William O. Douglas

Karl Marx once wrote that "religion is the opium of the people." Vladimir Lenin took this idea a step further by declaring that all good communists must also be atheists. Lenin hated the Russian Orthodox Church, the religious mainstay of Russians for centuries, because it had served as a prop to the Romanov dynasty. He also distrusted organized religion in general because it served as an alternative source of authority to the state. Under Lenin and later Josef Stalin, the Soviet government vigorously subverted religion. In 1955, two years after Stalin's death, William O. Douglas, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, was allowed to tour the Soviet Union. Among other things, he discovered that the vast majority of people had abandoned the open practice of religion. He also found, however, that religious sentiment among Soviets was still surprisingly strong...