Editors’ introduction

Abstract

This is the first issue of the fiftieth volume of Religion, State & Society. These 50 volumes represent the continuity between two manifestations of our journal, which was first issued as Religion in Communist Lands in 1973 and has been published as Religion, State & Society since 1992. These 50 volumes also point to the changes in the journal’s focus, scope, and context. Philip Walters, the editor who led the journal’s transformation into RSS, reminds us in his interview with Zoe Knox in this issue that the people behind RCL were motivated by both moral concerns and academic inquisitiveness. They wanted to alert the ‘free world’ to the vitality of religion in ‘communist lands’ and raise awareness of the predicament facing religious believers on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, the founding editor of RCL Michael Bourdeaux considered it his mission to be the ‘voice and speak’ for persecuted believers (2019, 87). In doing so, the RCL team in its early years performed a great service to the academic community by publishing a wealth of primary source material and exploring the relationship between religion and the communist system. Moreover, RCL was the brainchild of people associated with the Centre for the Study of Religion and Communism, which eventually developed into Keston College with its important ‘counter-archive’ (Luehrmann 2015). The two book reviews in this issue, written by scholars deeply engaged with Keston’s archive (now at Baylor University in Texas, USA), further illuminate this history of Keston College and the marginalised voices it sought to amplify. Ironically, or perhaps prophetically, the journal was founded at a time when secularisation theory reigned supreme in western academia, and religion was seen more widely as withering away and unworthy of attention. The idea of RCL, perhaps inadvertently, defied that view. It implied that focusing on religion under communism would enable us to better understand both the operation of an oppressive political system and the workings of religion itself. With the benefit of hindsight one might question, as Sonja Luehrmann did, whether the vitality of religion under communism in the 1970s and 1980s was perhaps exaggerated (see e.g. Luehrmann 2013). Even so, the palimpsest for this journal had been established: the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union may have disappeared, but the journal’s moral concerns and academic inquisitiveness have outlived them, as we continue to seek to uncover new facets of the relationships between religion, state, and society. The founders, editors, and readers of RCL were concerned about the suppression of religion and the oppression of religious believers by communist regimes using brutal means such as imprisonment, confinement in psychiatric asylums, and the prohibition of religious observance. While five decades later this kind of state control persists in parts of the world, academic research and public attention have focused in on less blatant forms of inequality, injustice, and unfairness. We are increasingly well informed about nuanced RELIGION, STATE & SOCIETY 2022, VOL. 50, NO. 1, 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2021.2020539