In spring 2025, the “values-based” streaming platform Angel Guild released a four-part documentary series based on Rod Dreher’s best-selling book, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Dissidents in Christian Countries. Both the book and documentary take inspiration from “Christians (and others) from throughout the Soviet Bloc who lived through totalitarianism”—in particular Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from whom the book’s title is taken—to show how the memory of resistance to communism should inform and guide the current fight against “soft totalitarianism.” This call for a renewed spiritual dissidence has been endorsed by now-Vice President JD Vance and reflects a well-documented conservative interest in Central and Eastern Europe. These parallels between communist totalitarianism and today’s “soft totalitarianism” have attracted much attention, but they are not new. In fact, they represent decades of global fascination with spiritual resistance to communism in Eastern Europe, and its reimagining as a model of anti-liberal, counter-cultural Christianity.
Conservatives’ parallels between communist totalitarianism and today’s “soft totalitarianism” have attracted much attention, but they are not new.
The roots of the global religious right’s interest in spiritual resistance from Eastern Europe can be traced back to the 1960s, when accounts of the “Underground Church” in Eastern Europe began to grow in popularity and were taken up with fervor by a new set of internationally connected anti-communist movements. Concerned by the increasing liberalization and secularization of Western societies, and seeking to revitalize the anti-communist cause, Christian anti-communist activists began to present the Underground Church in Eastern Europe in a new light: not only was it the most effective means of challenging Soviet power and ideology, but it was also a model for a reawakened, counter-cultural Christianity that could restore the West in wake of growing secularization and liberalization.
A closer look at one of Dreher’s “Christian dissidents,” the Romanian Lutheran pastor, former political prisoner, and international “Cold Warrior” Richard Wurmbrand (1909-2001), sheds light on the connections between Cold War religious anti-communism and the long history of the global religious right. Following his departure from Romania in 1965, Wurmbrand’s extensive international anti-communist activism profoundly shaped how the Underground Church came to be imagined and weaponized as a model of anti-liberal Christianity around the world. The full story of his anti-communist activism paints a picture of the influential but often forgotten roles—both real and imagined—that Christian anti-communists from Eastern Europe could play in shaping the global religious right.
The Underground Church
For many Christians today, Wurmbrand’s dramatic and widely publicized testimony before a US Senate sub-committee hearing in 1966 remains the most powerful evidence of communist violence and repression. “I show to you the tortured body of my country, of my fatherland, and of my church,” he declared, removing his shirt to reveal the scars of the torture he experienced during his 14 years of imprisonment in Romania.
This testimony came at a key moment of political change. The anti-communist consensus of the early Cold War had dissolved, but religious interest in opposing communism was far from over. In fact, the number of religious organisations interested in supporting Christians in communist countries grew rapidly between the 1960s and 1980s. Some of these new organisations, such as the Keston Institute, focused on gathering information about religious life in the communist world, documenting repression and persecution. Others, such as Aid to the Church in Need, Underground Evangelism, and Wurmbrand’s own Jesus to the Communist World (founded in 1967), had a more direct missionary focus, sending assistance to Christian communities across the Iron Curtain and at times engaging in spectacular activities such as Bible smuggling.
Over the course of the late Cold War, popular interest in the Underground Church, “Church of Silence,” or “Catacomb Church” in Eastern Europe flourished. At a time when, as Melani McAlister has argued, many evangelicals were lamenting the disenchantment of the West and were beginning to turn to Christians in Africa, Latin America, and Asia as “models to be emulated” and “living embodiments of authenticity, passion, and zeal,” the religious possibilities in Eastern Europe sparked Christian imagination. Figures like Wurmbrand presented spiritual resistance as a moment in which the authentic spirit of Christianity had returned: “The Early Church,” he proclaimed, “in all its beauty, sacrifice and dedication has come alive again in the communist lands.”
Over the course of the late Cold War, popular interest in the Underground Church, “Church of Silence” or “Catacomb Church” in Eastern Europe flourished.
Popular evangelical culture idolized the figure of the Bible smuggler through comics such as the Chick Tracts series, often inserting American heroes into narratives of anti-communist resistance. This type of popular culture blurred the boundaries between those living within and beyond the communist world. It was a strategy encouraged by Wurmbrand himself, who urged believers outside the Underground Church to become “co-martyrs,” enabling them to vicariously experience the struggle against communism.
Wurmbrand used these strategies to promote a hardline religious anti-communism which opposed any form of theological or political liberalism. This did not go uncontested. In fact, Wurmbrand’s actions were often resented by more moderate religious groups such as the European Baptist Federation, which saw him as harming their efforts to negotiate improved conditions for religious communities. By contrast, it was precisely this emotive hardline anti-communism, powerfully conveyed through using his own scarred body as a metaphor of the suffering Underground Church, that provided a symbolic glue for the new religious right in America.
