Hey there, /r/askhistorians! I've been doing a little reading, and one of my books is Communism: The God that Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. In the introduction to my edition of the book, Crossman said this:
Communism has had much more success in Catholic than in Protestant countries. The Protestant is, at least in origin, a conscientious objector against spiritual subjection to any hierarchy. He claims to know what is right or wrong by the inner light, and democracy for him is not merely a convenient or just for of government, but a necessity of human dignity."
Richard Crossman, ed., Communism: The God That Failed (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 7.
I of course won't co-sign Crossman's statements on the relationship between Protestantism and democracy, but I am curious about what he said in regards to Communism. For you historians of Communism, have there been any studies done regarding the success of Communism in Protestant compared to Catholic cultures? If not, why might Crossman have believed Catholicism was more amenable to Communism? If it helps, according to the publication data this book was first published in 1949, and Richard Crossman was a member of the Labour party in England at the time he wrote the introduction.
Thanks for your time and any help you might be able to render!
Communism seemed to work just fine in Lutheran majority East Germany. It's true that the Warsaw Pact had only one historical Protestant member, but that has more to do with proximity to Russia than anything else.
Catholic countries were able to resist communism better, my sociology of religion reading emphasizes, because Catholic hierarchies were transnational and therefore less susceptible to coercion and cooption compared to Orthodox and Protestant institutions, who had no outside check to local governmental pressure. The exception I'm aware of is the (mostly Hungarian) Protestant minority in Romania, who (likely because they were a minority and the state wasn't paying as much attention to them) were able to use the Protestant church as a base of resistance. In other places with religious resistance to Communism being an important part of the 1989-91 revolutions (the Baltics, Slovakia, and above all Poland) were all Catholic.
Now, if he means in terms of voting for Eurocommunist parties in post-1945 Democratic Western Europe, I don't know (were the Italian and French communist parties stronger than the Dutch and the Swedish?). I suspect not: Communism was very nearly successful in immediate post-WWI Protestant-majority German (though Protestants were perhaps underrepresented in its leadership). But if he means in terms of being part of the Soviet Bloc, he's just spouting nonesense.