Letter 5: Particularities of Christians and Fascists
Nine Letters to Our Comrades
Letter 5: Particularities of Christians and Fascists
by Mike Ely
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The RCP has given prominence to Avakian’s atheist polemics against religion. These are important topics. There needs to be a lively militant atheist-materialist pole raised among the people and in the fight against political reaction. This is after all a highly religious country, and this is a political moment when fascist forces of the Religious Right have been seizing positions of power.
However, Avakian’s analyses of religion have a distant, schematic, and reductionist quality. These works show little interest in the specific social and historic roots of people’s religious faith — and why particular religions have such power among particular communities. There is little appreciation of the complexity, sophistication and diversity of what people actually believe. And quite frankly there is little respect for the people and little real understanding of why many believe — or why some don’t. [67]
Little respect for the people. Little appreciation of what they believe and why they believe it. |
The problem is methodology: As Avakian dissects Christian fundamentalism and the “Christian Fascist” political movements, you can’t shake the feeling that it is done without really knowing the people or their beliefs. I don’t mean just personally knowing — but the deeper scientific sense of knowing. There is a necessary substratum of research, investigation and the summation of political practice that is largely missing here.
For one thing, you can’t actually understand people and religious movements (not even “fundamentalists”) by relying so heavily ona close textual read of their holy scriptures. And a communist understanding of political fundamentalism can’t be developed by just reworking lots of secular-liberal exposés of theocratic political trends. You can’t speculate that a Christian theocratic political order is coming without studying the real historically-specific political obstacles to both centralized fascist power and the establishment of state religion.
I spent most of the 1970s among West Virginia coalminers who (as most people know) include many born-again Christians. [68] This is personal experience, admittedly from quite a few years ago. But it was experience and it has left me with a sense of the living contradictions surrounding religion and the cultural wars.
Here is Avakian on the causes of religion:
“…religious notions don’t appear out of, or arise out of, the mist or out of nowhere, but of course have their roots, historically, in the ignorance, the lack of knowledge, of human beings in early society; but they have been carried forward, codified and institutionalized by ruling classes throughout the ages as part of enforcing their rule.” [69]
This view attributes religion to a mix of ancient ignorance plus the later ruling class manipulations. It profoundly underestimates how deeply religious faith is rooted in the needs and desperations of people’s existence. Faith and religious community are rooted in the search for consolation and meaning.
Those religious impulses are then shaped by very specific historical experiences and simultaneously by the ideological operatives of various classes in society (including, but certainly not limited to, the ideologues of the ruling classes).
To take one example: The adoption of Christianity by enslaved African people in America was not just the result of enforced ignorance or the forced indoctrination by Christian slave-owners (though both were involved). The mass conversion of slaves to Christianity happened as part of larger religious movements that swept across the U.S., sometimes in the face of resistance from their immediate owners. In the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s, African slaves and freemen flocked to camp meetings held by traveling white Baptist and Methodist preachers, some of whom were convinced of the humanity of the slaves (a then-radical idea) and of the slaves’ subsequent need for salvation. As they embraced Christianity and as they established churches, Black people shaped and reshaped Christian worship — in both form and content — marking it with their dreams and accommodations and, in some moments, creating a gospel of escape or emancipation.
The defining elements of Christianity were certainly codified over centuries by ruling class ideologues. Many core messages Black people received via Christianity reinforced and justified oppression. The Christ of the Bible preaches “turn the other cheek” to the oppressed. Slaves were told that African people were “the descendants of Ham,” condemned to be “servant of servants.” [70]
But at the same time, the “spirit-filled” worship and music of plantation churches was carried over from West African cultures and they developed through the creative work of once-African people. The Christian fervor by many African American people over the last two hundred years is rooted not mainly in the imposition of “false consciousness” from without, but in a deep need for ecstatic relief and mutual consolation in a horrific world.
Avakian often points out (correctly) that science can satisfy the human need for “awe and wonder.” But religion is not just born from that outward-looking desire for context and amazement — but often in the painful inner despair of loss and powerlessness.
Marx understood this and his assessment is a sharp contrast to Avakian’s:
“The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma. Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” [71]
I think back on many intense discussions with fundamentalist believers — where I would dig into the absurdity of a loving God allowing innocents to suffer, or into the scientific absurdities of Genesis. While I was thinking I had “really pinned them down,” my friends often turned to me in exasperation to say, “Look, this is really not the issue. I feel Jesus as a living, healing, guiding presence in my heart.”
In fact the attraction of born-again Christianity includes an ecstatic “personal relationship” — not just the certitude of absolute biblical truth and attraction of reactionary morality in a world of “turbocapitalism.” [72] And getting at that personal attachment requires upholding Marx’s dialectical materialism over Avakian’s superficial rationalism.
You can undermine brittle dogmatic religions by using their inconsistencies. You can pry some individuals over toward communistic atheism that way. But you really can’t touch the potency of religion if you don’t appreciate the source of its influence.
