Where are we going?
Another thing that some of the seminary students told me was that there were a certain number of Orthodox Christians in the places where they lived. The town was Orthodox or Muslim, or it was mixed, with some Orthodox and some Muslims. But not one of them told me of a village that was atheist. No one said that a village had 100 Orthodox and 200 Muslims and 500 atheists. And yet Albania was the first and only atheist state in the world. Where did all the atheists go? Or did they all wake up one morning and find themselves believers?
I'm not asking this question to make jokes, or to try to embarrass people. It is a serious question, and it is very much related to the question of where we are going.
In my country, South Africa, we had an authoritarian and oppressive government, similar to that in Albania. The persecution of Christians was not as severe as in Albania, and in some places it could seem that there was religious freedom, because you could see many churches open. Nevertheless, there were also many people who were put in jail for opposition to the regime. The government ideology of apartheid was not to be questioned, or at least not to be seriously opposed. The government controlled schools, radio and television, and the police and the army, and used these to try to force people to conform to the official ideology, even if they did not agree with it or like it. And many people did agree with it or liked it.
But when apartheid began to crumble, an interesting thing happened. It became hard to find anyone who had ever supported it. And then people wondered how an ideology could last so long if it had had so few supporters.
I don't think that is very different from Albania. I am sure that not everyone supported the communist government and its policies. But enough people must have supported them for them to be able to propagate and carry out those policies, including the policies on religion. You cannot have an atheist state without any atheists at all. And so again I ask, where did all the atheists go? How can a town be 30% Muslim and 70% Orthodox with no atheists at all?
And when people say that there are 200 Orthodox in the town, does that mean that there are 200 people who
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