Avakian’s Away With all Gods: Critiquing Religion Without Understanding It

by Pavel Andreyev

[This is part 1 of a two-part review.]

It would be wrong to suppose that Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World (Chicago, Insight Press, 2008 ) is just a book. It’s in fact a campaign by some highly motivated people to promote atheism, and a certain critique of religion (including “Christian Fascism”) in American life. Authored by the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, it has been advertised for months with great fanfare. The party, in a call to “Help Make this Book a Major Social Question,” has declared:

“There are many people who need this book, and many sectors of society which it must penetrate. In the communities of the oppressed and in the truly hellish prisons, where people are force-fed religion…in the high schools and universities, where atheist and agnostic clubs are beginning to emerge…among the educated and progressive, and among those hungering for enlightenment…this book must reach. April should be a time when this book emerges onto the scene with great impact.”

Even the most significant and original contributions to religious studies are seldom publicized with this sort of (dare I say religious ?) excitement. Party expectations are obviously high.

The targeted audience is vast, although the book blurbs including praise from at least four professors in different fields suggest the RCP wants the book to reach intellectuals in particular. It is not, however, a scholarly work. It offers no insights into the history of the Abrahamic religions, and indeed makes mistakes and errors of omission in its discussion of them. It isn’t likely to be reviewed in academic journals like the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Philosophical Review, or Rethinking Marxism. The organization is choppy; Avakian skips from topic to topic, sometimes asking questions he answers perfunctorily or partially, only to return to later. This is not designed to be a scholarly discussion on the level, say, of Engels’ “On the Early History of Christianity” published in 1895. It’s apparently supposed to be a popular, lively, in-your-face exercise in agitation. Committed to atheism and historical materialism, I myself am in principle totally sympathetic to the project. If I thought it was done well and effectively I would applaud it.

Like much of Avakian’s material (or what the RCP reverently terms his “body of work”), it reads as a series of homilies; indeed, it is a re-editing of two talks given in 2004 and 2006. (It is also often self-referential, with long passages from a 1999 book Preaching from a Pulpit of Bones and other Avakian publications.) The “significant amount of editing” the author performed (p. ix) deliberately includes bracketed indications of audience response to the talks. Some readers might find it off-putting when a passage that strikes them as less than amusing is followed by “[Laughter]”—but this informs us of what the author himself thinks is funny or ridiculous about religion, just in case there’s any lack of clarity. But having noted that it’s not an academic book, let’s examine it seriously, following its somewhat chaotic order, with the sort of rigor that might occur in a journal review.

It is divided into four parts, with much overlapping material, as suggested by the titles:

Part One: Where Did God Come From…And Who Says We Need God?

Part Two: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—Rooted in the Past, Standing In the Way of the Future

Part Three: Religion—A Heavy, Heavy Chain

Part Four: God Does Not Exist—We Need Liberation Without Gods

Avakian’s principle theses, simply stated, are that religion is a bad and harmful thing; that the Judeo-Christian and Islamic God described in the Bible and Qur’an is horrible (and Jesus too an unlikable figure); that Christian fundamentalism leads directly into Christian Fascism; that Christian Fascism is an immanent threat; and that atheism needs to be urgently propagated in order to liberate humankind.

Avakian begins — as so many have before him — with the observation that there are terrible tragedies in this world, and that some people unable to make sense of why they happen argue simply: “God works in mysterious ways.” He lists natural disasters and accidents, proceeding to atrocities rooted in class society such as slavery and war. “How much of this has to go on,” he asks, “and how long does it take, before it becomes clear that if such a god existed, it would indeed be a cruel, vicious, sick, twisted and truly monstrous god (p. 4)?” (Thus Avakian approaches what theologians call “the problem of evil,” the problem of how to reconcile belief in a Creator—which for the record, some very sophisticated people like Albert Einstein have held—with the fact of suffering.)

Turning specifically to “the ‘Judeo-Christian’ scriptures,” the author cites the biblical Second Book of Samuel, chapter 24, in which God smites Israel and Judah with a terrible epidemic. Since his discussion of this passage is typical of the “method and approach” to follow, let’s look at it in some detail.

