David Ost

There are at least four reasons why, for a Western audience, this book is more relevant today than when it was written in 1976.

Social and Political Upheavel
1) In the past fifteen years, Poland has experienced one of the most remarkable social and political upheavals of the twentieth century, precipitating the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe, and both Adam Michnik and the ideas expressed in this book played a significant role in bringing this about.  Michnik has been present at both ends of this experience--as a key leader in the pre-Solidarity opposition and as a central player in the 1989 Round Table negotiations that finally brought Communist rule to a close.

The Polish upheaval has been the most fascinating but perhaps the most confusing of all the East European "revolutions."  Here we saw a social movement packed with all the symbols usually associated with the Left, yet with a stocky religious underpinning that seemed part of a different drama altogether.  Workers occupied factories and called for a society of social justice while priests conducted mass in the Lenin Shipyard for thousands.  The confluence of the secular and the religious, of the modern and premodern, seemed unsettling to many in the West but entirely acceptable to liberal Polish intellectuals who had not long before been as anticlerical as any other European intelligentsia.  No other book explains the basis or rationale for the intellectuals' turn to the Church as well as Michnik's does.  Nor does any other work make clear the differences still remaining, differences which become more prominent today.  The Church and the Left gives us a key to understanding many of the developments of this extraordinary recent period in Polish and East European history.

A New Democracy
2) Like the rest of Eastern Europe, Poland is now trying to build a new democratic political system?an uncertain project that requires the precise meaning of democracy to be created anew.  Through Michnik's superb discussions of liberalism and nationalism, of secularism and clericalism, the book teaches us a great deal about the contending sides in the internal struggles now rocking Eastern Europe.

Today's Religious Revival
3) In the 1970s everybody seemed to treat religion as a mere relic of the past, waging a losing battle against progress and mercilessly cast aside by the irrepressible pull of secular modernity.  Even the experts considered Ayatollah Khomeini's struggle for power in Iran a curious sideshow to the "real" struggle between the monarchy and the political Left.  Today, on the contrary, the widespread feeling that secular progress, whether in its liberal or communist variants, only destroyed communities instead of creating the better ones it had promised, has led to a revival of religion and to a questioning of the notion of progress throughout the world including, of course, Poland, where the Church felt strong enough in 1991 to propose the repeal of the constitutional separation of church and state.  Michnik defends the Church as a social institution that has an inalienable right to pursue its pastoral mission for the faithful, but warns against the fundamentalist tendency to establish Catholicism as a state religion and deny others the same rights it reserves for itself.

A Distinctive Voice
4) Finally, publication of The Church and the Left is timely today simply because it was written by Adam Michnik.  Through a wide body of writing over the past fifteen years, and an unswerving political commitment that took him from prison to parliament and leaves him today as the chief editor of Poland's most important daily newspaper, Michnik has earned a place as one of the most influential and innovative European thinkers of our time. 

Excerpt reprinted with permission from The Church and the Left (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1993).  Available in hardcover for $24.95 from University of Chicago Press, 11030 S. Langley Ave., Chicago, IL 60628; tel:  312-568-1550, 800-621-2736; fax:  312-660-2235.

David Ost is the English translator of Michnik's The Church and the Left.

David Ost, "The Continuing Relevance of The Church and the Left," East-West Church & Ministry Report, 3 (Summer 1995), 9.

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© 1995 Institute for East-West Christian Studies
ISSN 1069-5664