Keston Institute

• 1. Introduction

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  The Keston Institute exists because a young British student walked through Moscow in the 1950s and counted churches. Michael Bourdeaux had arrived as part of the first wave of British exchange students sent to the Soviet Union. What he found there would consume the rest of his life. Of the 1,600 Russian Orthodox Churches that had existed before the Revolution of 1917, only 41 were still functioning. That number lodged in him like a splinter. Who were the people trying to worship in those remaining churches? What happened to those who tried to worship outside them? Those questions led Bourdeaux to found, in 1969, an organisation that would become one of the world's most distinctive centres for tracking what communist governments were doing to religious life. The institution would move from a modest house at Chislehurst to a school on Keston Common, then to Oxford, and finally to a university in Waco, Texas. Along the way it would win the Templeton Prize, shape the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, and build an archive that scholars still travel to consult.

• 2. The Counting of Churches

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  Forty-one out of 1,600. That ratio, which Bourdeaux encountered during his year in Moscow, gave him a precise measure of what Soviet religious policy had achieved since 1917. The scale of the reduction was not abstract to him. Each closed church represented a community pushed out of its building, its clergy dispersed or imprisoned, its congregation left to practice faith in secret or abandon it altogether. Bourdeaux came away from that exchange year with a personal commitment to those being persecuted for their religious faith. He did not return to ordinary academic life. Instead he began gathering evidence, learning how to find testimony from inside a system designed to suppress it. That work of documentation would eventually need an institutional home.

• 3. Founding at Chislehurst

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  In 1969 Bourdeaux co-founded the Centre for the Study of Religion and Communism at Chislehurst, together with Sir John Lawrence. Two other figures contributed to the effort: Leonard Schapiro and Peter Reddaway, who would later become Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. The collaboration brought together scholarly expertise in Soviet affairs with Bourdeaux's firsthand knowledge of religious conditions on the ground. The name was direct and descriptive: this was a place dedicated to understanding what communism was doing to religion, with no pretence of neutrality about the importance of the subject. Chislehurst gave the new centre a foothold, but within a few years the organisation would need more space.

• 4. Keston Common and a New Name

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  In the early 1970s the centre purchased the old parish school on Keston Common, a move that gave it both a permanent home and a new identity. The organisation became Keston College, named for the common where its building stood. The new name carried a certain quiet dignity, and the physical space allowed the archive and research work to expand. Over time the scope of the institution's attention widened too. It had begun with a focus on the Soviet Union, but it broadened to include all former communist countries, with the Eastern Bloc joining the former Soviet republics as areas of sustained study. The concern throughout remained the same: documenting what happened to religious communities under governments hostile to faith. The college's work during these years would later be credited with playing a key role in the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church.

• 5. Oxford and the Templeton Prize

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  Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke was the figure who urged the institution to relocate to Oxford, and that move prompted another change of name. In Oxford, calling itself a college carried specific implications it could not support, so the organisation renamed itself the Keston Institute. The Oxford years brought heightened recognition. In 1984 Michael Bourdeaux won the Templeton Prize, one of the most prestigious awards given for contributions to affirming life's spiritual dimension. The prize placed Bourdeaux and the institute in international company and drew wider attention to their decades of painstaking documentation. Bourdeaux remained at Keston until 1999, when he retired after thirty years of leading the work he had started with those forty-one counted churches. The current chairman of the Keston Institute is Xenia Dennen.

• 6. A New Home at Baylor

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  Since 2007, the Keston Institute's archive and library have been held at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, within the Keston Center for Religion, Politics, and Society. Baylor's custodianship means that decades of collected testimony, documents, and research materials on religious life under communism are now part of a major university's holdings. The transfer from Oxford to Texas completed an unlikely geographical journey for an organisation born at Chislehurst out of one young man's shock at counting the open churches in Moscow. The archive's new location at Baylor ensures that scholars researching religious freedom in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc have a dedicated institutional resource to draw on.