Can religion be revolutionary?

Church lends moral authority to capitalism


The excerpt below is taken from the discussion period of "So Far from God, So Close to Orange County," a talk given at a regional socialist educational conference in Los Angeles, California, over the 1994-95 New Year's weekend. Participants in the conference included members of the Socialist Workers Party branches and industrial union fractions, supporters of the communist movement, revolutionists from other countries, and workers, young people, and others who learned about the event from co-workers on the job or in the course of other struggles. The entire talk appears in Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. Copyright 1999 Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

BY JACK BARNES
The church and church hierarchy in today's world are no longer a social force in and of themselves. They have not been for a long time—not since the rise and consolidation of industrial capitalism. At one time, "the church militant" was an economic power, a ruling-class force in its own right. In whole sections of feudal Europe and later in other parts of the world, the church was the dominant holder of landed property. It was the single most powerful force among the landed estates.

That is no longer true, however. It is not true of priests, of bishops, of archbishops, of cardinals, or of the pope. They are not an independent social force; they do not have the power to overthrow social revolutions or reverse mass proletarian struggles. The church remains a ruling-class institution. But church officials function in the class struggle primarily by seeking to lend their moral authority to powerful bourgeois political forces or their agencies. They often offer ideological support to rightist movements, helping to give them a veneer of morality, of eternity, of ritual, of stately pomp. They try to anoint the counterrevolution.

But the church fathers are effective only if the working class and other toilers have no capable revolutionary leadership of their own to help clarify political questions and lead them forward....

All attempts in the modern period to turn religion into some kind of revolutionary ideology are bound to fail. During feudalism, popular movements that rose against oppressive conditions in the countryside and scattered towns and cities—and thus in part against the dominant class power of the church hierarchy—universally adopted a dissenting religious form. Secular revolutionary ideas found the beginnings of a popular echo only in the decades leading up to the American and French revolutions.

With the rise and consolidation of capitalist states and the growth of a modern proletariat, however, all that has changed. That is why liberation theology could never be the dominant outlook of a revolutionary movement. It is not a Marxist form of religion; it is a form of religion whose proponents, involved in various social struggles, attempt to graft onto it all kinds of ideas, including some borrowed from Marxism.

But to the degree a worker or peasant or young person who starts down this road gets more deeply involved in revolutionary politics, to that degree they will sooner or later begin looking for clearer ways to explain the class forces they are confronting and more effective ways to advance the struggle and win. And to the degree anybody remains faithful to the church, to that degree they will over time prefer sticking to the Roman rites without all the political add-ons.

Communists join with all fighters

The revolutionary workers movement opposes attempts to combine religion and politics through the back door. There is no way to carry the day in the church hierarchy for such an effort either. That is not how the bishops, archbishops, and cardinals got where they are. They are not a social force in their own right, but they are bourgeois figures in the epoch of imperialist decay.

Of course, communist workers will work and fight shoulder to shoulder with any individual as an equal in a common struggle, no matter what his or her beliefs or other views. We never quiz fellow fighters about their religious beliefs, nor do we push to be quizzed about ours. And we never let any such beliefs be a barrier to practical work together.

What's more, communists are absolutely opposed to the coarse and cynical measures taken by Stalinist regimes to attempt to force people to drop their religious beliefs, or change them through "ideological struggle" or "reeducation." Over time, as people go through a range of experiences in the class struggle, many come to change their views on religion and other questions. In the future, during the transition to socialism, as all human relations undergo revolutionary change, the social conditions that gave rise to religion will wither away along with private property, the state, the family, and other institutions of class-divided society.

There will no longer be a social basis for institutions, beliefs, and forms of regimentation and moral authority inherited from earlier class society in order to maintain a propertied minority in power.¹


1. In a 1909 article on "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion," Lenin wrote: "No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labor, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organized, planned and conscious way....

A Marxist must be a materialist, i.e., an enemy of religion, but a dialectical materialist, i.e., one who treats the struggle against religion not in an abstract way, not on the basis of remote, purely theoretical, never-varying preaching, but in a concrete way, on the basis of the class struggle which is going on in practice and is educating the masses more and better than anything could." V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 15, pp. 406-7. Also see Lenin's 1905 article, "Socialism and Religion," in CW, vol. 10, pp. 83-87.

As for the Stalinists' attempts to forcibly "reeducate" religious believers, Frederick Engels had pointed out long before, in 1874, "that persecution is the best means of promoting undesirable convictions! This much is for sure: the only service that can be rendered to God today is to declare atheism a compulsory dogma." See "Programme of the Blanquist Commune Refugees," Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989), pp. 12-18.