King David is instructed by God to conduct a census; he orders a general to conduct it; the general questions the project for some reason but carries it out. He reports on how many military-age men the kingdom has available. (This suggests that the acquisition of this data was the purpose for the census.) David for some reason regrets having ordered the census, and apologizes to God for doing so. God, planning to punish David, gives him a choice of three penalties: famine, invasion or plague. The king opts for the latter and 70,000 die before God is satisfied and relents.

Serious Bible scholars find this a difficult text, because the story doesn’t make much sense even within its own ideological framework. Why would God punish David for carrying out his order? It’s been explained in various ways. Avakian, citing the HarperCollins Study Bible commentary, states that the king somehow botched the task: “…in conducting the census in the way he did, David made a big mistake, because…soldiers on active duty were subject to a strict regimen of ritual procedures in ancient Israel, and were especially vulnerable therefore to cultic dangers” (p. 5). That explanation is not at all clear and I do not find it in the substantial notes to the New Jerusalem Bible or the New Oxford Annotated Bible translations.

There is another, alternative, account of this event in 1 Chronicles, chapter 21. This one is more logically consistent: Satan inspires David to conduct the census; the general asks David why he “should involve Israel in guilt.” This may allude to the expansion of state power (at God’s expense) implied by a census; the very establishment of the kingdom under Saul was, according to 1 Samuel 8:7-8, viewed by God as a matter of “rejecting me and serving other gods.” Quite possibly a census at some point was followed by a plague, and convinced that such events represent divine wrath, the religious authorities concluded that the one caused the other.

What’s Avakian’s take on these stories? First he emphasizes the illogic of the first account; God is not merely “cruel and monstrous” (p. 4) but wholly arbitrary in his infliction of cruelty. Then in discussing the second, he gives no thought to the possibility that a scribal error might have introduced the logical contradiction between the two accounts. Instead he assumes that the first was composed earlier than the second (although that is not clear) and that the depiction of God’s irrational brutality in 2 Samuel was simply “too much for the author” of 1 Chronicles. It just made God look too cruel, so the chronicler rewrote the tale in order to depict God more favorably (p. 5).

This desire to depict the object of Jews’ and Christians’ reverence in the worst possible light pervades the book. Avakian focuses on the personality of the “lunatic, maniacal and murderous god of the Bible” while his followers respond, we’re informed, with “[Laughter]” (p. 6). One wonders here, and will wonder repeatedly while reading this book in a country where about 78% of the population is Christian and about 2% religious Jews, who this book is aimed at, and who it’s designed to move, provoke or offend.

Avakian suddenly shifts his attention to the believers in this deity: “…even many religious people who are generally progressive,” he declares, as if to place all Bible believers on the defensive “…have the nerve to talk about the alleged horrors of communism” when their god has insisted on actions no communist leader has ever even advocated (p. 6). (Rephrased: what right does a progressive Methodist have to criticize collectivization in the USSR in the 1930s?)

Who, he asks, “needs such a god?” Avakian cites Psalm 137:8-9, in which the psalmist prays that the little babies of the Babylonians who had conquered his homeland get dashed against the rock. Fair enough; one should expose the fact the ancient Israelites who produced these texts were apparently comfortable with mass murder. It’s fine too to note that the Book of Isaiah joyously predicts how the Israelites will exact revenge on Babylon by raping women and killing babies. It seems tendentious to add, however, that Isaiah was “one of Jesus’s favorite parts of the Jewish scripture” (p. 13). Are we to assume Jesus (if he actually existed) especially got off on the descriptions of bloody revenge?

The God of the Bible, Avakian tells us, has been analyzed in the RCP newspaper, in “an important series of articles, ‘God, the Original Fascist’” by one A. Brooks in 2005. (Reading them at the time, I thought that what was “important” in them was the apparent intent to totally alienate religious people.) Those articles castigated the God of the Old Testament (Yahweh) for his sending of plagues; for subjecting the Hebrews into slavery in Egypt; for commanding them to slaughter the inhabitants of Canaan, etc. But neither Brooks nor Avakian (assuming they are different people) have explained how the twentieth century phenomenon of fascism, carefully defined and discussed within the international communist movement from the 1920s, applies to the deity represented in the Bible. (Does he, for example, merge corporate and state power during a period of economic crisis, crush the left, promote a personality cult, encourage pseudo-scientific theories of racial superiority and militaristic values?) In this usage the term seems a mere epithet, synonymous with “evil.”

