ABSTRACT
We suggested in the last chapter that secularism and state atheism could foster deliberate state actions that de-sanctify components of religioscapes while still keeping most of their religiously based attributes intact; indeed, sacrilege, to be recognizable and to foster the desired political effects, requires that at least some of those sacred attributes be preserved. Catriona Kelly, in discussing the debates over the preservation of some churches soon after the establishment of the USSR and the start of its campaign of militant atheism, has captured the tensions involved. A church was a “cult building” and thus suspect, but many of these buildings were also “monuments,” deemed important for their architectural features or for their prominence in urban settings (Kelly 2012). “Church monuments,” thus defined, could be preserved. But, as Kelly notes (ibid.: 797), putting the matter this way “is already to adopt a secular position [because] in the eyes of believers, the whole concept of a ‘church monument’ is tautological: every church is a ‘monument,’ since the Eucharist is an act of commemoration, and in addition, churches are likely to be used as burial places, and thus are ‘monuments’ in a secondary sense.” Further, religious practitioners and adherents had their own understandings of what made a church important, and “the very suggestion that secular authorities might decide which churches should be preserved and which should not” generated outrage at the time (ibid.: 797–8). Initial popular opposition was largely ignored, and the Soviet authorities turned major churches into museums, concert halls, cinemas, stage theaters, restaurants, cultural centers, schools and other public buildings, as well as warehouses, officers’ clubs, stables and other less public ones. Many churches and monasteries were destroyed (Smith 2015). The designated new secular uses of these repurposed sacred buildings added ideological emphasis to the act of forced de-sanctification. Allowing sacred spaces to be used for decidedly unholy, worldly activities, such as for drinking, the keeping of livestock, or the showing of irreverent films or theater pieces, added a pointed insult to the injury of state appropriation. Religious edifices were symbolically – and sometimes literally – fouled by such unorthodox uses.