Wurmbrand was among the most vocal figures comparing communism in Eastern Europe to the dangers of the New Left in the West. Amongst his first public actions in the West, for example, were dramatic interventions in counter-protests opposing the anti-Vietnam movement. Appearing on the Manion Forum radio program in 1966, he declared his aim to target “Communists in the West”: “They are so clever,” he argued, “not to say that they are Communists – here they say that they are pacifists – they are for peace and co-existence […] but they are doing the work of the Communists here.” He drew attention to himself at events such as the famous “March on the Pentagon” in 1967, when he joined a counter-protest organized by Young Americans for Freedom, appearing in a cherry picker which raised him 35 feet into the air. From these heights, he denounced the violent atrocities of communism.
Like other heroes of Christian anti-communist resistance, such as Cardinal Mindszenty and Haralan Popov, Wurmbrand became a symbolic and practical resource for right-wing religious groups who were seeking ways to engage with, support, and emulate the Underground Church. He became close friends with Billy James Hargis, whose Christian Crusade amplified his claims to represent the Underground Church, and helped lead workshops organized by groups such as Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. Carl MacIntyre’s fundamentalist network, the International Council of Christian Churches, similarly supported (and then later became supported by) Wurmbrand’s missionary work in Eastern Europe. The John Birch Society also used his story and those of other exiles as rhetorical devices: “Thousands of Wurmbrands, Popovs, and Mindszentys are still being tortured. Why can’t the neutrals feel the pain?” one writer in the organisation’s magazine American Opinion asked.
International Solidarities
It was not only in the United States that the Underground Church was mobilized by right-wing groups.
It was not only in the United States that the Underground Church was mobilized by right-wing groups. However, the full extent of Wurmbrand’s international solidarities has often been forgotten. By the early 1970s, he had expanded his network of anti-communist missions to over 40 countries. This was a consciously internationalist strategy aimed at counteracting the influence of the World Council of Churches (WCC), the leading organization in the ecumenical movement. From the 1960s, the WCC had begun to cooperate with churches in communist states and shifted its focus to the Global South. Wurmbrand was amongst the most vocal critics of this shift, declaring the WCC to be “leaders in a Church in which many have long since betrayed the Master” and calling on Christians to “pass over their heads” and “defend the churches!”
In a reflection of the growing “liberal-evangelical rivalry,” Wurmbrand’s international strategies were designed to mirror and counteract the work of the WCC. In Latin America, where he was a regular traveler, he used accounts from the Underground Church to oppose Christian support for democracy and Liberation Theology. In Brazil, where the Jesus to the Communist World mission received government support, Wurmbrand’s autobiography and Voice of the Martyrs newsletter were freely distributed, and he was invited as a “living martyr” to address audiences of up to 20,000 people. The mission praised the government’s stance against communism and promised Ernesto Geisel, who was president for five years during Brazil’s military dictatorship, that they could rely on the “humble collaboration of the mission Jesus to the Communist World.” In Chile too, Wurmbrand met with its dictator, Augusto Pinochet, and tried to undermine Catholic support for victims of the regime’s torture, declaring that “Anyone who assumes an attitude other than declared anti-communism is betraying Catholicism, even if he is a Cardinal or a future Pope.”
The Underground Church also found support in another focal point of global religious activism: South Africa. Here, solidarity with “forgotten” white Christians in Eastern Europe became a rallying cry for “anti-anti-apartheid” propagandists—an approach that had largely replaced explicit defence of apartheid by the mid-1970s. Wurmbrand had long criticised the WCC’s support for the anti-apartheid movement: “Why should it publicize nonexistent apartheid in Rhodesia and not atrocities and apartheid in Communist countries,” he asked. Determined to drive change wherever he could, he set up an anti-communist mission in South Africa in the late 1960s and became a regular visitor to the country. With the support of the Dutch Reformed Church, this mission became one of several aggressively anti-communist right-wing Christian movements propping up the regime’s support base. Such was the strength of feeling for the Underground Church amongst these groups in South Africa that in the late 1980s the Dutch Reformed Church embarked on its own anti-communist missionary project in Eastern Europe.
Cold War Afterlives
This globalized, hardline religious anti-communism did not come to an end with the collapse of communist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe. Very quickly after 1989, the region became a new focus of contestation for religious conservatives who sought to capitalize on anti-communist sentiment while advancing their own agendas: international pro-life groups quicky established and supported the establishment of local branches, organizations such as the Heritage Foundation toured the region to teach democracy, and Southern Baptists aimed to transform the Romanian Baptist Union into a European bastion of conservative theology.
