Quo Vadis,Polonia? On religious loyalty,exit,and voice

Abstract

Poland’s public sphere, in the three decades following the fall of communism, has been shaped by tensions between secular and religious visions of the polity. This article analyzes significant trends in the politico-religious landscape of contemporary Poland and discusses the growing polarization of Polish society around religion and politics. While the Catholic Church openly supports the country’s populist and right-wing government and remains strong from the loyalty of a significant portion on the Polish population, resistance to that political alliance and to the traditional association between Polishness and Catholicism is observable in various corners of Polish society. These include factions within the Catholic Church arguing for the depoliticization of Polish Catholicism; apostate and secularist movements; and the support for, and participation in, a notable Jewish revival. The article shows that while very different in both content and form, these movements converge in their effort to secularize Polish national identity and build a public sphere where various religious and non-religious value systems co-exist.

Where is Poland going, 30 years after the fall of communism? What is the current state of the relationship between religion and politics, and what is the role and place of the Catholic Church in contemporary Poland? While the Catholic Church openly supports the country’s populist and right-wing government and remains strong from the loyalty of a significant portion on the Polish population, resistance to that political alliance and to the association between Polishness and Catholicism is observable in various corners of Polish society. ¹ These include factions within the Catholic Church and the broader Catholic community who voice their desire to depoliticize Polish Catholicism, as well as some who prefer to exit through their formal apostasy, their support of secularist movements, or their participation in, and support for, a notable Jewish revival. While different in both content and form, they converge in their effort to secularize Polish national identity – to decouple Polishness and Catholicism – and build a space where various religious and non-religious value systems co-exist.

The Polish case, however, does not tell a straightforward story of either the wholesale rejection of Catholicism and embrace of secularization or that of a steady march toward political authoritarianism and clerical nationalism. Instead, I show that the last three decades have been marked by tensions between secular and religious visions of the polity that shape the political field and increasingly polarize civil society. I borrow the terms ‘loyalty, voice, exit’ from Albert O. Hirschman’s (1970) work on firms, organizations, and states, using them metaphorically to describe modes of engagement with the Roman Catholic Church and Catholicism in Poland. ² Before analyzing these, I first discuss the impact of the fall of communism on the Church and religion in Poland.

Landscape after the (Communist) battle

The post-Communist period in Poland was primarily narrated as the latest phase in the story of the nation’s long fight for independence. As a result, the transition was first and foremost understood by Poles as a national one: it was a period characterized not only by democratization and the building of free market economy but also by the construction of a national state: a state of and for Poles, to borrow Rogers Brubaker’s (1996) formulation. Given that project, the issue of what exactly constitutes ‘Polishness’ and what role Catholicism plays in defining the symbolic contours of Polish national identity needed to be re-examined. Now that Poland was resurrected, moreover, what was to be the place of the Catholic Church in the new polity?

While the Church and Solidarity were the primary institutions through which Poles could define their identities and fight for their rights during communism, the advent of a legitimate, democratic state led to a proliferation of political parties and a significant expansion of civil society organizations. The new institutional pluralism had important implications for the Church, foremost among which was that it ended its quasi-monopoly over the definition of national identity and its management of civil society. ³ The Church reacted to this new situation, in the early 1990s, by extensively intervening in political affairs. It publicly voiced its opinion on public policy, endorsed specific political candidates and parties, and organized a strong lobby for issues close to its heart: the return of mandatory religious instruction in public schools, the respect of Christian values in the media, the Concordat with the Vatican, and the severe restriction of abortion (Korboński, 2000). It also vigorously advocated for the constitution of a Christian state, based on the fact that Poland’s population is overwhelmingly Catholic (approximately 95%). ⁴ Public intellectuals and politicians on the left, the center, as well as progressive Catholics stressed instead the nation’s ideological heterogeneity and argued that since Catholicism is only one among many competing or overlapping value systems, the state should be confessionally neutral. Such a state, according to them, was (and is) necessary to protect the rights of minorities, atheists, or non-practicing Catholics and ensure citizens’ equality de jure and de facto. That position, in turn, was qualified by archbishop Michalik as ‘democratic totalitarianism’ because a minority of nonbelievers would determine the constitutional path followed by the overwhelming majority of Poles (Abp Michalik, Nasza Polska, 19 February 1997).

