Scientific socialism rejects the delusive concepts that make up religion. This does not mean that socialism is committed to any fanatically narrow conceptions of rationality such as characterized some nineteenth-century materialisms. It means that socialism is opposed to superstition in any and all forms. Socialists see human beings as fully capable of shaping human life, subject only to the limitations posed by the material world.
The reason for our opposition has three principal points of focus, historical, philosophical, and social. Historically, religion has always been allied with the authority of the state, and the state has always been the instrument of power of a ruling class. The role of priestly classes in antiquity, such as in Egypt under the pharaohs, is not particularly germane to a discussion of the alternative to capitalism, but if we consider the institutions of religion at the time of the first development of capitalism the case is plain enough. From the Middle Ages even up to the nineteenth century the Church commanded real political power, and it played a role in the control of territories. The Church could dictate what human behavior was allowable and what human ideas were allowable, and worked hand in glove with political rulers in support of such statelike political forms as then existed. In Europe the Church proclaimed an ostensible ethic that posited certain obligations of the powerful toward the powerless, of the rich toward the poor, but there was never any means by which this ethic could be enforced. As capitalism began to develop, even this ethic went by the board, and religious doctrine during and after the Reformation was more and more shaped to match the ethics and the needs of the new economic forces. Organized religion, particularly certain forms of Protestantism (for example, Calvinism and, later, Methodism), quickly developed such doctrines as the divine obligation of men to become rich a notion that both grew out of and grew up in support of the developing capitalism of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in other words, lent “religious” support to the material strivings of this new class of gogetters. A good example of this is an incident of some commercial warfare in India during the eighteenth century:
The incident {the “squalid Ruhela war” staged by the English India Company in 1774} raised one significant question: by what moral right did the Company conquer lands in India? The evidence strongly suggested that the Ruhela state was orderly and flourishing and, therefore, in the eyes of eighteenthcentury Englishmen, deserved to be considered as civilized. Moreover, its inhabitants were fulfilling, unknowingly of course, the will of God, who had ordained that the fruits and treasures of the earth belonged naturally to those who used them to the best advantage. Post-Reformation theology had provided a mandate for European expansion in America and Africa where, it was alleged, native populations had ignored or neglected what God had provided. Amerindians and Negroes could be evicted from their lands by interlopers who had the will and capacity to develop them. The law of man concurred with that of God: at the time of the Ruhela war Captain James Cook was cruising in the Pacific armed with a ruling of Justice Sir William Blackstone, who had declared that Australia was ‘terra nullius, a land owned (as yet) by no one. (From Raj: The making and unmaking of British India, by Lawrence James [St Martin's Press, 1997])
Stations, please!
The old ethic concerning obligations toward the poor of course dropped by the wayside, and then as now the moneyed class resisted all attempts to impose on them any social obligations beyond their own success and their families’ comfort.
Perhaps even more than in the Middle Ages, religion became a vigorous defender of class society, and by the eighteenth century, attempts to “rise above your class” (except by becoming a proper capitalist) were viewed with intense moral opprobrium by the religious institutions of the day. Catholicism and Protestantism alike preached against the evil of evading, or complaining about, the “station” to which God had “appointed” you. Thus, by the nineteenth century, there was good reason for working people to see religion as one great enemy of their welfare and of their attempts to better their lot by collective action. The brutal efforts of the state to keep working people in subjection (membership in the equivalent of unions could be punished by hanging in the eighteenth century) found ready support in the organized religions of the day and still do, in places like South and Central America. In our own times we had the example of Vietnamese Catholicism aiding and abetting the dictatorial state of South Vietnam; in Israel and various Arab countries strong forces are at work attempting to make religion an integral part of state power.
It stands to reason, therefore, that socialists learned to look upon religion with a hostile eye. A long history of abuse, oppression and betrayal lies behind that hostility.
Socialists are opposed to religion on philosophical grounds as well. Scientific socialism developed during a great upsurge of philosophical controversy in the nineteenth century, when the doctrines of materialism, both naive and sophisticated, came to challenge the irrational principles of revealed religion. Scientific socialists are materialists, that is, they hold that human history has been shaped not by supernatural forces, not by gods endowed with miraculous powers, but by material causes that can be analyzed, traced, accounted for, and to some extent controlled. They see all attempts to explain human history, human institutions, and for that matter human life by an appeal to divine, mystical, or supernatural intervention as doomed to incoherence and futility. Their position, in part, is that while no “god” ever invented a human being, human beings have invented all sorts of gods in other words, religion puts the cart before the horse.
