REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

ROMANIA’S BAPTIST CHURCHES UNDER
THE PERSECUTION OF THE COMMUNIST
REGIME. REPLY AND RESISTANCE ACTIONS
Marius SILVEŞAN 1
Recent history, respectively of the communist period, arouses the interest of
professionals and youth. To meet this desire, but also due to our interest in the stated
period, through this study we intend to submit how the Baptist congregation responded to
the pressures and persecutions exerted by the communist State.
We consider the means by which it reacted to the official actions, which combined
pressures, administrative harassment, juridical regulations, but also offering apparent
advantages. The answers were nuanced, some being of obedience to the political
authority (passive resistance), others were attempts to circumvent the constraints, through
more or less open opposition (for instance, pastors who continued to officiate the baptism,
although the communists forbade the baptism of those not proceeding from Baptist
families), or through the self-interest interpretation of some regulations (name-change of
the Sunday school in Bible time, or setting weddings on Sunday afternoons in order to
gather the congregation in the traditional moment, even if religious services should have
been officiated only in the morning).
As a result of studying memoirs, of interviewing, of analyzing the available documents
at the Central Historical National Archives, the Archive of the State Secretariat for the
Cults, the Archive of the National Council for Studying the Archives of the Security, we
take steps whereby we intend to open a path towards better knowing the role the Baptist
congregation played in the resistance and opposition actions against the communist
regime, and also to offer the youth who have not gone through the black period of
communism, some testimonies about its significance.
The installation of the communist regime in Romania brought about major societal
changes, also determining new ways of relating between State and Church. Against the
State’s intrusions and secularization actions 2 , which aimed at regimenting society,
promoting atheism and marginalizing the religious in a private space, Romania’s Baptist
Christian Churches 3 initiated a series of protest, resistance and contesting actions against
the ideology and practices of the communist regime.
1 Baptist Theological Institute, Bucharest, Romania.
2 The Explaining Dictionary of the Romanian Language (DEX) defines the verb to secularize by
referring to “putting out of the church’s ownership or constituency, assets, ranges of activity or
cultural values, into the State’s property”, DEX online,http://dexonline.ro/, term secularize,
(03.03.2011).
3 R.P.R. respectively R.S.R.