While the Church was not successful in all these endeavors, this interference had substantial repercussions for the institution, whose authority in the public sphere declined precipitously. The approval of the Church’s activities dropped from 90% in 1989 to an all-time low of 38% in 1993 (Centrum Badania Opinii Społecznej (CBOS), 1999, 2004). In surveys conducted throughout the 1990s, as many as three quarter of Poles disapproved of the Church for giving its opinion on the political affairs of the government, and 60% considered inappropriate for the Church to voice its opinion about mass media content and style. Moreover, about 60% of those polled thought that in the first eight years following the fall of communism, the Church was too involved in public life (Zdaniewicz and Zembrzuski, 2000: 435). If the Church’s involvement in political life was perceived as necessary under communism, it quickly became clear that extensive involvement in politics was perceived as unacceptable in a fully sovereign and democratic Poland, and ultimately turned out to be costly for the Church.

The post-1989 situation, therefore, posed serious challenges to the institution, yet it managed to recover from its early 1990s’ faux-pas. Toward the end of the decade, the approval of the Church’s activities stabilized in the mid-1950s and has oscillated between upper-1950s and mid-1960s throughout the 2000 to 2010s (CBOS, 2004, 2012, 2015).

Loyalty

The Church hierarchy is now more careful in its political pronouncements, but its conservative wing has found powerful allies – and outlets – for social and political mobilization: The Law and Justice party and Radio Maryja. Law and Justice is a right-wing, national-Catholic, Eurosceptic, populist party in Poland. It was founded in 2001 by identical twins Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński, former Solidarity activists, and now controls both the presidency and the parliament, thanks partly to an effective critique of the neoliberal policies of previous governments and the provision of popular welfare programs. ⁵ Radio Maryja, ‘the Catholic voice in your home’ as its slogan claims, is also the voice of anti-communism, anti-EU, anti-liberalism, and anti-semitism. Its charismatic leader, Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, has managed to create a social movement around the Radio’s right-wing politics (Jasiewicz, 1999; Krzemiński, 2009, 2017; Sekerdej and Pasieka, 2013: 61–65). Often accused by the Left and by progressive Catholics for having created a sect bordering on heresy, Fr. Rydzyk consistently mobilizes an army of devoted followers, mostly constituted by elderly women with few resources other than time, their voice, and their votes to donate to the cause of a ‘true Poland’, a Catholic Poland ‘free of Jews, Masons and Satan-loving secularists and communists’ as one can frequently hear on the Radio’s airwave (see also CBOS, 2008 on listeners of the radio station). Together, Law and Justice and Radio Maryja excel at using religious discourse and symbols as tools to recreate the ‘us versus them’ master frame that successfully mobilized masses under communism but that now impedes constructive, consensual institution building (Zubrzycki, 2011). ⁶

While Radio Maryja is not the dominant face of Catholicism in Poland, it is the most vocal and occupies public space with immense semiotic force: through related publications such as Nasz Dziennik (Our Daily) and Nasza Polska (Our Poland), it exerts a significant influence on the face of Catholicism in Poland by affixing the terms and relative positions that bound public debate. With the coming to power of Law and Justice in 2015 and overall shift to the right their election generated, the radical position of Radio Maryja is now closer to the center, offering solid competition to the ‘mainstream’ of the Catholic Church, represented by ‘traditional-conservatives’. This is the so-called Catholicism of continuity, supported by the late Cardinal Glemp, Abp Michalik, and the current Primate of Poland, Cardinal Wojciech Polak. It is also the type of Catholicism embraced by the majority of clergy as well as by many political figures on the right. Traditional-conservative Catholicism, in the Polish context, is characterized by the explicit engagement of Catholics qua Catholics in public life, since the nation is cast as a divine community and the Church portrayed as its holy guardian (Gowin, 1995, 2000) According to traditional-conservative Catholics, the specificity of the Polish way of life resides primarily in the tight relationship between religion and national identity. Like Radio Maryja, but less strident in their use of symbolic politics, traditionalists see the nation as a divine creation that must be protected by the state.

