Socialism and Religion. F A Ridley 1940s

Part II: Religion and Society

Religion is the opium of the people. – Marx

I: Religion and the Class War

The fundamental and decisive fact in every social order that has arisen since prehistoric times has been the class war for control of the surplus-value produced by that society. And the control of surplus value, of ‘the means of production’, carries with it automatically control of the state, of ‘the particular power of suppression’ (Engels) and of cultural processes in general. Historically nothing is more certain or well-established than that, in the words of Marx, ‘the [dominant – FAR] ideas of every age are the ideas of its ruling class’. Since the publication of the Communist Manifesto (1848), which first laid the foundations of an exact social science, only prehistoric survivals can be found to dispute this primary fact of social development.

The part that official religion has played in this age-long process is evident on every page of the historical record. As ‘the opium of the people’, as a drug, a soporific to deaden the effect of an inevitable social misery in a class-ruled society; religion has played always an important and often a decisive role in every known class society that has hitherto existed.

In the very earliest civilised societies of which we have any exact knowledge, the sacerdotal theocracies of the pre-classical archaic world prior to Greece and Rome, the role played by religion in sanctifying social inequality and oppression was decisive and overwhelming. In the oldest civilised societies, such as Egypt, Babylonia, Crete, ‘God and the State’ were virtually synonymous terms. (Though, we may add, Bakunin and his disciples were quite wrong in maintaining that the latter was derived from the former. Whilst undoubtedly influenced by religious ideas the earliest states did not originate from the ‘idea of god’, but from the concrete fact of the development of the means of production and the simultaneous development of classes.) The very name of the ruler of the oldest known civilisation, that of Egypt, derives from religious auspices: viz, ‘Pharaoh’ is derived from ‘Per-Ea’, ‘the Great House'; the Temple. And has not the most learned of ancient philosophers, Aristotle, left it on record that the Egyptian priests, the first ‘leisured class’ in history, were the creators of civilisation?

The colossal monuments left behind by this earliest civilisation, the giant Pyramids which still stand in the Egyptian desert, were about equally temples and tombs. Indeed, the imagination recoils before the spectacle of the ruthless slave-driving of whole generations necessary in a pre-machine age to erect these massive mausoleums. Literally, whole generations of slaves must have perished worn-out in the task of building an adequate memorial to the ruling class of the first known civilisation, symbolised in the Divine Pharaohs, for whom the Pyramids originally served as tombs: a necropolis of exploitation!

When we turn to subsequent ages and civilisations we are confronted with the same or a closely similar spectacle. The Roman Empire, the greatest engine of exploitation known up to that date, identified its religion with the worship of Cæsar, of the Emperor: and as to what sort of ‘gods’ the frenzied Caligula, the sadistic Nero, and the perverted Elagabalus were, even ‘official’ history bears eloquent testimony! And, so far as we know, none of the numerous moralists throughout antiquity protested against the frightful exploitation of the slave-majority by the free minority. [5]

Nor is it any different essentially when we turn to the ‘higher religions’, such as Christianity and Islam. For if, as is not at all unlikely, Christianity itself started as a ‘revolutionary’ mass movement against Roman society, as Eisler and others have sought to demonstrate, and as some of its surviving early scriptures seem to indicate (viz, ‘the Apocalypse’, etc), it is at least certain that it was soon effectively captured by the ruling classes of the day and became an instrument in the hands of the class state. [6]

In that respect, the ‘conversion’ of the Emperor Constantine (fourth century AD), was the perversion of (the original) Christianity. Even reputable bourgeois historians now admit that the Roman Emperors of the Decline, in adopting Christianity as the state religion, were motivated primarily by political and economic motives rather than by considerations of a purely religious character. They needed ‘moral cement’ wherewith to hold together their cracking administrative structure, and to arrest the decay of their exhausted civilisation in the era of the Barbarian Invasions. For a time it was doubtful whether Christianity or Sun-Worship (Mithraism) would best fulfil this social role. Eventually, however, a combination of favourable circumstances enabled the Son of God to prevail over the Sun-God. Both gods, in any case, would have functioned in much the same way in that society!

