Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

d receive a religiously-oriented education. ... It's probably no common knowledge, but the atheists have forbidden the church he carry on any charitable activity, and, as a result, she is unable to use her own resources for good deeds.?" ~ The prohibition on charitable activity was introduced in Article 17 of the 1929 law on cults. Recently the chairman of the Council of Religious Af- fairs, V. A. Kuroedoy, stated that the reason for this prohibition was that: Such activity is not directly related to the performance of religious ee Neither is there any practical need for such activity. Poverty, ae an unemployment have long been done away with in the oe ey The socialist state undertakes responsibility for social security, for anil ‘ ing leisure and recreational facilities for the workers, and for the cultura development of the people. It is striking that in other socialist countries Christians have sane in involving themselves in charitable activity and are recognizing a broa - responsibility as church. In the Soviet Union, in contrast, the only oh rat church charities are those conducted by the illegal Reform Baptists an Pentecostals, and this activity is limited primarily to serving. its avn Preaching and Peace 113 membership. The one socially responsible role that the Soviet state expects from the churches is patriotism, expressed in military service and peace propaganda, The first of eight points the editors of Bratskii Vestnik listed in 1945 as goals for the new journal was that it was to educate the churches in a feeling of love toward the motherland and its people. Their patriotic goal was listed ahead of the goal to print sermons and spiritual articles, Zhidkov announced in his introduction that the word Rodina, or variations thereof, would ap- pear frequently on the pages of the journal. He defined Rodina as that country where we were born and grew up, where we walked and where our fields are spread out; here are our families and the families of those close to us; here is our people which we must love especially deeply and strongly from the heart and according to the glorious teach- ings of our Savior, since Jesus himself loved his people Israel... . In like fashion we must have a great love for our country, in order to give to it all our strength, our abilities and means, and, if necessary, also our life.29 A few pages later he defined patriotism as love for the Rodina and argued that good Christians must be fervent patriots. “Each Christian must know,” he stated, “that God gave him not only a fatherland in heaven, but also a motherland on earth.’’®° In order to counter the other-worldly attitudes of his co-believers, he then expanded on the rather novel argument that Jesus was a fervent patriot because he loved his people the Jews. As promised, patriotism and Rodina appeared frequently in Bratskii Vestnik, but one article entitled “Khristianin i Rodina” merits special att