What about ordinary citizens? As we have seen above, a majority of Poles reject the Catholic Church’s direct involvement in politics, yet Catholicism remains important in their lives: over 90% of Polish citizens declare believing in God, and 87% participate in religious services several times of year, with 50% going to church at least once a week (CBOS, 2018). According to data collected in 2015, about 85% of Poles with higher education consider themselves people of faith and almost half of them declare attending religious services at least once a week (CBOS, 2015). Those numbers hold for young adults (18–24), with 85% who declared to be ‘believers’ and half of them declaring participation in religious services once a week. While religious practice in that group is similar to that of the national average, young adults’ religious practice is, however, lower now than it was for people of the same age at the beginning of the 1990s. Back then, slightly over two-thirds of Poles between the age of 18 and 24 years attended religious services at least once a week (CBOS, 2009).

Perhaps most significantly, however, is the growth of young adults declaring not believing (from 6% to 15%) or not participating at all in religious services of any kind: this number has almost doubled within 10 years, from 10% in 2004 to 18% in 2014 (CBOS, 2013, 2015). This might suggest the beginning of the end of ‘Polish exceptionalism’ in Europe if this trends holds over time: Voas and Chaves (2016) have argued that religious decline is primarily driven by cohort replacement, as each successive cohort is less religious than the previous one. Societies that might appear stable at first glance – like the United States – often are experiencing barely noticeable decline through that process. It is still too early to predict the future of religion in Poland, however. Political events could again place Catholicism as a key national and political marker (Zubrzycki, 2006, 2013).

The data presented above show that the majority of Poles remain ‘loyal’: they believe in God and continue to go to church on Sundays and on holidays. Catholicism also continues to provide a rich repertoire of symbols and practices that are used by nationalists for political ends. While statistical indicators such as declaration of belief and participation in religious services are helpful to paint the broad picture of Poland’s religious landscape, one needs to turn to qualitative methods to capture the subtle (and not so subtle) transformations that have taken place in the last two decades (Zubrzycki, 2001, 2006, 2012). As I will show next, an increasingly significant opposition to the Catholic vision of Poland is articulated within the Church, as well as in politics, social movements, and the arts.

Voice

If the dominant model of Catholicism within the Polish Roman Catholic Church is a conservative one that accentuates the public dimension of faith and politicizes religion, since the 1990s, a small élite group of intellectuals has been arguing instead for the privatization of faith: for its deepening and active internalization. Self-proclaimed ‘Open Catholics’ were initially associated with personalist Catholic publications such as Tygodnik Powszechny, Znak, and Więź, but in the last two decades, they have expanded their reach to liberal secular outlets such as the daily Gazeta Wyborcza. For that group, traditional Catholicism in Poland is associated with secular emotions to such an extent that it has become a political religion (Gowin, 2000; Obirek, 2017; Zubrzycki, 2006). They therefore warn against the conflation of nation and religion, and instead of emphasizing Polish Catholic exceptionalism, they stress the universality of Catholicism. Open Catholics also consistently promote the principles of Vatican II and engage in ecumenical dialogue.

Some well-known open Catholics go as far as publicly criticizing the hierarchy of the Church in Poland for its nationalist inclinations, for which they paid a high price. Notable examples include Father Stanisław Musiał, an important figure in the promotion of Christian–Jewish dialogue, who was censored for criticizing the Episcopate’s silence on anti-semitism in the late 1990s. ⁷ Father Adam Boniecki, editor (1999–2011) of the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, was prohibited to speak to the media after defending a controversial heavy metal artist who was being tried for ‘offending religious feelings’. ⁸ And Father Wojciech Lemański was suspended from the priesthood for disobedience and for allegedly failing to comply with some of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Father Lemański’s was in a public conflict with his superior, Archbishop Henryk Hoser, over his engagement in Christian–Jewish dialogue. All three figures received an impressive amount of support in traditional and social media, especially among the young, who started Facebook pages and support campaigns, petitions, produced t-shirts, posters, and buttons in support of these priests, the causes they represented, and against what they perceive as a totalitarian Church.

