Socialism and Religion. F A Ridley 1940s

Part I: The Origins and Nature of Religion

If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. – Voltaire

I: The Two Roots of Religion

Religion implies the belief in the existence of a god, or gods, with whom human beings can establish relations and from whom they can receive benefits. Usually, though not quite invariably, it also implies belief in the immortality of the ‘spiritual’ element in man: his soul. In practice, religion expresses itself in various forms of worship and intercession, both public and private. By means of such rites, as the Greek philosophers used to observe, mankind ‘does business with the gods’ and establishes reciprocal relationships.

The phenomena that together make up religion are unquestionably of extreme antiquity. Undeniably they can be traced back far beyond the dawn of civilisation to a very early stage in human social evolution. Indeed, if we assume magic to have been the earliest form of religion, which is probable, religion must be traced back almost to the earliest human societies. Amongst animals, as far as any test is possible, nothing that can be called religion seems to exist; indeed it is most improbable that any creature except man has any capacity for abstract reasoning. And the same was presumably true of the very earliest types of ‘ape-men’ who formed the very earliest societies that came in time to be fully human. We are necessarily dealing with conjectures, but religion in its primitive magical form can be traced with some certainty to the ‘neolithic’ (new stone) age, and may well have originated still earlier in the ‘palæolithic’ (old stone) age. In such vast periods of time dates mean nothing: say, anything from 20,000 to 100,000 years ago. [1]

The history of religion is therefore of vast antiquity, and is coeval in its entirety with many levels of cultural development. Between the witch-doctor beating his drum in the primitive rituals of the Congo, down to the intricate splendour of a High Mass in St Peter’s, Rome, a vast cultural cycle has been spanned. In investigating the evolution of religion all these stages of religion must be kept in mind. Only so can we do adequate scientific justice to the subject.

When we investigate the history of religion from the standpoint of the widest possible perspectives it becomes obvious that we are confronted with, broadly, two main species of religion. With substantial accuracy we may style these as, respectively, ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ religion. In our next two sections we will glance at the historical sequence of these two main types of religious evolution. Here we will glance at their social origins and character.

‘Natural’ religion is the religion of primitive races; that is, of races which have not yet attained to the cultural level of civilisation, using this last word in a Marxist sense to denominate not only a general level of material efficiency and cultural attainment, but, specifically, a society divided into classes and regulated by the class state. ‘Natural’ religion, contrarily, is the religion of primitive races who have not yet reached this last level; who still live in tribal communities based on common ownership of the means of production – which latter are obviously very primitive in such a society; and amongst whom class divisions are either unknown, as in the most primitive races, or at least are weak and undeveloped. [2]

These two types of religion are entirely dissimilar both in their character and in their motivating social causes.

In the case of ‘natural’ religion we are dealing with very primitive societies who carry on an unceasing battle with nature in order to wrest an uncertain existence from a hostile environment. Amongst peoples in this social stage religion becomes a ‘heavenly’ reflex of their actual life here below. And, as such, it is compounded chiefly of fear and ignorance, the two chief social features in all such primitive societies. Its gods are either personifications of natural forces, before which primitive man trembles, but which he does not understand: the Sun, the Moon, the Fire, the Thunder, etc. Or they are the ghosts of great chiefs, hunters, warriors, perhaps primitive agriculturalists, whose memory is held in reverence by the tribes which have solved their problem of existence under their leadership, or by means of their prowess in the chase or in war, the two chief occupations of all primitive races.

Hence, ‘natural’ religion, the religion of all pre-civilised races, is a religion motivated by fear and misunderstanding of natural forces. It is the product of man’s fear and ignorance of nature. Contrarily, its social roots are very feeble, and it does not reflect social antagonisms and social oppressions, at least, to any great extent, since history for such societies has not yet reached the point at which classes have grown up alongside the expanding means of production at which the class state presses heavily upon the enslaved masses.