You can’t challenge Christian morality by crudely equating it with venality — with Old Testament “horrors” or the ugliest “traditional values.” You also have to deal (in truly dialectical ways) with Jesus’ admonitions to “love your brother” and “turn the other cheek.” You have to deal with grace, redemption, forgiveness, reconciliation, charity and hope for blessings — in other words, you have to all-sidedly deal (critically!) with what actually attracts people to Christian teachings.
Further: Religions are not just scientifically “wrong” world outlooks — but are also the rituals, traditions and cultures through which people identify themselves with historically constituted communities. Look at the stubborn Catholicism of many Irish people or the tenacious Judaism among dispersed Jewish people — who are often not particularly drawn to the supernatural.
There are no gods who hear our muffled cries. No one should expect divine blessings or miracles. The meek will not inherit the earth. But that doesn’t mean religion is simply self-deception or that communities of people don’t reap real benefits by organizing themselves into congregations.
No gods hear our muffled cries. But religion is not simply self-deception. |
To return to my previous example: Can anyone hope to deal with the gap separating communism from the radical sections of Black people without appreciating the reasons why many African American people are so deeply attached to their churches and faiths?
Surely we have to understand the historic institutional role of Black churches, as economic support, as a political voice for a voiceless community, and even as the wellspring of world-changing music. Yes, those churches have been a force for accommodation and even reactionary purposes. But how can we evaluate all this if we don’t understand that religion (including the Black church) has had progressive and even revolutionary currents all through history. Let’s understand well the armed preacher Thomas Münzer [73] , the slaves’ prophet Nat Turner [74] , the last Puritan John Brown, and the still-beloved Sheik Bedreddin. [75]
The RCP has recently promoted the observation that “The Bible Belt is the lynching belt” — to suggest that violent racism is one of fundamentalist Christianity’s bedrock “traditional values.” But this approach lacks a sense of both history and dialectics: Christianity of the southern Bible Belt is not just the religion of the lynch mob — but also of the lynched. This is because the Bible Belt and the lynching belt is centered on the Black Belt — the former plantation areas of the deep South (what Black people called “the soil of our suffering”), a place where two distinct nations and national cultures cohabited in gruesome ways. Christianity there includes the African American churches.
Quite a few Black churches uphold some reactionary social values (including most recently in the controversies over abortion and same sex marriage). However, the gospel of the African American churches is obviously not marked by the “traditional value” of white supremacy. They have often interpreted the story of Jesus to explain, validate and inspire their own struggle for survival (including against the horrible threat and impact of lynching). [76]
Taking Claims of Fundamentalists Literally
Part of the problem with the RCP’s current approach is the fetish of the word — here taking the form of overestimating the value of textual readings. When fundamentalists say that they take the Bible literally, a dialectical materialist can’t take that statement literally. [77]
Sometimes secular people read the barbaric punishments advocated by the Old Testament and assume that fundamentalists “must” uphold this or else disavow the Bible. This is exactly what Avakian teaches. [78]
But in fact, many fundamentalists explain that (in their actual theology) there were different “covenants” with God — including a Mosaic Covenant (in the Old Testament) that was then replaced by a New Covenant brought by Jesus (in the New Testament). They often uphold some passages and insights of the Old Testament (like the Ten Commandments), but basically are not “bound” by its details or general moral tone.
In other words, conservative Christians have, long ago, cobbled together various theological ways of dealing with the contradictions and barbarism of the Old Testament. There is a long-standing conflict between that Christian fringe which literally believes in stoning people to death, and the broader ranks of fundamentalists who think those folks are nuts (even while they often condemn sex outside marriage in their own ways).
Their world is NOT rocked when the RCP naively points out that the Old Testament calls for stoning sinners. “After all,” people would explain to me, “Jesus stopped the stoning of the adulterous woman and said ‘let those without sin cast the first stone.’” [79]
With a few exceptions, the RCP ignores such distinctions — and at the street level, RCP activists (following Revolution newspaper [80] ) imply that executing gay people or disobedient women must be the program of the Religious Right today (and even of fundamentalists generally) because (after all) “that’s what the Bible says.” But it is wrong to functionally ignore the complex shades and divisions of faith. [81] You can’t act like fundamentalists (or even the politically active ones) are inherently or generally inclined toward literal theocracy [82] or (at the same time) imply that fundamentalists are essentially the only real Christians because of their literalism.
To actually understand the political programs (and shades of program) among the Religious Right forces (or anyone else), you have to do some real work of investigation. And you can’t just analyze the text of their programs — you have to analyze their actual living political movement, and what its driving contradictions are (which in real politics often lead in directions quite different from stated intentions.)
To understand the Religious Right, you have to do more than a close read of their Bible and a few public statements. |
Related example: Over many years of writing about elections for Revolution and the Revolutionary Worker, I was often amazed by how literally some within the RCP assumed that the stated program of bourgeois politicians represented what they actually intended to do. I sometimes thought, “This party is the only place in society where the statements of lying politicians are actually believed.” Again: the fetish of the word leads to overestimating the analytic value of close textual reading.