Globalized, hardline religious anti-communism did not come to an end with the collapse of communist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe.
Wurmbrand, too, attempted to bring his Cold War religious politics home. Returning at last to Romania in 1990 at the age of 80 and greeted by crowds of supporters, he was triumphal about the collapse of communism—but also brought a warning: “You might escape totally from Communist persecution, but this false western teaching is around the corner to destroy your spiritual life much more than Communism could have done.” His message was warmly welcomed by some. A 2006 poll conducted by the Romanian TV station TVR declared Wurmbrand to be the fifth greatest Romanian (Nicolae Ceaușescu came eleventh). This caused some consternation: to many, he was an unknown figure, while some on the far right even questioned the credentials of a Jewish Lutheran to be Romanian. Yet he has become an important figure in a growing body of martyrologies of “spiritual resistance” to communism that promote a return to nationalist, anti-liberal Christian culture.
As Wurmbrand’s attention moved back to Romania, the network of international religious anti-communist organizations that he had helped build began to adapt to a new post-Cold War order. In a familiar story of the 1990s, Jesus to the Communist World (now renamed Voice of the Martyrs) and other anti-communist missions shifted their focus to the plight of Christian persecution in Islamic countries. Memory of the Cold War was never far away, however: stories of communist persecution and Bible smuggling continued to fill the literature and resources used by these organizations, inspiring a new generation of defenders of religious freedom. These celebrations of martyrdom and heroic resistance under successive waves of persecution in these narratives have helped feed a desire for a faith reinvigorated by persecution, and a growing feeling that Christianity is now under attack within the West in a culture of “Christianophobia” or “soft totalitarianism” à la Dreher.
Memory of communism has become a powerful and emotive political tool, harnessed through the deep, affective global solidarities of the late Cold War that many churches and religious communities have preserved. It has also been increasingly appropriated and instrumentalized for new political struggles.
Memory of communism has become a powerful and emotive political tool, harnessed through the deep, affective global solidarities of the late Cold War that many churches and religious communities have preserved. It has also been increasingly appropriated and instrumentalized for new political struggles. International lobbying groups such as Liberty Counsel and Alliance Defending Freedom, which have been intensively campaigning for conservative legal reforms across Central and Eastern Europe, have drawn on the memory of Wurmbrand and religious repression under communism to advance their cause—and supported Dreher’s documentary series in the same spirit. Into this historical memory, they have interwoven a new generation of religious martyrs such as Kim Davis, the county clerk who became an international hero after spending five days in jail for refusing to issue marriage licenses for same sex couples. Liberty Counsel’s decision to take Kim Davis on a tour of Romania during the country’s 2018 referendum on same-sex marriage showed how this type of transnational memory culture could be effectively mobilized. Unsurprisingly, in campaign contexts such as this, such targeted uses of the historical past have tended to reduce complex stories of religious resistance and collaboration in communist states to simplified narratives and mythologies of victimhood and heroism.
These attempts to reanimate and reimagine the history of spiritual resistance to communism offer an unfinished history in need of its heroes for today.
These attempts to reanimate and reimagine the history of spiritual resistance to communism offer an unfinished history in need of its heroes for today. It may be tempting to dismiss these comparisons and claims of continuity. However, they emerge from a longer history of continuities between Cold War religious anti-communism and the new religious right that should be taken seriously. For over 60 years, grassroots activists have been connecting the struggles against communism and liberalism, establishing powerful global solidarities.
For the new, globally interconnected right-wing movements that emerged from the 1960s, Eastern Europe became a major focal point and source of inspiration. Through the work of a small number of prominent Christian anti-communist exiles such as Richard Wurmbrand, the region became a place from which “fires of resistance” might spread across the world. It is the enduring power of this late Cold War, globalized anti-communist culture—as much as the ideas and practices of dissidents themselves—that has helped fashion the vision of conservative Christianity championed by Dreher and others. And it is longer histories such as these that can help shed light on some of the ways in which Eastern Europe has come to be a global center for the new religious right.
Iona Ramsay is the Keston Research Associate in Religion Under Communist Regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, based at Cardiff University. She recently completed her PhD on the globalization of Romanian “spiritual resistance” to communism, and her current book project is a transnational history of religious anti-communism and the rise of the global religious right.
Image made using “Rod Dreher (cropped),” by Elekes Andor licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International. Other images used are in the public domain.
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