Between the sociologist and secret police: The ethical affordances of material religion in Cold War archives

This article addresses the peculiar challenges and opportunities of researching lived religion in archives produced during the communist era. Inspired by the material turn in the study of religions, this article discusses the significance and uses of collections of the material traces of religion found in communist-era archives in Hungary. Using the private archive of Zsuzsa Horváth (1950–1995), a sociologist of religion who worked in 1970s and 1980s Hungary as a starting point, I relate the context, affordances, and connectivities of material religious objects found in her collection to analogous collections in state security archives. These antagonistic archival collections of material religion are the product of the peculiar tendency of the secret police, scholars of religion, and Cold War western advocates of religious freedom – albeit in pursuit of vastly different aims – to collect material manifestations of religion – images, objects, publications, manuscripts, and spaces – as evidence of the persistence of religious life. I argue that the scholarly archive of Zsuzsa Horváth, with its assortment of religious ephemera, offers valuable insight into aspects of the sensorial and aesthetic worlds of religious communities and reveals the complex moral and methodological entanglements of a scholar of religion working in the shadow of the secret police. Approaching the problem of lived religion through such a material phenomenological lens offers the opportunity to place diverse and opposing archival collections in dialogue with each other in order to unlock their evidential potential for the study of religions during the communist era in Eastern Europe.