Argument for the present study (continued)

This text has been written with two kinds of audience in mind. It is addressed in the first place to those living in former communist countries and aims to help them to begin to understand what happened to them and to their societies under communism. The second audience is made up of Westerners now working in post-communist countries. They need to understand why we, post-communist people, think and behave as we do. Hopefully this will make it easier for them to work alongside us and avoid looking down on us. In addition to these aims, we also have the secret hope that, in the process of reading what follows, Westerners living in communist and post-communist countries will come to understand how much their own ways of thinking and acting have been affected by capitalism and by the ambivalent values of their free-market context.

This work is unapologetically written from a fully assumed Christian worldview. Since it may also be found useful in countries that are still under a communist regime, it aims to offer answers to three fundamental questions:

1. What, from a Christian perspective, is the essence of Marxist ideology in its multifaceted manifestations?

2. How can Christians who are still living under a communist regime prepare for the coming of freedom, whether sooner or later, to their country?

3. What is ‘the post-communist mindset’ and how can we, as Christians, relate to this complex reality?

This text is addressed primarily to Christians, but our hope is that it may also be found useful by people having different worldviews. In spite of the background theoretical ‘apparatus’ that we have used, this is not intended as an academic paper but as a means of providing practical help to those living and working in communist and post-communist contexts.

We are going to use the Old Testament story of the bondage of the people of Israel in Egypt of their liberation, under Moses, from slavery – the Exodus – and of their wandering for forty years in the desert. This figurative approach is intended to give unity to our presentation of this complex subject and also to open up imaginative ways of thinking about it that go beyond the limits of logical discourse.