We are consequently driven to this inevitable conclusion: primitive races profess a common type of religion which springs in general from a single source: misunderstanding, and, in direct consequence, fear of the terrifying and unknown forces of nature and of natural phenomena, upon which savage society depends for existence and before which it is so largely helpless.

With the expansion of the means of production and the consequent simultaneous and reciprocal growth of a class society, of the class state, and of civilisation, the above state of things inevitably passed away. Along with the demise of primitive society there vanished concurrently the type of religion which was the reflex and expression of that society. In its place there developed a new and distinct type of religion: the religion of ‘civilised man'; and therefore in itself the inevitable expression of the class-divided society and of the oppressive class state, which came into being concurrently with ‘civilisation’ itself. To this ‘civilised’ type of religion we apply the term ‘supernatural’, in sharp distinction to the ‘natural’ religion of primitive societies.

Supernatural religion differs sharply from natural both in its social origins and in its generic characteristics. Like all religion, like its predecessor, it is still based on fear and ignorance: the historic twin roots of religion. But on social rather than on natural fear. As society becomes progressively more civilised: that is, as it simultaneously acquires more knowledge of and more control over natural processes, its dependence on and consequent fear of nature becomes continuously less. For example, a citizen of a modern state has no reason to expect death by reason of the failure of the municipal water supply, unlike the dwellers in primitive societies, where droughts still take a heavy toll of human life. Nor does he fear the thunder, nor expect the wrath of celestial powers whenever an eclipse of the moon takes place. As civilisation advances, fear of nature declines along with growing knowledge of and power over its processes.

But fear and ignorance of nature are not the only kind of fear and ignorance. As civilisation progressively advances and frees mankind from the domination of natural forces, it concurrently enslaves it to social forces expressed in the exploitation of a class society and oppression by a class state. All civilisation hitherto is synonymous with slavery and exploitation of the majority by the ruling minority.

Consequently, in civilised society fear of man, of the ruling classes and of the class state which is their embodiment, takes the place of primitive fear of nature. Hence, in the ‘higher’ supernatural religions which accompany the rise of civilisation social causes predominate over natural causes. To revert to our previous illustration, the citizen of a modern capitalist state knows the nature of eclipses, and no longer lives in fear of drought, but he nonetheless has the liveliest fear of unemployment, bankruptcy and military conscription; all of which are social causes, unknown to primitive and inseparable from (capitalist) civilised societies.

To sum up this necessarily brief discussion of the nature and evolution of religion: as a product, for all its supernatural pretensions, of human society, religion reflects the fundamental nature of that society. And hitherto human society has passed through the primitive classless society of barbarism and the class-divided societies of civilisation. Religion is at all times and places the product of fear and ignorance: but these last assume different forms in different societies: respectively, fear of nature, and fear of exploitation and of the ruling classes who direct and symbolise that exploitation.

To complete our preliminary survey of religion it therefore behoves us to glance at these two sequential species of religion: the natural and the supernatural, according to our terminology. After which we shall be in a better position to investigate the current problem presented by religion in our contemporary world.

II: Natural Religion

In our contemporary society with which we are here primarily concerned, ‘natural’ religion, that is, the religion of primitive races, is merely a problem of historical interest. Consequently we only need touch upon it briefly.

How did religion originate? Of the various theories propounded, the respective merits of which still provoke controversy, two, in particular, stand out. According to the ‘animistic’ school, represented pre-eminently by such anthropologists as Tylor and Frazer, gods originally came into existence as the personification of the forces of nature: of the Sun and Moon, Dusk and Dawn, Fire and Thunder; all of which natural phenomena are incomprehensible to primitive peoples. According to the ghost-theory of Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen, gods always, or at least usually, represent the spirits of the dead ‘heroes’, who appear to their followers in dreams and are thus conceived as still alive in some spirit-land. Homer expressed the universal opinion of barbaric societies when he wrote that Sleep and Death were ‘twins’, and no barbaric race can distinguish between them. Consequently if the dead appear in dreams, in order to appear they must still be alive somewhere else! Hence the inevitability in such societies of the conceptions of personal survival and immortality.