Since its official adoption as a state-religion Christianity has faithfully acted as the docile instrument of the class state; it was always for the classes [7] against the masses; for the exploiters against the exploited. Under the peculiar conditions of the Middle Ages the Church indeed became itself the dominant force in society and the exploiter-in-chief. According to a moderate computation, one-third of the land of Europe was ecclesiastical property throughout this period: and this in an agrarian society when land was (in feudal law) real property, that is, the kind of property which pre-eminently bestowed social prestige and political power. It is well known how during this epoch, the golden age of (Catholic) Christianity, the Church waged the most frightful wars in the so-called Crusades (c 1100-1300 AD), and that its ‘Gestapo’, the Inquisition, bloodily and most effectively suppressed every free movement of the human mind throughout this entire era, during which a ‘law against dangerous thoughts’ (to employ modern Japanese terminology) was in unbroken operation.

And we may add there is strong reason to believe that the Inquisition was an engine of conscious social at least as much as religious repression. The heretical sects which it drowned in blood were the radicals of their period: indeed, some of them belong to the category of Utopian communist sects. The rack and stake of the Inquisition served both God and Mammon impartially. As Kautsky has aptly remarked: ‘It was a fanaticism of avarice masquerading under the forms of faith.’ [8]

And all this transpired during the era of the greatest Church-power: ‘the Ages of Faith'! For it is a matter of common knowledge that mediæval culture was entirely dominated by the Church. Its leading theologians, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, were the highest cultural authorities. Throughout this whole millennium (c 500-1500 AD), the word ‘clerk’ denominated equally and impartially either a person in holy orders, or a literate person able to read and write; the two were regarded as virtually identical in mediæval Europe, as in modern Tibet.

Nor has the situation been essentially different in modern times, even though religion has, in general, not exercised the overwhelming power that it enjoyed during the preceding era. From the time of that great ‘rebel’ Luther, who urged the German princes to ‘stab and slay’ their serfs revolting against intolerable oppression (1525) during the ‘Peasants’ War’ (Bauernkrieg), ‘the social record of Christianity’ has been one of almost unbroken subservience to the rich and powerful. As Engels himself demonstrated, Lutheranism reduced the free peasants of Germany to the level of serfs. If Calvinism was revolutionary in its social effects, it was only so in the interests of the new bourgeois exploiters, the lords of money, against the older feudal exploiters, the lords of land. As Tawney and others have shown it actually worsened the lot of the poor. It is notorious how the (reformed) Anglican Church has always been the obsequious tool of the English ruling class: ‘God bless the squire and his relations and keep us in our proper stations!’

And subsequent religious history is the same. Every social revolution from the French to the Russian has had to meet the full fury of the Churches. (According to some historians, it was the influence of Methodism which prevented the French Revolution from spreading to England.) In both its ideology and its property-relationships official religion has only played one role in the class war: that of chaplain, apologist, and, where necessary, active auxiliary to the ruling class.

The lack of real democracy on earth is made up by a fictitious democracy in heaven.

And what has been said above of Christianity is equally true and could easily be duplicated, had we the necessary space, in respect of other religions also. For example, Islam has always stubbornly opposed even the bourgeois revolution: Arabia and Afghanistan, still strongholds of Mohammedan clericalism, are almost completely feudal. Kemal Atatürk had to suppress it in Turkey in order to carry through the bourgeois revolution there. Whilst Hinduism, by means of its doctrine of reincarnation, has cleverly allayed the discontent of the Indian masses with their frightful conditions in this life! Even the originally rationalistic Buddhism has, in modern Mongolia and Tibet, become an obscurantist and oppressive priestly despotism.

To sum up: as far as the class struggle is concerned, official religion is, and always has been, on the side of the exploiters. Indeed, granted its social background, it could not have been anything else. And the same is true today.

Note: In dealing with the reactionary role of religion in past societies we are, of course, dealing with the official religion in such societies. In fairness we must add that another type of religion has existed on which Christian Socialists lay great stress. We refer to such movements as those of the Lollards and Anabaptists which were anti-ruling-class, and in some cases, even ‘communistic’ in their tenets. It is undeniable that such movements existed, that they reflected their contemporary class antagonisms and were, even, to a certain extent, revolutionary in their relation to contemporary states and society. To that extent accordingly they must be excepted from the strictures passed above on their official counterparts, the ‘orthodox’ churches. We must not forget that in a pre-scientific society religion necessarily became itself an instrument of the prevailing revolutionary class war.