It is certainly true that some powerful ruling class circles have deliberately trained, financed, promoted and empowered extremely reactionary Christian fundamentalist forces. In many ways that process has reshaped these forces and even reworked their theology. It is true that the Religious Right has a common program: they generally want to “bring religion back into the public square,” erase the separation of church and state, funnel tax money into their ministries, replace state social programs with church programs, and promote vicious reactionary values in opposition to the ‘60s values, science and progressive thinking. It is true that one piece of that movement literally wants a fascist Christian theocracy. All of that is true, dangerous and quite alarming.
But it is a huge leap to claim that a Christian theocracy is literally in the works, or that no other organized force has comparable political initiative within the ruling “pyramid”: [83]
“Straight up — Bush and his people aren’t just ordinary Republicans. And they’re not ordinary Christians either. They are Christian Fascists — dangerous fanatics who aim to make the U.S. a religious dictatorship and to force this upon the world. If they get their way — and they are very far along the road to getting it — society will be plunged into a high-tech Dark Ages.” [84]
“…there will in fact be no ‘pendulum swing,’ back to ‘the center’ of bourgeois politics and bourgeois rule… Where do you see the forces who are going to do even that — are you looking to the ‘liberals’ among the powers-that-be, the ‘liberal’ imperialists? Sorry, but let’s be real!” [85]
Here is one of those places where a necessary substratum of research, investigation and the summation of political practice is missing.
You want to put forward an analysis of trends toward fascism in the U.S.? You need to analyze their actual movements (inside and outside the ruling class), their history, sharp internal contradictions, and what they would actually have to knock down (not just ideologically, but institutionally, legally, structurally and politically). We would also have to hear and debate, in its own right, the underlying theory of fascism. [86]
In some ways, the RCP’s analyses lack a living sense of history — in ways too typical of American political thought generally. Yes, we should be outraged that evolution has been under attack in some target school districts and that it is being widely deemphasized in biology textbooks — but to understand this (to contextualize it) we need a historical perspective to this long struggle over evolution. Yes, we should be outraged that a chunk of the Republican Party thinks the Democrats should be criminalized as traitors — but don’t we need a historical understanding of how and how much that has previously been true — from Joe McCarthy’s demands for purges in the State Department, to Oliver North’s comments about “the Communists in Congress”? How can we really specify how much the pace is quickening and how much new force the fascists are gathering without a living sense of where all this comes from?
Another example of particularity: German and Italian fascism in the 1920s arose from deep political currents that were infatuated with a powerful central state. But American fascism (in most of its many popular forms) has always had a powerful anti-centralist streak. This is rooted in the whole history of slavery and frontier — and in the resultant politics of “states rights” and lynchmob localism. The fascist right in the U.S. (from the David Duke South to Oliver North-type officers, to James Dobson’s “pro-family” movement, to the thugs of “Free Republic” and more) have significant unity around militarism, draconian punishments, opposing immigration and a vicious vision of “traditional values.” But there remain some deep structural fractures (among them, and between them and more mainstream conservative forces), when it comes to specific, centralized codification of culture, religion, and government tracking of people.
The religious diversity of this country (and of the Religious Right itself) makes it hard to institute a single national theocracy. This is not Franco’s mono-Catholic Spain. The separation of church and state was never conceived as a protection of secularism, but as a federal accommodation to religious diversity. Theocracy is imaginable in some areas where one religion predominates, like the southern Bible belt or Utah. But wherever you have real religious diversity (including Judaism), that diversity re-creates the (very American) structural pull to institute policies (including future abortion bans) in a leopard-spot localist way within the existing federal framework.
Is a theocratic form of fascism coming? Are things really so either/or? |
Is the current arc going towards a specifically theocratic form of fascism? Are the possibilities really so either/or? Aren’t many stages and outcomes possible? Have we no respect for the role of political accident and the real-world mediations of necessity? The current fascization [87] of society may accelerate and there may well be sudden leaps if there is another 9/11 event. But the Christian fascists were always a minority wing of the Bush ruling coalition, subordinated to forces like Cheney and Rumsfeld. And clearly the Christian fascists’ top level influence has been in flux, with new inroads in the federal judiciary and setbacks in other arenas, all as elections and change of regime approaches.
Even if something close to fascism comes (and it might!), the process, outcome and contradictions will likely be quite different from the cartoonish Handmaid’s Tale [88] the RCP keeps projecting. [89]
It is right to sound an alarm in the U.S. If, for example, new acts of warfare erupt on U.S. soil, we can expect some dangerous tightening of many legal, political and even cultural restrictions — and even a growth of popular support for such tightening. There could well be reversals in long-standing legal norms. Such changes could well make revolutionary politics even harder to pursue. And there could well be a vicious reversal of abortion rights ahead. It is quite reasonable to discuss all this in terms of a fascist danger, and a process of fascization.
Not enough people are facing the danger. The theocrats are a real threat– as part of an even larger spectrum of fascist threats.
But the RCP’s specific analysis and predictions betray a real inability to dig deep into the actual history and particular dynamics of this country. And that reflects badly on their larger project and method.
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Notes
[67] As we publish these “Nine Letters,” there are announcements of a new book on religion coming from Bob Avakian (Away with all Gods, Insight Press, scheduled for publication in March 2008). That book will touch on issues discussed here.
