The former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has stated that ‘religion isn't born in someone's bright idea. Religion is born in collective pain.’ If the pain becomes too severe, someone will emerge to lead a new religion forward:

Sacks considers that the Western world has not yet reached such a place of despair, but that it will: ‘We in the West have not yet reached that cry of pain but we may in the predictable future.’ One society that did reach that cry of pain was pre-revolutionary Russia. The uprising of 1917 and the communist era that followed did not give birth to a religion but a political ideology that sought to crush all faith practices. What then happened to people's Christian faith and the culture that went with it? Was it extinguished? Quite the reverse.

We have considered how music has played a fundamental role in human evolution and neurological development. We have seen how music is a universal characteristic of human existence, experience, encounter and relationships. In the third chapter in this part of the book, I explore how the relationship between music and faith has endured, even in the most hostile circumstances in recent European history, including the rise of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. As Michael Bourdeaux has written, religion, and sacred music with it, were intended to be extinguished by Marxist and Leninist ideology: