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How did state power impinge on the religion of the ordinary person? This perennial issue has been sharpened as historians uncover the process of 'confessionalization' or 'acculturation', by which officials of state and church collaborated in ambitious programs of Protestant or Catholic reform, intended to change the religious consciousness and the behaviour of ordinary men and women. In the belief that specialists in one area of the globe can learn from the questions posed by colleagues working in the same period in other regions, this volume sets the topic in a wider framework. Thirteen essays, grouped in themes affording parallel views of England and Europe, Tsarist Russia, and Ming China, show a spectrum of possibilities for what early modern governments tried to achieve by regulating religious life, and for how religious communities evolved in new directions, either in keeping with or in spite of official injunctions.

What are the political consequences of growing religiosity in Russia and China-two countries that share a communist past and thus a long history of atheism, but have followed very different paths of political and economic liberalization since the 1980s? In this dissertation, which is based upon nearly two years of fieldwork in multiple sites within these two countries, I carry out a systematic comparison of the relations between religious communities, on the one hand, and the Chinese and Russian states, on the other. This comparison leads to five conclusions. First, there is compelling evidence that the emergence of a robust religious associational life is neither a force for democratization nor a sign of impending regime crisis in Russia and China. Instead, religious communities are reproducing elements of the political contexts in which they are embedded and reinforcing authoritarian structures of political rule. Second, religious groups are playing an increasingly important role in the political economy of both states. Third, while Moscow and Beijing have set the parameters on religious expression, it is at the local level where the interactions between religion and politics actually take place and where, as a consequence, the relationship between the two sets of players is defined. Fourth, in direct contrast to what the literature on civil society within authoritarian states suggests, church and local-state relations in both Russia and China are cooperative, not conflictual. Just as religious groups court those in power, local governments likewise rely on these groups to take on some of the responsibilities of governance. Finally, collaboration is not based on faith; rather, it is based on convergent interests, with bargaining between religious leaders and local state officials focusing on the distribution of money, power and prestige. Indeed, material, not spiritual concerns drive most the interactions.

State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine is a collection of essays written by a broad cross-section of scholars from around the world that explores the myriad forms religious expression and religious practice took in Soviet society in conjunction with the Soviet government's commitment to secularization.

- Suppression of cults