[68] In that primitive communist organizing among coalminers, our atheism was often more shocking and fascinating than our communism. No serious discussions of the future or world affairs got very far without colliding head-on into dispensationalist interpretations of events, based on the Book of Revelations. And that collision with fundamentalism was hardly just ideological: In 1974, preachers in central West Virginia organized “Textbook Protests” — wildcat strikes against the teaching of sex education, drug education and Black literature in the high schools. RCP supporters organized a coalition of miners and Black Vietnam veterans to politically oppose these strikes and stop their spread out of West Virginia’s central Kanawha valley. It was an early battle of the cultural wars – straight up against the then-emerging Religious Right.
[69] Bob Avakian, “Making Revolution And Emancipating Humanity,” 2007, revcom.us
[70] King James Bible, Genesis 9:25
[71] In the early nineteenth century, opium was a newly arrived painkiller. Marx’s famous remark is not simply “drugs as illusion and escape” but a metaphor of self-dosed relief from agony. Karl Marx, Abstract from The Introduction to Contribution to The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844, marxists.org.
[72] Since his work “Great Objectives & Grand Strategy,” Avakian has repeated his analysis of where the rise of fundamentalism and the religious impulse comes from. Avakian does acknowledge the role of “restlessness, anxiety, insecurity, and longings” rooted in the latest workings of “turbo capitalism” – but those points are made firmly within the context of the overall reductionism I am criticizing here.
[73] Radical preacher Thomas Münzer (approx. 1489-1525) led a great peasant rebellion against the feudal church and princes in late medieval Germany – claiming he was called by the Holy Spirit to establish theocratic order marked by common ownership of the means of life. See: Fredrick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, 1850, marxists.org
[74] Nat Turner (1800–1831), preaching that he had seen a great sign from God, led the greatest slave rebellion recorded in U.S. history in Virginia’s Southampton County. See: Mike Ely, “The Slave Rebellion of General Nat Turner,” mikeely.wordpress.com
[75] The revolutionary Muslim preacher Bedreddin (1359-1420) led a rebellion against the Ottoman Empire in 1416. His early communist motto was: “Share everything you have, except the lips of your lover.” He inspired Nazim Hikmet’s masterful poem, The Epic of Sheik Bedreddin (Persea Books, 1977)
[76] If you don’t know what I’m talking about, listen to African American theologian James Cone on “Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” Oct. 2006, www.hds.harvard.edu/news/events_online/ingersoll_2006.html
[77] The RCP has also painted political Islam generally with single big brush. Avakian says (in a quote published by itself):
“What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these ‘outmodeds,’ you end up strengthening both.”
Is there really only one “Jihad” that we “see in contention” with the U.S.? Is it all really so monochromatic? Though Islamic forces haven’t created political programs that can liberate people from imperialism, are there really only “historically outmoded” strata involved (presumably meaning: the entrenched comprador, bureaucrat capitalist and feudal elements)? Aren’t there places where political Islam has gained influence among other strata, or where its politics may reflect other programs? What would a serious and dialectical class analysis of the different Iraqi movements show? Shouldn’t the inter-imperialist contradiction also be seen as a considerable part of the U.S. “war on terror” and its consolidation of its hegemonic status, so that “what we see in contention here” is something more complex and many sided than colliding “universalisms.”
These issues are beyond the scope of these letters, but obviously demand further engagement.
[78] Just one example of many, Avakian writes:
“…the point that I’ve been hammering at has to do with a key contradiction I have spoken to a number of times—the contradiction that these Christian Fascists are objectively caught up in—the contradiction between an insistence on a literalist interpretation of the Bible, the insistence that the Bible is, in every word and detail, the true word of God that must be believed and followed to the letter, with all that the Bible actually calls for — all that in contradiction to what most people in this society would consider just, decent, and even sane.” (from: “Religion, Morality … Polarization, Repolarization, Two Solid Cores in Fundamental Opposition,” September 25, 2005, revcom.us
[79] Bible, KJV, John 8:1-11
[80] One notorious example of this among many is the Revolution series “God the Original Fascist” by A. Brooks (revcom.us/godoriginalfascist) which focuses on the five Mosaic books of the Bible and claims they are representative of “the fundamental essence” of the Bible. The whole argument rests on ignorance about what Christians (including fundamentalist Protestants) actually believe about the relationship of Old and New Testament. They are after all Christians – it is the teachings of Jesus (not Moses) that they consider “the fundamental essence” of their faith.
[81] Just one small example: The contentious theological and political differences among Christian conservatives don’t really come up. What separates dispensationalist Christians from their opponents – and what does that mean for “end times” predictions of the Book of Revelations, the Rapture and religious beliefs about Israel in particular? Does it matter which deep political and theological differences have historically divided Southern white and African American Baptists? Yes, it does. If we communists don’t understand such things, how deep is our analysis of “what fundamentalists believe”? Do we want to talk to actual believers about their actual beliefs and about actual political currents arising from the Bible Belt and “Red States”?
[82] Theocracy is a form of class rule where the state and legal system are dominated by religious principles and figures, ruling in the name of their God.
