Vaclav Havel, center in red scarf, placing a candle at a Prague commemoration of the Velvet Revolution (Petr David Josek/AP)

The New York Times did a nice retrospective yesterday on Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution on its 20th anniversary. I was 15 years old when the Berlin Wall fell along with all the other Eastern European dominoes that fell in its wake. Just old enough to have a global consciousness, but not quite old enough to have a sense of what it all meant and what it still means today. I’m still learning.

Of course, the Times didn’t mention the role religion played in the Czech Republic’s peaceful move toward a free democracy and society. That doesn’t bother me; that’s what we’re here for. And by sheer coincidence I ran across this passage last week by Stanley Hauerwas, written in his book After Christendom, not long after the monumental events of 1989.

These questions [about the "awkward" role of Christianity in contemporary society] are made even more bewildering by the anomalies occasioned by sudden changes in our world. We are puzzled by the fact that in countries where we have freedom of religion it is very difficult to make serious reference to God in the public arena. Of course we are not prohibited from confessing our belief in God as long as we make the appropriate social gestures that we understand such belief has no implications for our fellow citizens who do not have such beliefs. Yet suddenly in countries that have repressed the Christian faith for most of this century, Christians, exactly because they are Christians, have become the primary political actors. Indeed in those contexts it seems some even think it makes a difference, and it is a political difference, whether what Christians believe is true or false.

It would be easy to read Hauerwas’ “anomalies” with an ironic eye today. But he makes clear in the footnote to this passage that he is thinking of Vaclav Havel, particularly Havel’s book Living in Truth, and of the liberating power of Christian conviction in the face of totalitarianism, which, as he’s writing, had just happened in Czechoslovakia. The same would hold true for some of Havel’s global contemporaries: Desmond Tutu, Czeslaw Milosz, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, et al.

All of which makes this an intriguing time to rediscover an intriguing time in our globe’s recent history. Like I said, I’m still learning….