We must add, however, that their ‘communism’ was pre-scientific and therefore backward-looking:When Adam delved and Eve span where was then the gentleman?’, as the Lollards phrased it: viz, in the beginning class distinctions did not exist. In all such Utopian ‘Communism’ history chases its own tail. Moreover, most of these movements were dominated by clerics – for example, John Ball and Thomas Munzer, etc. Had they succeeded they would have inevitably become themselves theocracies. Voltaire has summed up, once for all, the social character of all theocratic communism in his satirical description of the clerical ‘communistic’ state founded by the Jesuits in Paraguay (eighteenth century): ‘In Paraguay perfect communism existed: the Jesuits shared the wealth; whilst the Indians shared the work!’

II: The Churches and Society

In the preceding section we have summarised the historical role of religion throughout all earlier periods. It remains to glance at the contemporary attitude of the Churches in present-day society.

By far the most powerful, best organised, and logically consistent of the Christian Churches is the Roman Catholic Church. This originally mediæval and feudal institution almost foundered in the storms of the Reformation era which witnessed the opening-up of the world market and the earlier phases of the bourgeois revolution against feudalism and clericalism. By a skilful combination of terror and demagogy the Catholic ‘Counter-Reformation’ extricated the Church from its dangerous situation and, under the brilliant direction of the Jesuits, made a masterly adaptation to the rising capitalist social order.

Today, the Papacy is fully alive to the urgency of social questions, and even to the imminence of social revolution. If this ancient institution does not really know much about the next world it undeniably knows quite a lot about this one! It has not wasted its 1900 years’ historical experience. And to meet its current dilemma it pursues a two-faced and subtle policy: here, we only touch upon its social aspect.

Despite its claims to Divine origin the Roman Church is an institution with a very strong sense of ‘survival-values’. It was not an accident that the biologist, Lamarck, who invented the theory of ‘creative evolution’, was a pupil of the Jesuits: to arrive at his theory of ‘the giraffe’ which deliberately ‘grew a long neck’ in order to survive, all he had to do was to study the evolution of the famous Order! Today, the Papacy knows that it is in even greater danger than at the time of the Reformation. For whilst it survived Protestantism it could not possibly survive Communism, which would necessarily be fatal to all religion, The Pope may, or may not, be ‘infallible’, but he knows this only too well!

There is no doubt at all that the fundamental aim of the present-day Papacy is at all costs to defeat Communism. All its other aims are subordinate to this one. It fights for its life; and it knows it! To defeat the Social Revolution it resorts, as at the Reformation, to a combined policy of demagogy and terror. On the one hand, the Popes issue encyclical letters denouncing the ‘abuses’ of capitalism, and demanding a ‘square deal’ for the masses. On the other hand, whenever the masses attempt to secure a ‘square deal’ for themselves it backs terrorist movements against them. It is well known how actively it assisted Hitler and Mussolini to come to power; and how fiercely it denounced Bolshevism whilst the revolutionary phase of the Communist International endured. And the whole world knows how strenuously the Roman Church exerted its worldwide activity on behalf of Franco during the Spanish Social War.

Its pronouncements leave no room for doubt as to its motives: it was not taken in by the myth of (bourgeois) democracy promulgated by the Stalinists and their allies during the Spanish war. The Church knew as well as we do, that in our era the alternative to Fascism is revolutionary Communism, and not bourgeois democracy. On this point, at least, the extreme Left and the extreme Right agree! Hence, in Spain as elsewhere, the Church fought for its life against the ‘Red Peril’. It will do so again whenever Social Revolution threatens and it will always support Capitalism – with whatever mental reservations, since the Roman Church is a pre-capitalist institution – when the alternative is revolutionary socialism.

The Papacy is itself a totalitarian institution. For it, socialism is not a question of politics but a ‘moral’ question. This is so. It is, indeed, fantastic to imagine that either Christian pre-scientific doctrine or Christian servile ethics could survive in a communist and libertarian society. Hence, as Cardinal Newman predicted long ago: whenever and wherever the Social Revolution appears, it will find the Catholic Church in the forefront of its enemies. And the workers of Spain, Ireland and Mexico, etc, know this already from bitter experience! [9]

We accordingly conclude that the Roman Church – the one Christian Church which is still a world-power – stands in the front rank of the opponents of socialism.

The remaining Churches can be dismissed briefly since they have little real power, and that only local. Moreover, they are not organised on the efficient totalitarian lines which characterise Roman Catholicism.