[83] Bob Avakian, “The Pyramid of Power And the Struggle to Turn This Whole Thing Upside Down,” Revolutionary Worker #1231, March 7, 2004
[84] “The Battle For The Future Will Be Fought From Here Forward!” Dec. 2004 revcom.us/future
[85] “More on ‘The Coming Civil War,’” Revolution #29, Jan. 8, 2006, revcom.us. Avakian’s arguments are rarely without nuances and caveats in the fine print, and this is no exception. In his essay “The Coming Civil War” he writes: “Now, it’s not impossible that a different section of the ruling class could come forward and cohere and get more backbone, but ‘the odds favor’ — and the way things are going now, they are pointing to — a one-sided conflict within the ruling class, and the continuation of the present dynamic.”
And then almost immediately afterwards, he returns to the kind of argumentation we are criticizing: “The reality is — and it is crucial for people to grasp this — that even if we don’t provoke them, they are going to the extreme with this program. What more evidence do you need? Read the mainstream press, watch the mainstream media, day after day. To cite here just one crucial dimension of this, they are trying to redefine the definition of science — to include religion right within the definition of science — on a societal level. You think that’s just going to stay in a little small, confined sphere, in terms of its influence?”
[86] Avakian has not articulated the new definition of fascism embedded in his recent work. For Avakian, fascism seems to be a definitive new leap in the norms of operation of both the bourgeois state and civil society – a combination of state repression, ideological climate and new official consensus that conspire to effectively suppress of a range of oppositional options. This is a new break from the flawed and long exhausted 1935 Comintern formulation of fascism as “the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” which focused narrowly on open state terrorism.
[87] Fascization is the growth of fascist trends within the existing bounds of bourgeois democracy. An example: There was a dangerous growth of executive power and reactionary judiciary within Weimar Germany (under leaders like von Papen) before the rise of Adolf Hitler to power and the leap to a new fascist form of rule. Here too, things need not be so “either/or.” It is quite possible for very dangerous, reactionary norms to emerge within the U.S. without that process producing an inevitable or necessary leap to a qualitatively new form of bourgeois rule (i.e. for a full leap to fascism with the complete negation of former “norms” of law and politics).
[88] A powerful and cautionary novel about a future theocratic and rigidly male supremacist America, Margaret Atwood, A Handmaid’s Tale, 1985
[89] Revolution newspaper published a series of posters called “Scenes from a Faith-Based Future” set a few years into the future, where for example a kid can be legally stoned to death for wearing a witch costume on Halloween. Numerous people have commented to me how out-of-touch and crudely reductionist this kind of agitation is. revcom.us/i/090/bible-horror-pt3-m-en.pdf
Published: December 2007
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Jimmy Higgins said
Many thanks for this whole incisive and thought-provoking series, to which I have not yet devoted the attention and reflection that it deserves. One challenge will be deciding whether or not it will be desirable or even possible to open up the discussion here to folks who, like me, are not deeply steeped in the line and practice of the RCP(USA) over the last couple decades. Even though I have the advantage of having been in the early RU/RCP and having tracked developments there at a distance ever since, I have doubts about my right to speak here.
That’s not the sort of thing that usually stops me, of course, so I thought I’d raise three points on Letter Number 5, which deals with the danger of “Christian fascism.”
First, as with the other letters, situating the critique of this aspect of Avakianism (for want of a more felicitous term) in a broader set of ideological and epistemological shortcomings is a very good thing. The “fetishism of the word” and the failure to derive the general from the particular (and line from social practice) are correctly highlighted. I have argued elsewhere that a priorism, the starting from a predetermined conclusion and the unfolding of line development around that conclusion are errors which have characterized the RCP throughout its history, as in the case of the aberrant line on “homosexuality” you cite elsewhere. Do you think this is a useful tool for understanding some of the failures you describe?
Second, and more particular, like any revolutionary in this country, I find developments like the Christianist takeover of the Air Force Academy alarming and have looked more closely at the RCP’s pronouncements on the issue than other topics you address in the series. But as you point out, there’s no there there. To your criticism of the basic failure to understand the role religion plays in the lives of individuals in this society, I would add that the investigation of the actual organization of the Christian Right and dominionist forces is negligible. Dropping in fearful references to the Promise Keepers almost a decade after they peaked doesn’t reflect seeking truth from facts. I went to Revolution Books in search of a copy of United Methodism @ Risk: A Wake Up Call by Leon Howell, a very useful look at the line, program, tactics and backers of the Institute on Religion and Democracy which is targeting mainstream Protestant denominations for “renewal.’ The staffer I spoke with had not heard of it and showed little interest in it.
On this point, the RCP is not alone, of course. When Naomi Wolf wrote an article in the Guardian this spring, entitled “Fascist America: in ten easy steps” it created a storm of approving commentary throughout the left and liberal blogosphere. That died down in about a week (not before I blogged it here ). This probably says more about teh internets as a vehicle for broad discussion and collective analysis than anything else, but it also shows that clear leading line on the topic would be welcomed by a lot more people than we might expect.