If God’s “fascist” character is merely asserted, never explained, so too the fascism of Christian fundamentalists is merely declared:

Now, right away, the question may arise: “Why do you call these right-wing Christian fundamentalists Christian Fascists?” Well, the simple and basic reason is that they are Christians, and that they are fascists. [Laughter] They are the present-day American version of the Nazis in Germany, headed by Hitler, in the period before and during World War 2. They want to impose a fascist theocracy on society…. (p. 16).

This introduction of the “Christian Fascism” theme, familiar to any reader of the RCP press for the last several years, explains the sudden fervor of Avakian’s “Away With All Gods!” project. To fight the specter of fascism, you have to challenge the religion (with its “Original Fascist” God) that supposedly gives rise to it.

Avakian lumps together the “right-wing fundamentalists,” who are in fact divided into numerous movements and sects. (Avakian seems to think the “Hard Dominionists” mount more of a threat than they actually do.) One of the “striking” things about them, he declares, is their assertion that they uphold not the “old covenant” (the Laws of Moses in the Old Testament) but the new one, based on the teachings of Jesus. It is telling that Avakian finds this “striking,” since it’s really Christianity 101 material.

This point, introduced in passing, is in fact central to the understanding of Christianity. But Avakian fails to grasp its meaning throughout his long sermon. St. Paul, whom Avakian proceeds to discuss next, was a Hellenized Greek-speaking Jew born in Tarsus (now part of Turkish Kurdistan) who took it upon himself to preach a version of Christianity to Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews) in the eastern Mediterranean world. His theology, in a nutshell, is this: God selected the Jews as his “chosen people,” giving them a body of law governing their lives (dietary habits, sexual practices, customs pertaining to ritual purity, etc.) in detail during the time of Moses. God had judged them at any point of time by their faithfulness to these laws, punishing or rewarding them. This was the basic Judaism of his day. But by becoming incarnate in human form, in the person of Jesus Christ (over a thousand years after Moses), and undergoing the process of his ministry, crucifixion, death and resurrection, Jesus, in Paul’s view, initiated a new era (and new “covenant” with all humankind). Now believers in Jesus—not only Jews but anyone—could obtain salvation through faith alone.

(Later Christianity was to downplay this doctrine and emphasize the believer’s need to perform penances, undertake fasts, contribute to the Church, and acquire merit by such acts as pilgrimages, all designed to strengthen Church authority. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century revived emphasis on Paul’s doctrine of salvation by faith, rather than such “works.” As Karl Marx put it, Martin Luther “shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith.” The Christian believer, equipped with the Bible translated into his/her own language, could interpret it personally and imagine him or her self relating directly to God, rather than having to accept the Church as intercessor. This had profound socio-economic repercussions, as Marx, Max Weber, R. H. Tawney and many others have pointed out. In breaking down the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and validating productive and profit-making life in this world, and in positing virtuous lives in trades and commerce—rather than in the Church—it had a lot to do with the transition from feudalism to capitalism.)

The doctrine of salvation by faith stated one could ultimately obtain eternal life in communion with God by sincerely accepting Jesus as one’s “savior.” (The specific timing of this ultimate salvation was a matter of controversy among early Christians; there was no consensus about Christians resurrecting in Heaven immediately after death.) Most Christians came to feel they were not bound by the centuries-old Mosaic laws, with their draconian punishments, and some very significant Christian sects (such as the Marcionites in the mid-second century, “heretical” followers of Paul) even came to reject the Old Testament and its god Yahweh in general. They imagined a much higher Father God that didn’t throw temper tantrums like Yahweh.

Paul’s synthesis of Jewish monotheism with a Christ-centered message may strike us as illogical, even laughable. But we need to at least understand it if we’re to mount a serious critique of Christianity or influence/dissuade serious Christians. Avakian doesn’t get this far. His comments on Paul here (pp. 17-19) and later, are largely confined to the observation that Paul “upholds such things as slavery and the subjugation of women.” This regrettably is the level of analysis found throughout this book the RCP insists the people “need.”

