Romanian Spirituality in Ceauşescu’s ‘Golden Epoch’: Social Scientists Reconsider Atheism, Religion, and Ritual Culture (2016)
This chapter examines efforts to create a socialist spiritual culture in Ceaușescu’s Romania. During the 1970s, professional atheists and social scientists began to speak of religion as a form of spirituality that fulfilled abiding human existential needs and as a complex social phenomenon that needed to be discovered empirically. The shift away from the ideological stereotypes of the Dej period brought on the transformation of the atheist project and ushered in socialist ritual reform by the end of the decade. The party-state also embraced the cultivation of a so-called Romanian spirituality to provide citizens with properly atheist, yet nationally authentic, ways to find existential meaning and self-transcendence. I argue that while these transformations were a response to the broader questioning of Marxist humanism in the 1960s and echoed post-Stalinist revisionism in the East bloc, socialist spiritual culture in the Ceaușescu period ultimately retained the hallmarks of a quintessentially national-Stalinist regime.
...MoreBook Paul Betts; Stephen A. Smith (2016) Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe.
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