Finding God in the Gulag

In college, I borrowed a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s famous work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, from the BYU library, and read it.  This was remarkable on two counts.  First, this was not assigned reading for a class; it was of my own free will and choice.  Second, it was fascinating!  It was an engrossing story that pulled the reader in.  I could easily imagine myself right there alongside the title character freezing to death in a work brigade and dealing with the guards and fellow inmates in the barracks.  It brought to life the horrid conditions of Soviet labor camps, something that the world hasn’t entirely gotten away from yet.  It was something I found interesting enough to want to know more about.

Finding God in the Gulag: A History of Christianity in the Soviet Penal System by Jeffrey S. Hardy (ISBN: 978-0-19-775167-1) is a book that gives readers a chance to know more about life in the Gulag.  Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s based-on-a-true-story novel, this book is an academic look at Christianity in the Soviet camps from the earliest days under Lenin to the dying days of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev with a little post-script about a few things in the post-Soviet times.  It catalogs both attempts by inmates to life and express their religions and attempts by the prison management to suppress religion.  It was interesting to note that efforts to extinguish religion in prisoners was not uniform in the Soviet Union.  It was more lax in some camps than in others.  There wasn’t always a central policy that camp managers could look to, so they did it their own way.  Sometimes that meant believers were beaten and spent time in solitary confinement.  Sometimes that meant a Christian guard did nothing when a prisoner prayed or sang a hymn or made an icon.  There was a short section on faith among thieves and other such common criminals, including a few paragraphs about the fascinating world of Russian prison tattoos.  The book also catalogs people losing their faith, which was unsurprising, and one that is not judged neither by the author nor by most prisoners who are cited in the book.  They tended to believe the camps were inhumane and that one should not be judged too harshly or even at all for what they did in the camps.  There was also a little proselyting that happened in the labor camps.  This was especially true of Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but Orthodox and Catholic priests also preached and even baptized people.  Toward the end of the Soviet regime, religion was sometimes encouraged because it generally had a good influence on prisoners and mediated their violent behavior.

The book was an interesting read and would be interesting to people interested in Russian or Soviet history or religion.  It only briefly discussed non-Christian religions, which are major players in Russia, but either weren’t the focus of the book or weren’t such a concern in the Gulag.  I did think the book was slightly disorganized and it felt like the narrative jumped around a lot, but I am not sure how I would’ve better organized it.  I thought the stories about people finding faith and maintaining faith despite great psychological and physical pressure were inspiring.  People sacrificed a lot to maintain their belief in God and to live it according to their conscience.  It’s worth looking to many of these people as examples of standing up for what’s right no matter the consequences.

   

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License and is copyrighted © MMXXI John Pruess.

He Walked the Americas

I remember hearing a story from my grandpa as a young kid about some Indian tribe that believed their ancestors had contact with a great white god and how some people in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believed that could easily be explained by Jesus’s visit to the Nephites after His resurrection.  Later, I learned that such legends were likely more widespread and that the natives at the time of the Spanish Conquest may have been influenced by these beliefs to think that the arrival of the white conquerors was a second coming of Christ, the great Queztalcoatl.  I was reminded of those old stories more recently when a Native American man who was also a member of the Church made the rounds on Church-related podcasts and said that when he went through the temple, he found a lot of similarities to his lodge ceremonies.  I don’t know how much these various stories have been convoluted with Mormon culture, but they always seemed interesting to me, and it seemed like there could be at least some truth to them.  

He Walked the Americas: The Trail of the Prophet by L. Taylor Hansen (ISBN: 978-1-939149-19-0) is a compilation of stories from North and South American Indians that relate to a so-called white or pale prophet.  The stories tell about the arrival of the prophet, his activities, and then his departure.  The legends describe the man, usually as wearing white garments (most often with small crosses on the hem), having brown hair, usually a beard, wearing sandals, and usually with cross-shaped marks in his hands.  Sometimes he was accompanied by other white men.  Other times he organized churches, established temples, and called people to continue his teachings after his departure.  The arrival is usually on a ship in the legends, but one of the stories recorded by the author noted that the mysterious white prophet’s ministry started with his appearance at the temple.  The man’s activities while visiting the ancient Indians included preaching peace, ending human sacrifice, healing sick and otherwise afflicted people, and controlling the wind and water.  The last two were kind of important in the legends because this god was often referred to as the feathered serpent.  Wind was often represented by feathers and the water by the snake.  The organization of churches, usually with twelve men called to be leaders and teachers, and the establishing of temples was the other main activity of this white prophet in the legends.  The stories then tell of his departure, usually with the people mourning his leaving and eventually forgetting his teachings and reverting to war and human sacrifice.

I thought the book was very interesting.  Hansen simply compiled the stories and lets the reader judge for himself what to think.  If someone is well acquainted with Mormon theology, the most likely candidate for the great white prophet is Jesus after His resurrection.  The legends allow for a few other Book of Mormon-related possibilities, too.  Many of the legends involve the white prophet’s arrival via boat.  Both the Jaredites and the Nephites arrived by sea and brought with them seeds, which was also in the legends.  Some have claimed the legends, especially in North America are the result of Moroni’s travels before finally depositing the plates in the Hill Cumorah.  There’s no real way to know since the stories are clouded by time (admitted by the compiler and by some of the Indians relating the legends), but the similarities are fascinating and with so many from such a disparate set of sources, there is also no real reason to discount them all.  Knowing the Book of Mormon is true comes through study and prayer, but anthropological evidence for it like this is always nice to have once the spiritual testimony has been gained.

   

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License and is copyrighted © MMXXI John Pruess.