In general, they can be described as anti-revolutionary and anti-socialist, though some more blatantly so than others. For example, the surviving Calvinistic Churches: the State Churches of Scotland and Holland, are hotbeds of black reaction. Still worse, if possible, is the South African Church which adds colour to class hatred. The above is somewhat ironic when we consider the prominent role played by the Calvinist Churches in the bourgeois revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, ‘predestination’ automatically becomes counter-revolutionary after victory!

On the other hand, the Anglican Church, whilst at bottom probably equally reactionary, is so less openly in that it permits a certain amount of ‘Leftism’ among even its higher clergy: it goes without saying that this presents no real danger to the existing social order. Thus we have a ‘red Dean’ of Canterbury and have even had a ‘pink’ Archbishop! However, since the state controls the purse-strings in the form of endowments, it may safely be presumed that Anglicanism, in the future as in the past, will be the faithful servant of British capital and British Imperialism. The recent Education Bill, introduced by a Tory minister, evidently predicates a closer alliance in Britain between Church and State in the coming era for the purpose of promoting a common reaction.

The same goes for the others as well. The ‘revolutionary Church’ of the ‘Christian Socialists’ is a revolutionary myth. Historically, in the pre-capitalist days of such sects as the Lollards and Anabaptists, there were, undoubtedly, ‘heretical’ Churches that can accurately be called revolutionary, having regard for the circumstances of their time. But that is all ancient history. It is a far cry from the revolutionary Anabaptists of the sixteenth century to the smug Baptists of the twentieth: from Jan of Leyden to ‘Spurgeon’s Tabernacle’. [10]

The case of the Russian ‘Orthodox’ Church, recently re-established by Stalin, is a special case, and, as such, merits a word. In Tsarist days the Russian State Church was one of the most ignorant, intolerant and obscurantist of all. The brutality of its ‘Holy Synod’ was notorious. And its charlatan-in-chief, Rasputin, had become a bye-word. The official recognition recently given for political reasons to this Church indicates undoubtedly the growing compromising character of the Stalinist regime and its increasing reversion to power-politics. Every class revolution in decay tends to compromise with religion. The example of Napoleon’s ‘Concordat’ with Catholicism is a well-known instance (1801). The latest Stalinist policy demonstrates that even an originally socialist revolution is liable to retrogression in the cultural sphere if it remains indefinitely backward and isolated. Only international socialism can abolish religion.

Regarding the non-Christian world we have already alluded to its reactionary character. For example, the pacifist role of the Hindu ‘Mahatma’, Gandhi, is a most powerful contemporary obstacle to the Indian Social Revolution. Whilst Islam, as remarked above, is still an anti-socialist barrier of feudalism. In Japan, the militarist cult of Shintoism was artificially revived by the Japanese warlords as a barrier against revolutionary ideas. But Emperor-worship is unlikely to survive the defeat of Japan. The Deity has now become a Democrat!

To sum up: as the social utility of religion becomes less, and as the Social Revolution gains ground, everywhere organised religion allies itself more closely with the forces of reaction in other spheres. The gods form a ‘united front’ against the Revolution! For the Revolution digs a common grave for all the gods!

Note: Space does not permit us to deal with ‘freak’ cults, such as Christian Science, Theosophy, etc. In any case, the time has long gone past for the foundation of new religions. The old ones already have sufficient difficulty in keeping afloat!

III: Religion and Socialism

After what has been written above it is unnecessary to devote much time to the question of the relations of Socialism and Religion: they necessarily mix about as well as oil and water! We have already seen what were the historical causes for the appearance and growth of religion and how it arose out of fear and ignorance; fear and ignorance in savage societies before the incomprehensible phenomena of nature; fear and ignorance of the uncontrollable forces of civilisation and of the social tyranny which is inseparable from the operations of a class-dominated society. In this last respect, the aphorism of that shrewd bourgeois politician Napoleon, ‘I regard religion not as the mystery of the incarnation, but as the mystery of the Social Order’, is abundantly borne out by history. Indeed, before Bonaparte, Robespierre had expressed to perfection the role of religion in a society based like all class societies on fundamental inequality and injustice: ‘Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a god who avenges outraged innocence and punishes triumphant crime, is essentially the idea of the people.’

Or in other words, if there is no justice here, there must be somewhere else! – an obvious case of ‘wishful thinking'! ‘If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him’: this remark of Voltaire is absolutely correct of any society based on exploitation, even if the circumstances of his era prevented Voltaire himself from drawing this correct conclusion.

