Turning Prayers into Protests : Religious-Based Activism and Its Challenge to State Power in Socialist Slovakia and East Germany

Description

Turning Prayers into Protests is a comparative study of grass-roots religious activity in Slovakia and East Germany prior to 1989. Religion was a long-standing arena of culture, thought, social organization, kinship and ritual in the societies in which communism took hold after the Second World War and it was a primary target for most of the regimes in the region. The author examines the different ways in which religion was targeted by the regimes and the various and divergent roles that the Catholic Church in Slovakia and the Lutheran Church in East Germany played in the social response to and the eventual dismantling of state socialist rule. He compares these cases in terms of the political power, influence and affect that these movements had vis- -vis state repression and/or cooptation, vividly showing the history of how religion provided both a space for carving an independent area of life beyond state control and a foundation upon which to stand against the state in defiance.