La stratégie du refus: les Églises néo-protestantes sous le communisme.Les Chrétiens d’après l’Évangile et l’Église Évangélique Roumaine
A Strategy of Refusal: Neo-protestant Churches under Communism. Christians according to the Gospel and the Romanian Evangelical Church

Summary/Abstract: The article proposes to uncover the attitude of the communist regime towards religion. The author seeks to offer a more precise measurement of the distance between the official discourse of the time - seemingly very democratic in what concerns religious freedom -, and the corresponding abusive and restrictive political practice. A short historical overview of the neo-protestant cults in the communist period and of the persecution suffered by the neo-protestants shows that the communist regime was in fact extremely intolerant towards any pos­sible ideological current. Two interviews constructed and interpreted via qua­litative techniques allow a closer analysis of the different practices of resistance. The interplay of what was said and what was done made duplicity a sort of structural component, which characterized both the official and the private per­formance. The interplay of what was said and what was believed becomes a viable practice of taking one's distance from a totalitarian regime with an obsession to supervise and control. Although it initially shunned this premise, precise­ly to prevent any partisan investigation, the study concludes that, at least for the two religious groups under scrutiny, one can actually endorse the contention that resistance through religion was manifest in communist Romania.

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