Rational and real understanding
The distinction between supernatural and material explanations of phenomena is crucial for socialists, because it is tantamount to a distinction between, on the one hand, seeking for rational understanding and rational control of human history, and on the other, throwing up one’s hands in the face of divine mystery and some mysteriously designed “destiny” beyond any rational explanation. In other words, socialists feel that belief in what they regard as the illusions of religion stands in the way of any real understanding of the world. All the prayers in the world will not grow a blade of grass, but human rationality can and has produced abundance. No mystical ritual will ever prevent a flood, but rational land use can and has. The incoherence and confusion that can be sown by religious belief is grimly illustrated by the fact that while the Allied Powers in the first World War were calling on “God” for aid in the mighty struggle, the belt buckles of German soldiers bore the motto, Gott Mit Uns (God is with us). No god caused the slaughter of tens of thousands of men at Passchendaele, but the misguided belief in one certainly contributed its shameful share.
The imposition of a religious sanction by all sides in most wars (and not just modem ones) is connected to the third heading under which we can discuss the socialist hostility to religion, and that is the baleful social effects of religion. Unquestionably implicit in some of the facts already mentioned is the power of religious belief and religious practices as forms of social control. Such fairly recent events as the Church’s silencing of activist priests who were siding with oppressed communities in Central and South America and the current Pope’s blathering about the “terrible plague” of abortion while maintaining a politic silence on issues like worldwide hunger and poverty simply carry on religion’s long history of siding with the status quo and keeping people’s attention diverted from their real needs.
Teach us to sit still
The rhetoric and the principles of religion are rife with proclamations of human unworthiness and helplessness, and full of exhortations of humility and acceptance of one’s lot. One of the core messages of Christianity figures in a sanctimonious passage in T S Eliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land” “Teach us to sit still,” in other words let us not be agitated, by oppression, by want, by injustice. Christ’s own advice was similar “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and render unto God the things that are God’s.” Don’t meddle with what may be being done to your actual life leave things to the hand of God and don’t make waves. This tranquil passivity has long been a major recommendation of religion.
The rhetoric, and consequently the teachings, of religion are designed to inculcate concepts of human unworthiness and powerlessness. All have sinned and all fall short of the glory of God, and “the sins of the father shall be visited on the sons.” Under the aegis of religion, humans are seen as unclean by nature and powerless to better themselves without the help of some divine being. Furthermore, most devotional religions focus on the “salvation” or “purification” of individual persons. Asian Buddhism similarly focuses on the “illumination” of disparate individuals and encourages its practitioners to turn away from the “temptations” and the problems of the world around them. All this harmonizes only too well with the divisiveness fostered by the phony “individualism” pushed by the fans of capitalism. The concept that the world can never improve until individual persons cleanse their consciences, so popular among Romantic and Victorian writers, is a clear echo of the preoccupations of western religions. (Remember when the automobile manufacturers were crying that legislation to make cars safe would be futile and unfair, and that the only “solution” would be to focus on the individual drivers? Same thing.)
In the end, then, when religion looks at the actual world at all, it promotes ideas of social cohesion only for the preservation of the status quo, and it ignores or even condemns collective efforts toward human betterment. Both western and nonwestern religions, whether the Christianity of the west, the animist religions in parts of Africa, or the savage religions of ancient Mexico, have placed the “needs” and “powers” of the “gods” above the needs and powers of mankind. Religious hierarchies side with the ideology of the ruling class of the moment, and offer explanations of human history that are mere fables.
Socialists, with their perception that society is organized around different classes, maintain that radical human betterment can come only as collective betterment, and that the “salvation” of single individuals is an illusory distraction. Socialists maintain that the illusion that this “salvation” is to be won by fealty to some mythical divine force is just that, an illusion.
They also reject the western religious concept that mankind is by nature evil and doomed because of some legendary mankinddamning crime. Socialists maintain that “human nature” is shaped by the material forces of history. The socialist position is an empowering concept that frees people from nonsensical, disabling concepts of universal unworthiness on the one hand and universal helplessness on the other.
Thomas Jackson