For, we repeat: there is nothing accidental about the rise and historical role of religion. It is a mere waste of time to try to kill it by argument or ridicule where the social or natural causes exist that inevitably result in its reappearance. To attempt to do this is, indeed, the cardinal error of bourgeois rationalism which lops down the branches of religion but leaves its roots untouched. Wherever injustice and fear exist men will seek a remedy elsewhere, if none exists here. Hence as an Anglican bishop recently naively remarked: ‘Ages of fear have always been ages of religion.’ For example, after the Roman slaves had failed to win their social liberty under Spartacus (73-71 BC), they resorted to the ‘spiritual’ salvation of Christianity.

Hence, to seek to abolish religion in a society founded on exploitation is futile. The ancient Greek and Roman freethinkers such as Epicurus and Lucretius demolished every theological argument as well as their modern successors have done, but when Paganism passed from the scene it was Christianity, not Atheism, which took its place. And, we may add, the mediæval freethinkers who perished at the stake of the Inquisition could testify that the change, as far as freedom of thought was concerned, was merely from ‘the frying-pan into the fire'!

If, however, it follows from the above that religion cannot die out or be abolished in a class society, it follows equally and by the same reasoning that it could not survive under the world-order of international socialism. Once a communist order was fully established the twin foundations of religion, ignorance and fear, would be torn up by the roots. International socialism, by doing away with class exploitation and by developing to the fullest possible extent the unfathomed productive potentialities of the machine-age, hitherto hardly touched under capitalism, would make poverty and insecurity absolutely meaningless terms in an age of universal plenty. Whilst war, the third partner in the unholy capitalist trinity, would necessarily pass into oblivion along with the competitive capitalism and imperialism which is its sole efficient cause.

All the social roots of religion would thus simultaneously disappear. And, of course, it goes without saying that the last remains of barbaric ignorance and superstition which still survive from pre-civilised eras would vanish before the impact of universal free education based on the scientific humanism that is inseparable from socialism, and no longer twisted as today by class domination into a mere machine for producing standardised wage-slaves, mechanical minders of machines, and servile robots.

Whosoever therefore is capable of reasoning scientifically from cause to effect must realise that the universal arrival of scientific socialism means inevitably the definitive end of religion; which, deprived of all reason for existence, would become a mere anachronism in such a society: a modern version of Mohammed’s coffin floating unattached in space without visible means of support. Under world socialism we shall arrive at that pleasing state of things humorously depicted by Anatole France in one of his novels, where the then reigning Pope is forced to earn his living on the race-course whilst discharging his official duties as a spare-time occupation! Can we wonder that the Papacy dislikes the prospect?

What then are, or should be, the present relations of the revolutionary socialist movement with religion? Obviously, if and when the revolutionary workers seize power in a given society they will establish immediately the secular state and secular education, according to the principle: ‘The free Church in the free State’. Equally obviously, they will rely on education and propaganda to abolish the remnants of religion in the new era. Despite clerical scares, the ‘Red Peril’ is a civilised and civilising force: it will not make use of the methods of the Inquisition. Of course, if, as has so often happened, the Churches support counter-revolutionary movements then naturally the workers’ state will take strong measures against them as counter-revolutionary agents. But such obvious methods of self-protection have nothing in common with the persecution of religion as such, which would be offensive to the humanitarian ethic that is an integral part of international socialism. The workers’ state will rely on education, on scientific socialist propaganda, and, above all, on the progressive achievement of the socialist society which will make religion superfluous. The Churches have more reason to fear that than a thousand persecutions.

In the meanwhile, prior to the conquest of power, the revolutionary socialist party continues its necessary propaganda against all manifestations of capitalism, including those which belong to the sphere of religion. Whether it is necessary to attack religion specifically depends on local and on particular circumstances, but every reactionary movement of the Churches in our current society should be duly noted and exposed. It goes without saying that a revolutionary party has no official relations with religion: though whether a specific ‘anti-religious’ test is necessary for each individual member is, again, a matter for local and particular decision in view of the existing circumstances. Under no consideration, of course, would any party member posture on religious platforms nor angle for Church support.

To sum up: Religion is a social phenomenon in present-day society. Hence no amount of merely negative and critical propaganda can destroy it. Only the positive achievement of a classless society can do that by abolishing its causes. The war against the gods is, henceforth, equivalent to the class war for a socialist society: Forward to the Social Revolution!

Socialism and Religion. F A Ridley 1940s