ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on popular resistance to official atheization drives in the past decade. It explores the independent social initiatives of religious activists as well as the organizational initiatives of intact religious hierarchies. The chapter considers the origins and aspects of opposition to state policy in the religious communities of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, the Orthodox Church and smaller faiths and sects. Religious leaders who refused to sign loyalty oaths to the Communist authorities were imprisoned en masse and, in some cases, summarily executed. Religious seminaries, schools, publishing houses and charities were severely threatened by budgetary cutbacks and outright closure. Opposition to government policies on religious issues assumed wider proportions in Poland in 1984 during the so-called "war of the crosses." Czechoslovakia can claim one of the worst records among Leninist states with regard to the observance of religious freedoms. In Czechoslovakia, as in Hungary, Protestantism is a minority religious orientation.
