Envy and greed ended communism

Marc Fisher says sins--deadly ones--had more to do with communism's fall in Eastern Europe than sin's arch-nemesis, Pope John Paul II, did.

His personal account of how materialism and a desire to keep up with the Jonesenbachers freed East Germany is at Slate.

[M]any demonstrators felt that they would be shot at that night.
. . .
I always asked: Why are you doing this? And the answers came in a torrent, as if decades of silence had been unplugged. Especially in East Germany, where almost everyone could watch West German TV (though they had to keep the volume way down because it was strictly verboten to watch, and if the neighbor heard, there could be trouble), people talked about their jealousy for the material goods that Westerners enjoyed—the clothes, the shoes, the cars, the food.
. . .
Even when I sat in churches for hours on end, talking to ministers, priests, and the generally nonreligious people who came there because of the more open atmosphere, the talk was of political freedom and consumer goods, not of faith.

Fisher also notes that by the 80's, except in perhaps Poland, the people of both communist and capitalist countries had become "detach[ed] . . . from their religious traditions." The same ambivalence seen in the Bloc countries took root in Western Europe "without any official atheism or overt state antagonism to religion." Kierkegaard surrenders.

Fisher was the Washington Post's Berlin Bureau Chief from 1989 to 1993.