Third, the other reason I was never able to take the RCP’s writings on the topic seriously has to do with an issue I find missing from most critiques of by those who have departed the RCP and its orbit. This is the united front, or let’s call it the United Front, using the upper case to indicate not just an alliance of organizations but an actual bloc of objective class forces and social movements.
My question, posed on a few occasions to RCPers (who reacted as if I had myself taken to speaking in tongues), is simple: If you think that there is a real and imminent danger of theocratic fascist rule being imposed in the US, isn’t it patently obvious that one of the main forces already opposing it are the millions of religious–clergy and devout laity alike–who are (forgive the shorthand) democratic and progressive? Aren’t they among the advanced we have to unite in order to win over the intermediate and isolate the reactionaries? And if they are, why in hell would you adopt as an incessantly reiterated ideological dividing line in the struggle, the need to reject any belief in the existence of a deity and to uphold the inherently reactionary character of religious belief?
To me this is flat-out nuts. It says that either the analysis is not taken seriously by those propounding it or that they have managed to frame a strategy guaranteed to isolate a small section from within the advanced from the rest of the population. This is not leadership I am interested in following.
tellnolies said
Jimmy asks a good question. I wonder if he has an explanation for this seeming contradiction beyond the RCP being “flat-out nuts.”
While anecdotal, Jimmy’s experience shopping at Rev Books is indicative of one of the consequences of Avakian’s peculiar refusal to acknowledge (and therefore openly engage) his sources — a stifling of the intellectual curiousity of those who take up the call to promote Avakian.
Jimmy is correct that the IRD is a much more important force to understand today than the Promise Keepers and that a group that is attempting to put forth a leading line on the threat of Christian Fascism should know this or at least be interested.
redflags said
I was just listening to an old debate between James Baldwin and Malcolm X about the tactics of the civil rights movement. At one point, Baldwin says his main quarrel with the (then) movement leadership was its religiousity. He said that, in that light, he saw nothing crazier about Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam theology than any mainline protestant or Catholic. To him, they were all beyond proof – faith-based, and ripe for self-delusion. Baldwin said, “We don’t need that.”
Instead of looking at Malcolm and saying, “you nut, you believe white people are literal devils created in a laboratory,” which the Nation of Islam certainly held factually true – he looked to see what the method was that tied people’s yearnings to religious bases beyond their control.
Learning from Baldwin, I’d ask: For all the problems of the RCP, why have they been able to speak to the political conditions we face while more “reasonable” groups continue to walk roads that are manifestly self-defeating: like “anybody but Bush” or that we can’t (shouldn’t) actively oppose a war even when the population has across all classes turned to opposition.
To look beyond the realm of the real, what already exists, is to walk a line of madness. To think, “this world is not the only world”, to see the cracks in the sidewalk where the grass grows through.
Pavel said
Notice the “Holiday Story” in the latest Revolution. Set in the future, it depicts a group of very young people attempting to clean up environmental damage, while also spending lots of time in meetings where they “wruggle out” (=”wrangle” with, in current RCP jargon)lots of line questions. One tells another that long ago (”in the back-then”)kids were told about a winter holiday to celebrate “a powerful guy who was really a god,” and if they didn’t celebrate, they’d be tortured forever. If they broke his irrational rules, which he never explained, they’d be burned forever.
“And then when he died they had put nails in him, and his crew went around and told people that all that was their fault…”
You get the idea. The Old Testament God associated with the Laws of Moses is conflated with the Jesus Christians worship. From the get-go there was a “crew” managing this cult in order to scare children—a cult we’ll have to “wruggle/wrangle” with for ages to come (guided by Bob’s path-breaking works on biblical religion).
Another concrete example of the distant, reductionist quality of RCP discussion of religion—and of ignorance and insensitivity.
I’d have thought that the response to the March 7, 2004 RCP leaflet denouncing Gibson’s Passion of the Christ movie, which was ridiculously simplistic and in its own way crudely evangelical (”Open your eyes, people. Don’t be taken in. Chairman Avakian has said it is time to quit praying to things that don’t exist…) might have taught the comrades something about how NOT to approach the issue of religion. This Christmas offering seems positively designed to alienate.
redflags said
Well, I do think one day we (as a common humanity) will look back on the monotheistic religions and their myths of punishment and judgment much as we look on animal sacrifice today.
Here’s the rub: There is no god, but there is religion. Understanding religion and the religious instinct in a world without god means to understand people; how we view the world from cosmology to ethics.
Understanding there is no god, we see religion comes from people. We make god in our own image.
Once, a long time ago, there was an argument among Russian communists before the revolution about whether to construct a “proletarian god.” The Russian people were profoundly religious, with a church structure built into the monarchy and empire. Russian communists ran smack into this roadblock time and again.
Maxim Gorki, respected as the great novelist of his generation, proposed this new cult. The argument was shot down. For a time.
But fast-forwarding to the mummification of Lenin and living deification of Stalin, concurrent with the destruction of any form of politics not disseminated from on high, perhaps Gorki “won” that argument in the end.
What began with the cult of (a then-dead) Lenin, turned into a mantle passed to Stalin… and a template picked up in China (by Mao’s friends and foes!) and then replayed in true “second time farce” by Avakian and Gonzolo.