Exit

So far I have discussed how, and the extent to which, Catholicism continues to matter in Poland. I now turn to the analysis of movements of exit from Catholicism.

Secularist movements and apostasies

The first is direct and visible in increasingly organized anti-clericalism, secularist demands, and the emergence of ‘apostasy movements’. In 2010, businessman Janusz Palikot founded an explicitly anti-clerical party, the Palikot Movement (Ruch Palikota). Palikot defected from the Civic Platform which he considered too elitist and too careful in its dealings with the Church during a controversy about the continued presence of a cross by the Presidential Palace in Warsaw. ⁹ Palikot described his party as representing the ‘anti-Radio Maryja Poland’ and ran in the 2011 parliamentary elections on an anti-establishment platform proposing the removal of religious education from state schools, the end of state subsidies and tax credits for religious institutions, as well as the legalization of abortion on demand, same-sex civil unions, and marijuana. ¹⁰ The ‘Palikot Movement’ garnered an astonishing 10% of the vote in those elections, coming in third after Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (39.2%) and Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party (29.9%). It was most popular among the young and not religious: 42% of the 18%–44% and 37% of Poles who did not attend or rarely attended church voted for Palikot’s Movement (CBOS, 2011). ¹¹ By 2015, it had vanished from the parliament. ¹² Yet, despite its ephemerality, the movement highlighted some of the values and political aspirations of a segment of the population. It also gave rise to organizations, trends, and political figures that have endured and thrived.

Palikot officially left the Catholic Church through the process of apostasy, not only because he had been a non-believer for years but most of all because he did not want to provide ammunition for the Church and the Right, who consistently justify various political positions and social policies by the ‘fact’ that the overwhelming majority of Poles are Catholic. Following his personal path, the Palikot movement sponsored apostasies, providing information to Poles who desire to formally cut their ties to the Catholic Church and helping them initiate the complex and time-consuming bureaucratic process, filing collectively paperwork in so-called ‘apostasy weeks’. It is impossible to know (as yet) how significant that phenomenon is. The process is long, and (not surprisingly) the Church does not publish relevant statistics on that. While this is certainly a minority trend, it has several organizations devoted to the process; there exists many websites and Facebook pages dedicated to helping individuals wishing to initiate their formal exit from the Catholic Church, and the topic is present in traditional and social media. ¹³

Palikot became, at the height of his popularity in 2011–2012, the voice of anti-clericalism in Poland. His party officially proposed a bill for the complete secularization of the Polish state on Friday, 16 November 2012, and even though he has receded in the political background since the 2015 parliamentary elections, the issues he raised in the public sphere about the problematic proximity of the Church and the State have remained in the mainstream of public debates, frequently evoked by the newly created Komitet Obrony Demokracji (KOD) – The Committee for the Defense of Democracy.

What has perhaps been the most significant aspect of the so-called Palikot ‘revolution’, however, was the election of Robert Biedroń, the first openly gay parliamentary representative in Poland, and of Anna Grodzka, the first-ever elected transsexual representative in Europe. While Palikot himself has faded away, Robert Biedroń has become the leader of a new party, Spring (Wiosna), bringing forward a political platform for the explicit rejection of a conservative Catholic Poland. ¹⁴

The Law and Justice party’s attempt at criminalizing abortion in Poland, home of one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion law, has also mobilized tens of thousands of men and women who have marched against the project, protesting against the alliance between the Right and the Catholic Church. Recent films on sexual abuse scandals within the Polish Catholic Church and the Church’s response to them (or lack thereof) have also ignited an important public debate about the Catholic Church. ¹⁵

