Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

evil individuals. Somehow, only communism and no other ideology (e.g.,
Nazism, racism, imperialism, colonialism) earned the label “godless.” Two
key findings underlie Western literature on religion under communism. The
first is that Marxist regimes were hostile toward traditional religions, seeking
to eradicate them. The second is that methods for attaining a religion-free
society combined sporadic state-sponsored terror with various “religious surrogates”
such as secular cults, nationalism, sports, science, and dogmatic
applications of Marxist ideology as an “absolute truth.” Many excellent analyses
of religion under communism have been written, but somehow no
convincing and complete work has addressed the question of why no communists
anywhere in the world completely eradicated religion (it is still little
known that only communist Albania came close to the “final solution” of
the religious question). Concerning Yugoslav communism, no evidence exists
that the Tito regime, from its Partisan years to its collapse, ever intended to
eradicate religion. After the 1945–53 bloody anticlerical terror, driven more
by post–civil war passions than revolutionary zeal, the regime was prepared
to grant religious liberty and even many privileges to religious organizations
that were instrumental in championing the official patriotism of brotherhood
and unity, designated in this study a civil religion.
To be sure, the Yugoslav civil religion of brotherhood and unity did share
many features with phenomena such as the cult of Chairman Mao or the
making of the new Soviet man or what George L. Mosse termed the “new
politics” of secular worship and “nationalization of the masses” in the Third
Reich. 36 Yet the rationale of Titoism was not the consolidation and conservation
of state-party systems as in China and USSR but reform that eventually
weakened the state and the party. This “Yugo-experiment” eventually
brought the system to a point when it was safeguarded by “emotion” alone,
that is, by the few people who valued brotherhood and unity squeezed between
diehard ethnic nationalists and communists turned into ethnic nationalists.
Nor was the rationale for rituals and symbols utilized in the Titoist
“nationalization of the masses” the same as that in the Third Reich. That
is to say, had Hitler at Nazi rallies called for brotherhood and unity between
Germans and Jews in order to make Germany stronger in its diversity, would
the Holocaust have come out of it? The Yugoslav civil religion of brotherhood
and unity was a public worship compatible with the Western liberal
idea of religious toleration. Further, in contrast to Soviet and Chinese-styled
secular worship, Titoist brotherhood and unity was neither a religious surrogate
nor channel for imposing Marxism on society, because it sought not
to exclude but to embrace and activate religious organizations on an ecumenical
agenda and did not refer to Marxism. To be sure, Titoism did dwarf
religion in order to maintain ethnic harmony and prevent the ethnonationalistic
groups from unification with religious organizations. In the
end, however, forces of conflict have prevailed. For that matter, Yugoslavia
seems analogous for example to India, although Tito and Mahatma Gandhi
had different religious views and pursued different religious policies. In con-
224 balkan idols