Compare this with the discussion found in Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford University Press, 2003). Badiou, an atheist philosopher sympathetic to Maoism, emphasizes Paul’s break with Jewish exclusivism—his declarations that in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, free nor slave, male nor female; and that God shows no partiality (Badiou p. 9, citing Galatians 3:28 and Romans 2:10). He emphasizes what Paul does not “uphold” in the Judaism of his time. His is a sophisticated, nuanced treatment of a central figure in world history, whose writings have moved billions, who deserves intelligent analysis. Avakian’s discussion in contrast is superficial and arrogantly dismissive.

Next Avakian turns to the figure of Jesus, noting straight off that he, like Paul, “accepts slavery as a given” (p. 18). (He might here have included some specific discussion of Mosaic law pertaining to slavery, and how it differed with Roman law, notably in limiting service to six years with freedom obtained in the seventh [Exodus 21: 1]). In the section ambitiously entitled “Seeing Jesus in a True Light” the author notes (a) Jesus was an exorcist who “(a)pparently…hadn’t been paying attention to the field of medicine;” (b) upheld slavery as a given; (c) accepted male domination as a given; and (d) was wrong in his predictions about certain decisive events (p. 27).

Is Avakian really shining a “true light” on the subject matter here? Has he really done the necessary investigation about this topic, entitling him to preach as he does, as though he knows what he’s talking about? He says nothing about the attacks by the Jesus of the gospels on the Pharisees and Sadducees, his critique of formal public worship and advocacy of a personal relationship with God (validating the individual of whatever status), or his concept of the “Kingdom of God” (or as sometimes translated, “God’s imperial rule”) as a challenge to the Roman Empire. Avakian does not even discuss the thorny question of Jesus’ historicity. (There is a strong minority view within New Testament scholarship that the Jesus of the Gospels never existed.) Instead, he merely gives us a broadside against the Jesus depicted in Christian scripture. For example: why, asks Avakian, if Jesus was the son of God, didn’t he “tell people the truth” about the nature of disease, rather than exploiting their belief in demonic possession (p. 24)?

One wonders again: who is the audience here? The person remaining in the religious mode, who believes that Jesus is/was divine, but doesn’t believe in demonic possession? Does Avakian suppose that such a person might be persuaded to abandon his/her faith by meditating on the question, “Why didn’t Jesus say, ‘There are no demons. The sicknesses I heal have natural scientifically explainable causes’”? Isn’t the believer more likely to suppose that Jesus did heal, and that the people of the time understood this as exorcism? This is not so much a question of Avakian’s obvious lack of understanding of, or empathy with, believers’ feelings and emotions: it’s a question of the effectiveness of the propaganda.

Avakian suggests that both Paul and Jesus not only accepted slavery and gender inequality, but indeed, “propagated and fostered” them (p. 23). He makes this the principle aspect of these men’s careers. But could he not make the very same case for practically every scientific and philosophical mind of note in the Roman Empire in the first century CE? By ignoring or dismissing the new content of their teachings, which had enormous historical repercussions (some of them positive), Avakian displays a remarkable lack of intellectual curiosity and willingness to “engage” the beliefs of past class societies on their own terms. He might as well berate slave-owning antiquity for being what it was and leave it at that. Why even bother looking at the details of religious evolution within those societies over time, since they were all slavery-based and patriarchal?

Paul did not, it’s true, agitate against the slave system; indeed, he may have urged slaves to obey their masters (1 Timothy 6:1 and Titus 2:9-10, although authorship of these letters is disputed). But he clearly won over many slaves—almost all the people he salutes by name in the Epistle to the Romans (16:6-15) have slave names—and considered them equals in the organization that he was building. His, and other Christians’ attitudes towards slavery, while by no means revolutionary, had important ramifications. While the Roman ruling class disparaged physical labor, Jesus was known to have been a carpenter and Paul a tent-maker; early Christianity dignified manual work largely performed by slaves. From the fourth century the Christianized Empire gave slaves, who had never been able to marry and whose unions could be broken up at any time due to sale, the same institution of marriage applied to other social classes. The “mainstream” Christian movement never led a revolution against slavery, but figures such as St. Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century condemned it passionately and it became rare in the European Middle Ages.

Thus Avakian’s characterization of the relationship between early Christianity and slavery is to say the least undialectical. His main point, apparently, is that biblical Christian figures ought not be revered because they did not in their own time speak on behalf of principles that most people today (or at least those whom Avakian wants to reach) take for granted. He makes the point provocatively:

“…if, somehow, Jesus were transported from his time to ours and we were to encounter him, the fact is that we would not, and we should not, like this Jesus very much” (p. 83, Avakian’s emphasis).