Jewish revival

The second mode of exit is indirect and consists of the active promotion of religious diversity to neutralize the salience of the Church in the polity and deconstruct the association between Catholicism and Polishness that is occurring primarily through non-Jewish Poles’ support for an on-going Jewish revival in Poland. ¹⁶ As the Church and the Right use religious discourse to disqualify opponents and symbolically exclude them from that national community, excluding them by accusing them to be ‘Jews’, secularists, ‘bad Catholics’, or masons – all code-names for Jews – Jewishness increasingly has come to stand for liberalism and cosmopolitanism. ‘Jews’ – symbolic Jews – must be politically neutralized and culturally marginalized, hence the anti-semitism in a country with very few Jews. ¹⁷

But according to proponents of a civic and secular vision of the polity, ‘Jews’ must, for the same reason, be rescued and Jewishness promoted. Liberal youth therefore protest against Catholic nationalists by wearing t-shirts and brandishing posters on which they ironically and subversively claim that they are ‘Jews’. ¹⁸ In the words of a young non-Jew wearing a hip clothing line with Jewish designs and Hebrew slogans, ‘Wearing [that clothing] is like taking part in a public discussion about Jews in Poland – that Jews live here and that Jews can live here’. ¹⁹ This comment is significant: it underlines that public discussions about Jews in Poland are actually one about the very identity of Poland and a critique of the still dominant vision of the nation as ethnically Polish and (nominally) Catholic.

It is in that context of struggles to define Polishness that Poland has witnessed, in the last two decades, a significant ‘Jewish revival’: there exist over 40 festivals of Jewish culture across Poland, several new Jewish museums and commemorative spaces, Jewish restaurants, cafés, and klezmer clubs, as well as new Jewish study programs at major universities (Gruber, 2002; Waligórska, 2013; Wodziński, 2011; Zubrzycki, 2012, 2016). Given the small size of the Jewish community in Poland, the majority of participants in those initiatives are non-Jewish Poles. One of the many motivations behind non-Jews’ participation in that cultural and religious revival is that it has the potential to neutralize Catholicism.

My ethnographic work and interviews with key cultural entrepreneurs and numerous non-Jewish activists suggests that their promotion of Jewish culture is part of a broader attempt to expand what it means to be Polish: to specifically oppose the monopoly of the Catholic right over the definition of Polishness and ultimately to secularize Polishness. Consider what Natalia, a non-Jewish woman in her 30s who volunteers at the Jewish Community Center in Kraków, responded when I mentioned that Radio Maryja was organizing a march in the following days:

Argh, I forgot that they still exist . . . [But] let’s leave these marginals in the margins! Radio Maryja, it’s a bunch of old ladies – hopefully they don’t have too many young followers. There’s a chance, with Jewishness being fashionable, that it means that the young generation is more open [and] that there will be more openness in the future.

Whether or not Natalia is right about generational change, what is most significant is that the hegemony of Catholicism is countered with Judaism and Jewishness instead of other religious minorities because of the specific significations Jewishness carry in Poland.

Building and promoting a plural society in a nation-state with an ethnically and denominationally homogeneous population is no easy task, however. Many activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) thus create visible, countable, ‘objective’ counterweights by reviving Jewish culture, supporting the institutional growth of Jewish communities, promoting knowledge about Poland’s Jewish past and present, and even introducing Jewish symbols in the public sphere. Why would many of the people who argue for a secular society in Poland encourage the display of Jewish religious symbols in the public sphere? Ethnographic data prove helpful again. Aga, a nominally Catholic student in Kraków who volunteers in Jewish organizations, is expressly anti-clerical and declares herself an atheist, explained to me during a Shabbat dinner at the Jewish Community Center:

I think it’s great to see all of that [Jewish religious activity]. I’m not religious but I think it’s good to see that there’s something else than what we already know – and frankly speaking – that we’re sick of – processions, pilgrimages here and there, crosses everywhere . . .

My research thus suggests that the presence of non-Christian symbols and of visibly different religious groups in the public sphere is embraced because their presence de facto weakens the hegemony of Catholicism. Another young woman, a self-declared feminist in her early 20s, explained to me in an interview that she’s happy to see ultra-Orthodox Jews in the streets of Kraków ‘because it breaks the Catholic “black cassocks” monopoly’.

