All State Atheism Campaigns

State atheism campaigns were programs pursued chiefly by twentieth-century communist governments to suppress organized religion and replace it with an officially atheist state ideology, going well beyond ordinary secularism toward active elimination of religious institutions and practice. The Soviet Union pursued sustained anti-religious campaigns from the 1920s onward, closing churches, mosques and synagogues, executing and imprisoning clergy, and promoting militant atheism through state propaganda, with the harshest phase under Stalin. Albania under Enver Hoxha went furthest of any state, formally banning all religious practice in 1967 and declaring itself the world's first constitutionally atheist state, closing every mosque, church and monastery in the country. Communist Czechoslovakia liquidated male religious orders in a single coordinated police action in April 1950, arresting monks and confiscating monastic property nationwide. China's Cultural Revolution saw Red Guards destroy temples, monasteries and religious artifacts and force clergy into secular labor as part of a broader campaign against the Four Olds. These campaigns shared methods despite arising in different communist states.