Adam Michnik, my compatriot and one of the anti-communist leaders of the Solidarity movement whose thinking bulldozed the Berlin Wall, should feel at home in Jefferson's space. Michnik, who now edits the largest newspaper in Poland, Gazeta Wyborcza (Election Gazette), is here to give the Labrosse-Levinson Lectures. In the three-lecture series, he will defend the separation of church and state while asserting that religion gives democracies a conscience. His presence here is one of the many good things that happen thanks to the university's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and its Center for Religion and Democracy. Headed by James Davison Hunter, the influential sociologist who in his 1991 book popularized the idea of culture wars, the institute is an interdisciplinary meeting place for scholars who are "seeking to make sense of our times." [   ]

The three lectures are framed as Michnik's interactions with Pope Benedict XVI's writings from the perspective of a democrat-skeptic, as he calls himself. Refreshingly hard to pin down, Michnik is a friend to the Catholic Church in Poland, but the kind of friend who'll tell you when he thinks you're acting like an idiot. [   ]

Michnik lives in a country where two-thirds of the adult population say they go to church every Sunday, and where about 1.2 million tune in daily to Radio Maryja ("Radio Mary"). They are not fans of compromise. The station transmits extreme nationalist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-EU, conspiratorial, fundamentalist Catholic propaganda. It has been an embarrassment to Michnik, to Poland's politicians dealing with the European Union, and even to the Vatican, which doesn't quite know what to do with it.

Because of the clout marshaled by the radio station, the threat of theocracy in Poland seems very real to Michnik. I doubt theocracy will take place here United States, but I receive Michnik's indictment with concern for my motherland. Radio Maryja's muscle was behind Lech Kaczynski, who won the last election. Listen to some of Michnik's report:

"We are witnessing an alliance between a significant part of the clergy and those forces the democrat-skeptic calls 'the new populism.' The rhetoric of the new populists is Manichaean. They claim to be serving the absolute good rooted in the Church's teachings and fighting the absolute evil present in the theories and practices of their adversaries. They intoxicate themselves with the cult of their own sinlessness, narcotizing the public opinion with campaigns against ever new threats, with attacks on ever new scapegoats, with ever new witch-hunts.

"They often declare their ardent anti-communism, and yet they are genuine children of the communist mentality, with its obsessive suspiciousness and its contempt for truth and the law. There lives in the 'new populists' the spirit of homo sovieticus, with its primitive egalitarianism, its collectivistic aversion toward the heretics, its belief that the state should regulate all mechanisms of social life and that the state's will is the source of morality and truth about the world. This becomes particularly powerful when the state--that is, the ruling élite--refers to the Chruch's teachings, and the Church consents to that."

The rise of the extreme Right was also the reason why, after having written a book titled The Church, the Left, Dialogue, Michnik wrote an article titled "The Church, the Right, the Monologue." "In these titles dwell my hope and my anxiety," Michnik says.