Post-communist states saw explosive simultaneous Christian and Islamic revivals after ideology collapsed

Evidence

The ubiquity and relevance of religion has been dramatically evident in former communist states. Filling the vacuum left by the collapse of ideology, religious revivals have swept through these countries from Albania to Vietnam. In Russia, Orthodoxy has gone through a major resurgence. In 1994, 30 percent of Russians below the age of twenty-five said they had switched from atheism to a belief in God. The number of active churches in the Moscow area grew from 50 in 1988 to 250 in 1993. Political leaders became uniformly respectful of religion and the government supportive of it. In Russian cities, as one acute observer reported in 1993, “The sound of church bells once again fills the air. Newly gilded cupolas gleam in the sun. Churches only recently in ruins reverberate again with magnificent song. Churches are the busiest place in town.” Simultaneously with the revival of Orthodoxy in the Slavic republics, an Islamic revival swept through Central Asia. In 1989, 160 functioning mosques and one medressah (Islamic seminary) existed in Central Asia; by early 1993 there were about 10,000 mosques and ten medressahs. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 263

Categorization

• XREF: The ideological-vacuum-fill pattern connects to Huntington’s later argument about civilizational identity replacing ideology, and to the earlier reads about how collapsed institutions leave identity vacuums.
• SHARE: The Central Asian mosque growth figure (160 to 10,000 in four years) would fascinate anyone studying post-Soviet religious revival quantitatively.