Avakian takes on the Ten Commandments (pp. 25-30), making some wholly valid points: they do recognize slavery and institutionalize patriarchy, and are part of a broader package of Mosaic Law that (like all law codes of antiquity) strike us today as irrational and draconian. Present-day calls for them to be publicly posted and specifically honored (above, say, the Code of Hammurabi or the Laws of Manu) are totally reactionary and should be opposed. But then Avakian segues into a section on how Christianity is “totally rooted in the Old Testament” (p. 31), again downplaying the Pauline “new covenant” concept to say nothing of the Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Persian influences on the fundamental doctrine of Christianity: the god who dies, descends into the netherworld, and is resurrected! (There is nothing in the Old Testament to justify that narrative, although there are parallel myths in the cults of Osiris and Isis, Tammuz and Ishtar, Mithras—all much older than Christianity.)

Avakian is so bent upon Old Testament-New Testament consistency that he states “even most [Christian] fundamentalists (at least in the U.S.) don’t…so far as I know” “sacrifice animals,” as required by the Laws of Moses (p. 34)! This observation occurs within a section on “Fundamentalist and ‘Salad Bar’ Christianity.” Here the author divides Christians into two types: those who believe scripture literally and those who choose which parts they wish to accept or reject. He notes that the former chastise the latter as “salad bar Christians” for “passing over or putting aside that which makes them uncomfortable or strikes them as wrong,” and declares that there is truth in this claim. But he adds that not only liberal Christians but the fundamentalists “pick and choose,” giving the example cited above: they don’t practice animal sacrifice.

The implication is that this is a departure from Biblical teaching. But the fact is, the New Testament makes clear that followers of Jesus are free of the ritual obligations of Jewish law, including the requirement of offering sacrifice (prescribed in the Book of Leviticus). There is only one reference in the New Testament to Christians performing animal sacrifice. This occurs in the Book of Acts (21:18-29): Paul and four others visit the Temple in Jerusalem, on the advice of Jesus’ brother James, and have sacrifices made for them by the priests. They do this to quiet suspicions about Paul among the Jewish Christians (who continued to believe that the Laws of Moses should govern their lives). In participating in this ritual, Paul shows “he knows how to be ‘a Jew among Jews’” (Badiou, p. 29). But when Paul writes to the Christian communities he has founded, he forbids participation in pagan animal sacrifice (1 Corinthians 10:18 ) while making no comment about Jewish traditional sacrifice and instead emphasizing that the crucified Jesus is the sacrifice making such rituals irrelevant.

In other words, the fact that even the most fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. do not perform animal sacrifice is not a question of selectively accepting and rejecting Bible teaching. The suggestion that it is again reflects Avakian’s fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between Christianity and the Old Testament—his lack of attention to the details of the subject matter about which he’s chosen to sermonize before his appreciative congregation.

Speaking to both liberal and fundamentalist Christians, Avakian states: “But then the very basic question arises: Once you have in effect denied that the Bible and Christian religious tradition is true and valid for all times and in all circumstances…then where is the ‘divine authority’ for any of this…?” (p. 33). Having stated that “most Christian fundamentalists” would “to be consistent” have to approve of beating children, putting homosexuals to death, shunning women during their menstrual periods, killing witches, raping women and carrying them off as “prizes of war,” and slaughtering non-Christians, he continues:

“It is a legitimate and very important question, which must be put to these Christian Fascist fundamentalists. Which is it? One way or the other—either you believe that the Bible, all of it, is the “inerrant word of god,” and every word of it is absolutely true and must be believed in, or you don’t.”

Note the abrupt switch from fundamentalists in general to “these Christian Fascist Fundamentalists.” “These people,” thunders Avakian, “must not be allowed to waffle and sidestep what, in the Bible and Christian religious tradition, is inconvenient for them at the time. (p. 34)”

Avakian here levels the “salad bar” charge at the fundamentalists more than the liberals, intending to force them to “admit that [if they] don’t believe in every word and every part of it…this cannot be the absolute word of God (p. 34).” You might suppose he would direct his remarks more at liberal Christians, who’d be more likely to give him the time of day and out of curiosity read his book. But they could respond that there is a long traditio