We have no gods. The very essence of deification, even when the figure is actually world-shaking (which Avakian plainly is not), is to rob people of their own agency and place it in a trust where only the “great leader” has the keys.
That millions do this every Sunday isn’t proof it “works” – but of the terrain we must actually traverse.
ShineThePath said
I think these questions are particularly complicated. Here it seems to be the basis of unity for creating revolution should be as broad as possible, including people who are evern deeply religious. Obviously, if you ask Terry Eagleton and Father Barrios what he thinks of the matter, he is on the firm side of Jesus Christ…while at the same time for Socialist Revolution.
Those who see Christ the Table Turner, as depicted in the Pasolini (Communist-Atheist) film The Gospel According to St. Matthew, should be brought over on the basis of liberation of oppressed peoples.
I think it is also obvious the line of RCP in promoting the polarity of Bob v. Dubya as an organizational principle WON’T win these people over (if anyone else on that matter as well).
The approach of the RCP is truly dogmatic and what can be called in itself an uninteresting and blind Atheism.
I will admitt that, at least for me, it was an attractive principle in the beginning as I was rupturing from Catholicism in my teenage years. It was definately a rebellious act to be a Communist, but on top of that, an Atheist?! A militant atheism always brings forward people in such a way; however it is very limited perspective in itself. It also, if put out as question of polarizing people in favor of revolution, is dreadfully limited.
I recall when I was in the Youth Brigade going into Union Square, collectively with other Brigaders, while one of our Brigade leaders was yelling on about how God is a muderous thug, Christianity is genocidal, and we passed out flyers and got into discussions with people around us. I remember a discussion of a Black Proletarian telling me I would go to hell, at the time I laughed, but today I realize I was acting like a self-righteous dick.
In fact we were so out of step and antagonistic to people in Union Square (one of the hubs of liberal secular NYC), that we made the 9/11 Truth styled conspiracy theorists [Stop the Police State Coalition] people look more reasonable! In fact some socialists amongst them were coming to us an telling us this is no way to win over people. One of the few times they were correct.
I recall other exampels similar to this when RCP was attacking Christianity at movie theatres when Passion of the Christ was out.
This way of doing things is off to me. It doesn’t do anything but pidgeon-hole us, and fails to reach out to the masses of people. Do I suggest taking on a Populist or Chavista approach where we are turning Jesus into a revolutionary – when this ever is done, it seems to me the tendency amongst Revolutionary Communists was to malign people for their efforts, without dealing with the content of these impressions – but we should take an approach that goes back to a Marxist or even Hegelian approach to religion, in this sense I appreciate Slavoj Zizek’s work because this is precisely being reconsidered in a way that is vibrant and all sided.
Rather than subsuming to these ‘Zeitgeist’ arguments that have been put forward by Dawkins, Hitchens, and now grabbing those curtails, Bob Avakian.
Books like ‘God Delusion’ and ‘God is NOT Great’ serve well in popularizing Atheism around a broad range of people, but also because of its militancy and polemical flavor, doesn’t do a serious justice to intellectual development of knowledge about religion itself.
I think this is True, in its contradiction. And in fact these are how many Popular Science books are written as well. Whether we are speaking about Carl Sagan, Brian Greene, Michio Kaku, Simon Singh, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, etc.
It seems to me that we should follow this definite pedagogy of the Sciences and Academics. How the sciences are taught to, especially children, is that these are indeed DEFINITE truths. Children in a Biology or Physics class (unless its Georgia or Kansas) are taught in the terms of a definiteness, an affirmitive position on the expositions they are taught. Of course, this is not the grand scope, as the truth is there is great debate and ferment about the questions if Physics about General Relativity and its relation to Newtonian Laws, Cosmology, or even on the process of Evolution (Dawkins v. Gould camp).
Thomas Kuhn, who was first to popularize the dialectical development of knowledge of the sciences, even agreed that a classical pedagogy that treats these questions with assurity.
Assurity even with Truths in contention (but with the self-consciousness of this contention, of this ferment) seems to be the spirit of the Dialectical approach toward knowledge.
Avakian’s outlook here seems in the utterly in contradictory to this look. I think Mike did a great job in revealing the striking mechanical materialism Avakian is working with, especially on relative truths.
Avakian is right that relative truths are still Truths, they corresspond in some sense to this world, but he misses the obvious distinction here on how we come to see any Truth as Truth to begin with. To just remark that Truth (regardless of its objective-subjective relation, without the dialectical approach) is always criterion of our aims is to say to me, we will assure ourselves of our dogma, of our self-righteous correctness, of our [excuse the phrase] “Will to Truth.” This mechanical (whether the criterion is Materialist or Idealist). It is the error of Stalinism!
Pavel said
I don’t think the RCP would deny that “people who are even deeply religious” should be politically united with in various campaigns. They seem to consider it quite a victory that Dan Berrigan signed the Protect Bob ad (even though I think it likely that he signed out of a principled moral desire to defend a significant left activist, may be unaware of the cultic context of the ad campaign, and may not in fact have “come away from encounters with Avakian provoked and enriched in [his] own thinking…” as the statement indicates).