Actually, both schools of thought probably contain an element of truth, and it is not always possible to decide between them in the case of particular cults. For example, was the Jewish God, Jahveh (usually mis-spelt Jehovah), originally a primitive thunder-god from the Sinai region, where the Jews seem to have originally adopted his worship, or a primitive Hebrew hero, worshipped after his death? Similarly, was the Scandinavian god, Odin, whom the primitive English worshipped, a personification of the Sky, or a primitive Norse ‘Führer’, an aboriginal ‘Hitler'? There is nothing inherently improbable in either explanation.

At any rate, whatever the precise origin or origins of a particular barbaric religious cult may be, there can be no room for doubt with regard to the social character of such particular cults. Every ‘natural’ religion accurately reflects the primitive unsophisticated barbaric society of which it is the celestial replica. In the great epic poems characteristic of such societies, such as the Greek Iliad, or the Scandinavian Sagas, the ‘gods’ are merely glorified men who spend their existence fighting and drinking – like their earthly worshippers; and who periodically descend from Olympus or Valhalla (the Norse heaven), to fight men or seduce women. And, as befits the gods of barbaric peoples, in the composition of such ‘reflex’ deities, brawn predominates decidedly over brain!

Another point must be noted. Barbaric societies are but little troubled by abstract ideas, and the uncertainties and complexities of civilised life are unknown. Hence the religions of the nature peoples are naive, unsophisticated, joyous; not ‘sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought'; and in their exercise concrete visual acts take precedence over abstract speculations, since the theology of such primitive peoples is elementary in the extreme, in striking contradiction to the complicated metaphysics which usually characterise the theological systems of the ‘higher’ (civilised) religions. [3]

To sum up: the ‘natural’ religion of barbaric peoples reproduces faithfully the elementary social organisms that characterise such primitive social states. Above all, it reflects as in a mirror the helplessness of such societies before the dark and unknown powers of an incomprehensible nature. Obviously, in the civilised societies of today such religions have little meaning. The artificial revival of antique paganism in recent Germany and Japan is not due to natural but to political causes! The ‘supernatural’ religions of today are as different in their character as in their motivating cause. Accordingly, we propose to glance briefly at this species of religion before turning our attention to the current problem of religion in present-day society.

III: Supernatural Religion

With the advent of civilisation and concurrently of class society and the class state, barbarism began to disappear, and along with it the type of religion which we have seen above to be characteristic of barbarism. In its place there arose, at first, probably gradually, another and quite different species of religion; one which reflected the new and radically different social conditions which came into existence along with civilisation and class society at some unknown period before the dawn of recorded history. [4]

In Marxist (that is, in scientific) terminology words like ‘civilisation’, ‘classes’, ‘the state’ etc, are used in a definite and precise sense; unlike bourgeois ‘science’, in which such terms are used in an extremely vague and haphazard manner, frequently undistinguishable from sheer mumbo-jumbo charlatanry. By the term ‘civilisation’ we imply a social order in which the means of production have expanded to the point where, for the first time, they yield a surplus wealth over and above the lowest needs of current society for immediate consumption. This wealth is owned and utilised in the form of private property, by the ruling class for the time being, which maintains its exploitation of the subjugated masses by the agency of a novel institution unknown in primitive society, that is, the class state: that ‘particular power of suppression’, to employ the masterly definition of Engels. In all societies so constituted, from those of the oldest civilisations, Ancient Egypt and Ancient Babylonia, down to and including those of our own day, this fundamental state of things exists. In all such societies, accordingly, the class struggle for control of surplus-value and for the consequent right to exploit, remains the decisive social factor.

