current generation of Christians, who, in his view, are facing a very different kind of challenge than he did at their age.
“When I talk to young people today, I tell them that they have it harder than we did in one way: it is harder to tell who is the enemy. I tell them that what is crucial is to stay true to yourself, true to your conscience, and also to be in community with other like-minded people who share the faith. We were saved by small communities.”
Mikloško, in his youth a close aide to the underground Catholic bishop Ján Chryzostom Korec, credits the clandestine bishop—made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II after communism’s fall—with emphasizing the importance of small communities.
“He told us that they”—the communists—“could take everything from us. They could take samizdat from us. They can take our opportunity to speak out publicly from us. But we can’t let them take away our small communities.”
Mikloško started university in Bratislava in 1966, and met the recently released prisoners Krčméry and Jukl. He was in the first small community the two Kolaković disciples founded at the university. Christians like Krčméry and Jukl brought not only their expertise in Christian resistance to a new generation but also the testimony of their character. They were like electromagnets with a powerful draw to young idealists.
“It’s like in the Bible, the parable of ten righteous people,” says Mikloško. “True, in Slovakia, there were many more than ten righteous people. But ten would have been enough. You can build a whole country on ten righteous people who are like pillars, like monuments.”
These early converts spread the word about the community to other towns in Slovakia, just as the Kolaković generation had done. Soon there were hundreds of young believers, sustained by prayer meetings, samizdat, and one another’s fellowship.
“Finally, in 1988, the secret police called me in and said, ‘Mr. Mikloško, this is it. If you all don’t stop what you’re doing, you will force us to act,’” he says. “But by then, there were so many people, and the network was so large, that they couldn’t stop it.
“If they had come at us in the seventies, they might have succeeded. But we always remembered that the goal was to turn our small numbers into a number so big they can’t stop us,” Mikloško says. “Thank God we had leaders who taught us patience.”
“Most of us had fear, but there were people among us who really did act absolutely fearlessly. I’m thinking about Silvo Krčméry, Vlado Jukl, Bishop Korec, but there were hundreds, even thousands of others,” says historian Ján Šimulčik. “Young people like me saw their example and were able to grow in courage by their example. The lesson here is that when you see someone acting courageously, you will act courageously as well.”
In many traditional liturgical churches, on the night of the Easter celebration, the congregation stands in total darkness, holding unlit candles. The priest takes the flame from the paschal candle, lights a few tapers held by the faithful, who turn to those around them and spread the flame. Within minutes, the lights from scores, even hundreds, perhaps, and in cathedrals, even thousands, of candles illuminate what was once a sepulchral room. This is the light that precedes the proclamation of Resurrection.
And so: In 1988, the underground church leaders, the spiritual grandchildren of Father Kolaković, organized the Candlelight Demonstration in Bratislava—the largest protest event in Czechoslovakia since the 1960s. The police used water cannons to disperse thousands of Christians gathered peacefully on the city’s main square to pray for religious and civil liberties. But it was too late for the communists: the momentum was with the people. Within two years, communism was over.
“I had the fastest rise of any modern European politician,” jokes Slovak lawyer Ján Čarnogurský, a former political prisoner and a leader of the Candle Demonstration. “I was released from prison, and two weeks later, I was sitting at the table with Václav Havel negotiating with the communists about the handover of power.”
Small Groups Can Be a Pastoral Lifeline
Father Kolaković’s instinct to build up the Catholic laity as a source of resistance proved to be a stroke of genius.
“The official, approved Catholic Church was limited to just the churches,” says Ján Čarnogurský, who defended dissidents in court. “If the priests were discovered coming to someone’s apartment and praying with them, for example, they would be sentenced to prison. It was against the criminal code. It took maybe twenty years before the Catholic Church figured out how to keep the faith alive under these conditions, but it was the underground church that did it.”
In Soviet Russia, Evangelicals learned and practiced this survival skill decades earlier. The Baptist pastor Yuri Sipko, now sixty-eight, recalls the world that he was born into—a world that his parents and their friends had been living in for some time under Stalin’s merciless persecution of the churches.
“The strongest strike was against the preachers and the pastors, first of all. They took the preachers and pastors to prison. Other men stood up and filled their shoes,” Sipko tells me. “Then they took their houses of prayer. Then at that point began the practice of small groups—people who lived close to one another would gather in small groups. There was no formal structure of pastors or deacons. There were just brothers and sisters who read the Bible together, prayed together, and sang.”
“When they jailed my father, my mother was left alone,” he continues. “Several other sisters were left without husbands. We all got together. We found the Bible they had hidden. The women were reading the Bible to all of us. They were telling how people should live, what we had to hope for. They prayed together, and cried.”
These small groups continued the life of the Baptist church for decades, until Gorbachev released the last Evangelical prisoners of conscience.
“Sixty years of terror, they were unable to get rid of the faith,” the pastor muses. “It was saved specifically in small groups. There was no literature, no organizations for teaching, and even movement was forbidden. Believers rewrote biblical texts by hand. Even the songs that we sang. I even remember writing these notebooks for myself. But they preserved the true faith.”
Over steaming cups of black tea, the pastor reflects with palpable emotion.
“Many of us didn’t even have Bibles. Just to be able to find yourself in a situation where there was a group, and one person was reading the Bible to others, this was the greatest motivation,” Sipko says. “This was our little niche of freedom. Whether you were at work in the factory, on the street, or anywhere else, everything was godless.”
Today, it is easy to obtain a Bible in Russia, easy to meet for worship services, and easy to find religious teaching on the internet. Yet something among contemporary Christians has been lost, the old pastor says—something that was held dear by those small groups.
Sipko goes on:
Christianity has become a secondary foundation in people’s lives, not the main foundation. Now it’s all about career, material success, and one’s standing in society. In these small groups, when people were meeting back then, the center was Christ, and his word that was being read, and being interpreted as applicable to your own life. What am I supposed to do as a Christian? What am I doin
g as a Christian? I, together with my brothers, was checking my own Christianity.
Small groups not only provided accountability, he says, but also gave believers a tangible connection to the larger Body of Christ. “This was so wonderful. This was true Christianity.”
It was startling to hear Sipko say that in Russia today, there are Evangelicals who have returned to the patterns of life their ancestors lived under communism—even though there is far more freedom (of religion, and everything else) since the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991. “They have a very clear understanding that their faith in Christ means they are going to have to reject this secular world,” he says. “Even under free conditions today, we are having to live in the underground.”
Though it’s unlikely that American Christians will be threatened for going to church, it is not only possible, but quite likely, that institutional churches and their ministers will continue to be inadequate to the challenge of forming their congregations for effective resistance. This is where intense, committed small groups styled after those of the Soviet era could be indispensable.
Small groups are not new. In the United States, Evangelical and charismatic congregations have long practiced meeting in small groups outside of formal worship for prayer and discipleship. What the experience of the church under communism, and a discerning read of the signs of the times today, tells us is that all Christians of every church should start forming these cells—not simply to deepen its members’ spiritual lives, but to train them in active resistance.
Solidarity Is Not Exclusively Christian
As important as it is for Christians to strengthen their ties to one another, they should not neglect to nurture friendships with people of goodwill outside the churches. In the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, Christian dissidents had to maintain close contact with secular dissidents because there were so few believers within resistance circles.
