If you haven’t ever been in this situation, you may be soon. You are preparing for a holiday meal. It seems appropriate to pronounce a prayer before all your guests sit down. You feel a bit awkward about it. Prayers before meals are the sort of thing that priestly families do, and Evangelicals, but it may not have been the custom in your family. Suddenly, however, you realize that the majority of the people at the table are atheists or agnostics, or at best, lapsed believers. How will they react? What should you do?
If it is Easter or Christmas, you stick to your program. The prayer, after all, is part of your Ukrainian holiday routine, and you’re in your own house. You’re not going to drop it to avoid offending anyone. But what if it’s a secularized “holiday” like Thanksgiving? Once upon a time, of course, it wasn’t Thanksgiving at all if we didn’t give thanks. But today it’s just an excuse to stuff ourselves. And wouldn’t a verbal prayer mean that you are presuming to speak on behalf of a gathering of individuals most of whom would not subscribe to your words? Instead of providing an exemplary “Christian witness,” wouldn’t it just confirm the stereotype of “religious” people as annoying bigots who take every opportunity to impose their beliefs on others? Besides, you don’t want to discomfit your guests. And the comfort of your guests is, after all, the first rule of hospitality.
But suddenly a strange thought enters your mind. How did Ukrainian believers conduct themselves in the Soviet labor camps? Did they hide their faith? Next month, in fact, marks the 70th anniversary of the forced liquidation of the Greco-Catholic Church in Galicia, which heralded the mass arrest and deportation of priests and believers to Siberia. (On this occasion, the Ukrainian Catholic University’s Institute of Church History is publishing a documentary photo album.) In the previous two decades, the Bolsheviks had destroyed both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in Ukraine. In later decades, they would target Protestants. As you think of the heroic individuals who refused to abandon their faith in the face of brutal persecutions, you wonder whether they would have silenced their prayers at a holiday table just to avoid offending anyone.
The comparison, of course, is unfair. The martyrs of the Ukrainian Churches faced a militantly atheist regime armed with the power of the state. You, on the other hand, are merely trying to be polite to your friends. It’s completely different.
Or is it? Would a person who conformed to the unbelieving majority at table likely stand up to a direct challenge backed by force? Shouldn’t the example of the catacomb Church – like the martyrdom of Christians in today’s Syria, Iraq, Egypt, or Nigeria – shame us?
In a way, the temptation of 1946 was not much less insidious than that of 2016. The Greco-Catholics were not ordered to renounce God or Christianity or even the Byzantine rite. They were merely requested to switch allegiance from pope to patriarch. In our society, no one is suggesting that we forsake religion – only that we not take it so seriously. But in reality, the former was an invitation to apostasy. The latter is the first step.
Some religious leaders complain that our country is pushing religion out of the public square. Despite the occasional show of piety as a sop to naïve and gullible believers, our ruling elite – including those who set the tone for politics, law and culture – is practically agnostic. The culture of the state influences the culture of the society, and thus of the family. At your Thanksgiving dinner, instead of asserting your role as master of the house, you bow to the unbelieving majority. You have allowed the democratic principle of the state to override the patriarchal principle of the family. Perhaps you have abdicated hierarchical authority altogether, deferring to the modern penchant for equality at the expense of order, sense and meaning itself.
In that case, is there anything to learn from the struggle of the catacomb Church against a concrete, identifiable enemy mounting a direct frontal attack? Today, the attack is subtle and discreet – if, indeed, there is an attack, or even a concrete and identifiable enemy. Perhaps it is simply an inevitable process. The poet T.S. Eliot described it in “The Idea of a Christian Society” (1940): “…a society has ceased to be Christian when religious practices have been abandoned, when behavior ceases to be regulated by reference to Christian principle, and when in effect prosperity in this world for the individual or for the group has become the sole conscious aim.”
Has this happened here? Americans are considered to be remarkably “religious,” especially in comparison to the citizens of other wealthy industrial nations. But as a society, the U.S. meets Eliot’s definition of de-Christianization. As he put it, “we conceal from ourselves the unpleasant knowledge of the real values by which we live.” In fact, the most noticeable religious trend in America is decline. Between 2007 and 2014, according to the Pew Research Center, the religiously unaffiliated (including atheists and agnostics) grew from 16 percent to 23 percent of the population (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/05/12/christianity-faces-sharp-decline-as-americans-are-becoming-even-less-affiliated-with-religion/ ?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1).
Eliot observed in 1939 that the majority of Britons, who were not even conscious of their dilemma, were “becoming more and more de-Christianized by all sorts of unconscious pressure: paganism holds all the most valuable advertising space. Anything like Christian tradition transmitted from generation to generation within the family must disappear, and the small body of Christians will consist entirely of adult recruits.” Tradition is “transmitted from generation to generation within the family” in great part at our holiday feasts. If yesterday’s war for religion was waged and won in the catacombs, today’s is being lost at the dinner table.
Further reading: “To the Light of Resurrection through the Thorns of Catacombs,” Lviv: Ukrainian Catholic University Press, 2014.