Against the background of a society so constituted it is obvious that the primitive type of religion (in itself the reflex of an altogether different and more elementary society in which social antagonisms were relatively undeveloped and weak), could have no conceivable relevance and would, in fact, have been absolutely meaningless. For ‘Man – Society – made God in his own image'! And a ‘civilised’ god can only be the work of ‘civilised’ men! Despite the recent ludicrous efforts of the German militaristic disciples of Ludendorff and Alfred Rosenberg, along with their Japanese Shintoist colleagues, to revive primitive pagan cults amid modern industrial conditions, the incongruity between the ideology of the machine-age and the nature myths (the Swastika, the ‘Solar Wheel’, the (Japanese) Sun-Goddess, etc.) of primitive rustic paganism is altogether too great. The table-manners of the antique barbaric gods are simply impossible in a modern civilised society.

Unquestionably, the fundamental difference between ‘natural’ – barbaric – religion and ‘supernatural’ – civilised – religion, is to be found in the broad distinction already noted above: that is, in ‘natural’ religion it is physical nature that predominates; whereas in ‘supernatural’ religion it is social forces, antagonisms and contradictions, which play the decisive role. Barbaric religion is a reflex mainly of Nature; whereas civilised religion is a reflex mainly of Society: the accurate mirror of its social inhibitions and contradictions.

If we turn from the purely speculative consideration of the subject to the consideration of the positive evolution of religion this fact becomes crystal-clear. The earliest ‘civilised’ religions arose in the earliest civilisations; Egypt, Chaldæa, etc. These religions represent the faithful reflex of the societies wherein they originated. For example, each city-state in Egypt and Chaldæa had its own local God. The importance of the state-god waxed and waned proportionately with the temporal political and military fortunes of his terrestrial worshippers here below! Thus, when Assyria, by utilising iron weapons for the first time in the history of war, became the dominant empire in western Asia (c 800BC), simultaneously, Assur, the local Assyrian god, was elevated to the first place in the heavenly hierarchy: viz, the social discovery of iron for military purposes led to alterations not only in the terrestrial, but, equally, in the celestial sphere! Similarly, when the Egyptian city of Thebes became the capital of a united Egyptian empire, Amon, the city-god, became supreme over the other gods. Indeed, throughout the entire history of civilisation heaven faithfully reflects the vicissitudes of earth! The growth of equality in heaven accompanies the growth of inequality on earth!

When we turn to more advanced forms of religion than pagan polytheism the same phenomenon recurs. According to the writers of orthodox text-books on the history of comparative religion, the broad distinction in religious evolution is that between ‘polytheism’ – belief in the simultaneous existence of many gods, and ‘monotheism’, that is, the belief in one god alone. But, in actuality, there is no absolute distinction between the two forms of belief. The historic link between polytheism and monotheism is found in ‘monolatry’, that is, the belief that many gods exist, but that one alone ('ours’, of course), is superior to all others. This was for centuries the belief of the Jews, the ‘discoverers’ of Monotheism. And Monotheism itself did not originate among the Jews as a result of speculative reasoning, but was due essentially to the hostility of the surrounding pagan peoples at the time of the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews (c 600BC), the gods of whom became accordingly quite inacceptable as objects of worship. Hence the Jewish god, Jahveh (Jehovah) was left as the solitary tenant in a vacant heaven.

The highest forms of religion faithfully reflect the highest forms of society. This age-old truth is seen with particular clarity in the case of the great cosmopolitan and ethical religions which have arisen in Europe and Asia during the course of the last 2500 years: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and their modern off-shoots. These ‘universal’ religions reflect with the fidelity of a mirror the social evolution of civilisation throughout this era. They are cosmopolitan because society during this period had been steadily widening its boundaries and advancing from the tribal, first to the national, then to the cosmopolitan sphere. They are ethical, since in a society founded on the exploitation of the many by the few mere brute force is insufficient to hold the masses in subjection: for this last purpose, an ethic is required; that is, the masses must be persuaded to do what it is against their real interest to do, and submit voluntarily to exploitation on earth in the name of heaven! And they all presuppose the regime of classes, private property and exploitation, not as temporary social phases, but as something fixed and eternal: ‘the sacred rights of private property'! Such universally found commandments as ‘Thou shalt not steal’, ‘Thou shalt not covet’, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, etc, etc, presuppose a state of society based on private property, inequality and violence. It is one of the most glaring paradoxes of all ‘civilised’ ethics that every society based on social theft and murder by the rich must peremptorily forbid individual theft and murder by the poor as an essential prerequisite for its existence!