Another reason why Jewish symbols may not offend ‘secularists’ is that unlike the cross, which has come to be associated with the Right in the past 20 years, the menorah (or Hasidic garb) have no such acquired ‘baggage’ for left-leaning Poles who support a civic and secular vision of the nation. Jewish markers, be they religious or secular, serve to visibly create diversity, thereby somewhat diluting the dominance of Catholicism.

Bringing back Jewish culture and supporting the revival of Judaism is a way to plausibly argue that Polishness is not only about Catholic practices and folklore but that Polishness is also about broad universalist values that have shaped a long tradition of ‘religious tolerance’ that led to the flourishing of Jewish religious and communal life, prosperous Jewish towns, and peaceful shtetls. The Jewish presence they encourage provides evidence of the historical roots of a Polish ‘civic nation’, this legacy legitimizing a vision of the national community that the communist party-state had tainted with its own perverse civic discourse. Embracing Jewishness is a way to secularize Polishness and redefine national culture.

Secularism, in the Polish context, is therefore not being fought for by attempting to erase all religious elements from the public sphere but rather through an effort to build a neutral space where Catholicism is only one among many other value systems (religious and non-religious) in which none is dominant. Many evangelical Christian groups also support the Jewish revival in Poland. They do so for theological reasons, but my interviews show that their support is also meant to build a counterweight to the all too heavy presence of Catholicism. Finally, Catholic groups invested in the Jewish revival often do so in explicit support of so-called open Catholicism and John Paul II’s call for ecumenical exchanges and respect for ‘our older brothers in faith’, in explicit opposition to the reactionary and anti-semitic Catholicism of Radio Maryja.

This is not to say that the dominant place of Catholicism in Poland is only or even primarily contested and countered through the support of Judaism and Jewish culture, nor that philosemitism has gone completely mainstream. The contestation is also operated, as I have discussed, through other processes of voice and exit: critiques of the Church and of traditional forms of Polish Catholicism; formal demands for a stricter separation of church and state and apostasy movements; as well as the support of the rights of various alternative groups, primarily sexual minorities and feminists, who, significantly enough, also support the revival of Jewish communal life as they understand their minority status and their struggle as one shared by Jews.

This is not to say either that the Jewish revival is not about other properly Jewish processes or that anti-semitism has disappeared in Poland. A 2016 study showed a significant incidence of hate speech on television, in the press, or on social media, targeting minority groups including Jews (Winiewski et al., 2017: 20). Contrary to one might expect, however, religiosity does not play a key role in anti-semitic attitudes in Poland (Stefaniak et al., 2015). Those who declare themselves religious and regularly attend religious services do not hold anti-semitic prejudices at a greater rate than respondents who do not believe and do not practice. Stefaniak et al. found instead that it is one’s political orientation that is most closely correlated with anti-semitic prejudices. What I argue here is that one must see a relation between non-Jewish Poles’ support of, and participation in, the Jewish revival and the desire to build a Poland that is different from the one forcefully promoted by the Catholic Church and the Right.

Conclusion

Where is Poland going, 30 years after the end of communism? It is difficult to say. We know that the country has not experienced a Quebec-style Quiet Revolution, despite what some public commentators had envisioned in the 1990s. Most Poles remain religious if we consider traditional indicators. But we also know that many are concerned about the type of Catholicism prevalent in Poland, and that others are so dissatisfied that they leave the Roman Catholic Church altogether. As the current Law and Justice government is not only taking Poland to the right but also toward an undemocratic – dare I say authoritarian – turn, the Church tagging along, I suspect that the polarization we observe in the political sphere will follow in the religious field and that those fighting for the respect of democratic institutions and the rule of law, as well as those supporting the European Union, gender equality, and the rights sexual and religious minorities, will drift further away from the Catholic Church. The youngest generation of Poles have already started that exit, and they have few figures, within the Catholic Church, that can offer them something to stay. This is certainly a story worth following.