Space is not, unfortunately, available to pursue in any detail the very interesting and instructive question of the social evolution of the higher religions. A word, however, may be usefully added on that of the one which most concerns us Europeans: viz, Christianity. Historically, this last may be described as the faithful reflex of the last phase of classical society. As the Roman Empire unified the local city-states of the Mediterranean, so, concurrently, Christianity unified the local religious cults that were their ideological expression. For example, the Greek writer, Plutarch (second century AD), went on record with the observation that every city-state (Polis) to be counted as such must have two things: ‘A god and a town-hall’ – viz, seat of government. The Roman Empire abolished the second and the Catholic (Christian) Church the first. Similarly, it is well known that the rise of individualistic capitalism in the sixteenth century led to new forms of Christianity, in the reformed Churches, which accommodated themselves to the new competitive ethics so different from those of feudalism. For example, punctuality is pre-eminently a capitalist virtue. Protestantism is the first religion to make it a religious virtue: the proletarian who is late at the factory gate cannot be in time at the door of heaven! One could give countless similar examples.

To sum up accordingly the first part of this pamphlet: Religion has historically passed through two main epochs. The era of barbarism throughout which religion expressed chiefly man’s fear of and helplessness before Nature. And the era of civilisation, in which religion was primarily an instrument in the hands of the successive ruling classes and which primarily reflected fear of these classes and of the fundamental social antagonisms which have, hitherto, dominated every class-ruled society.

One further point may be added. Under capitalism and, in particular, under monopoly-capital, the most advanced form of capitalism which brings all its contradictions to a head, the first, natural root of religion, man’s awe of natural phenomena, becomes extremely weak, and indeed, in the most advanced countries almost disappears with society’s growing mastery of natural forces due to the machine-age. Whereas the second, social root in insecurity and in social disharmony acquires a terrible and altogether unprecedented power due to the previously unheard of intensity of prevailing social contradictions expressed in war, crisis and universal instability. Hence, in dealing with current religion it is its second, social root that almost exclusively concerns us as, even a generation ago, Lenin had already specially insisted. The second part of this pamphlet is written from this last point of view.

Note: In this brief analysis of the fundamental characteristics of religion we have not, unfortunately, the space to delve deeply into special problems of theological criticism. But we may relevantly add that the idea of ‘god’, though due essentially to social and not to intellectual causes, is also a logical absurdity from the purely intellectual standpoint. For if, as the theologians say, everything has to be made by someone, and therefore, the universe must have been made by god, it is, in the first place, obvious that the universe – the all – is not a thing, but a name, or rather an abstraction: no one can see or touch the universe, but only some part or aspect of it. And, in any case, if the universe must have a maker, so by the same logic must god, and so on, ad infinitum! In any case a ‘first cause’ is an absurdity, since by the term ‘cause’ we understand something that is, also, an effect of a previous cause.

Moreover, we know the world to be full of pain and misery. Such a world could not possibly originate from an all-good and all-perfect god who, by definition, could not create anything not, also, good and perfect. This point was made once for all by the old Greek philosopher, Epicurus: God must be either all-powerful or all-good, or neither, if we conceive him as the author of so imperfect a world: one in which all animals must struggle for existence and in which as has been aptly said: ‘History is the conjugation of the verb “to eat.”’ But, of course, such quibbles are not ‘the foundations of belief’: they are merely excuses – and very bad ones! – for not giving up a belief that was necessitated by social conditions in past eras. It is only the lack of real evidence that brings the ‘evidence societies’ (who peddle such puerile arguments) into existence.

We could, of course, continue to pick holes in theology indefinitely. For example, if the ‘soul’ had a beginning, it must have an end, etc, etc. But here we are concerned with the social realities of religion, not with the verbal acrobatics of its professional apologists. When a thing is old and profitable one can always find reasons for justifying it, and not always in conscious bad faith!