The problem is, as ShineThePath suggests, the party while cherishing its ties to people like (the late) Father Bourgeois or Cornell West offends the mass of Christian believers in this 80% Christian country by atheistic propaganda that is primitive and insensitive. The New York Passion of the Christ flier in March 2004 was a model of offensiveness obviously produced by people with no understanding of religious psychology.
To audiences consisting largely of devout Christians waiting to see the dramatization of a scriptural narrative central to their belief-system, RCP-connected activists demanded, “What about the sufferings and executions…in some cases directly caused by Christianity?” It wasn’t merely an attack on the alleged anti-Semitism of the film emphasized by some other organizations, but on Christianity itself, linked crudely to Old Testament laws and myths and to the “Christian Fascism” supposedly endorsed by Mel Gibson and George Bush. As usual, the use of the lower-case g for “god” is calculated to jar and annoy the believer. And as an alternative to this nasty religion, there are the words of Bob Avakian–first a rather pompous statement of what any New Testament reader knows (that there are different accounts of Jesus’ life in the four gospels) designed to establish Bob as some sort of insighful Biblical scholar, and then the preposterous: “Open your eyes, people. Don’t be taken in. Chairman Avakian has said it is time to quit praying to things that don’t exist…”
What would Berrigan or any progressive Christian have to say to that? That they’ve been “provoked and enriched”–or had their intelligence insulted?
Similarly the “God, the Original Fascist” series seems calculated to alienate. The accurate part of the entire effort could be summed up in a sentence: The Yahweh of the Pentateuch is a highly emotional deity who having chosen the descendents of Abraham as his worshippers rewards them for obedience and punishes them, often brutally, for violating his laws in a world where slavery (long before the emergence of fascism, which is not just or even mainly about slaughter and patriarchalism) and mass killing was common. The author might have added that Yahweh compared to many other dieties worshipped in the ancient world lays uncommon emphasis on justice and charity and that such values become central to the prophetic tradition. He/she deliberately confines him/herself to a discussion of the Five “Books of Moses” probably compiled around the 6th century BCE, and appears oblivious to the fact that (1)the Jesus of the gospels (the Book of Revelation is another matter) presents a very different object of worship, and (2) basic Christian theology states that the Old Testament has been superceded by the New and the old laws with their brutal punishments do not apply to the Christian believer.
Bob Avakian extends the criticism to the figure of Jesus, basically nothing that Jesus advocated submission to the state, thereby validating oppression. Is that supposed to “wake people up”? Yes, Jesus said, “render unto Caesar,” rather than, “don’t pay your taxes.” (That would have simply resulted in him getting locked up earlier than he did.) He also, according to the gospels (a mix of sayings many of which were probably actually stated by the man, plus plausible narrative, legend and myth) criticized the rich and powerful and of course, as ShineThePath mentions, overturned the money-changers’ tables in the temple, thus drawing the prists’ wrath and his crucifiction.
The fact that Jesus was not a revolutionary (at least in most scholars’ opinions) is less interesting than the fact that he deliberately posited a “basilieia tou theou” (traditionally translated “kingdom of god” although some scholars prefer “Heaven’s Imprial Rule”) against the Roman Empire, while preducting that the latter would come to an end. But these nuances seem unimportant to BA, who seems to be saying that because Jesus wasn’t Spartacus he’s to be seen principally in a negative light.
It seems to me that Revolution could feature intelligent articles examining religion as something that can neither be reconciled with science nor validated as something that, since based on faith, can be exempt from rational deconstruction. Engels’ observation, “It is impossible to conceive of thought without matter that thinks,” is the appropriate starting point. To the common religious rationale, “How can everying exist is there was no creator” one must answer with the question, “How could that creator exist without another, prior creator—innumerable creators leading back to…what?” While acknowledging that we do not know what, if anything, preceded or caused the Big Bang, we can note that between that event (currently thought to be around 14 billion years ago) and the appearance of the first animals with brains on this planet about 13.5 billion years went by, and animals with “consciousness” have only been around a short while. The idea of a Great Mind consciously undertaking to make a universe can be refuted through patient logic. The party wants to do it provocatively, by hurting feelings, puffed up with righteouness as it does so.
A series on “Marx and Engels on Religion”—emphasizing Marx’s understanding of religion as a reflection and protest against suffering, as an evolving human product not necessarily generated by a state apparatus or even in its inception by a ruling class, as a mode of expression at times of oppressed classes (like the slaves of the Roman empire, or I’d add, lower castes in India attracted by Buddhism which denied the validity of the caste system)for which we no longer have need and can once we’re educated enough no longer believe—would I think be far more effective in disabusing people of religious believe than the crude party offerings on the subject to date.
Sorry for the length.
Andrei Mazenov said
Some questions:
With the fascisization of society coming about in the US, how can the now-regrouping Maoist forces in the US protect themselves (and effectively resist such attacks) from such attacks and repression?
redflags said
With the fascisization of society coming about in the US, how can the now-regrouping Maoist forces in the US protect themselves (and effectively resist such attacks) from such attacks and repression?
As (almost) always, the best defense against repression is engagement with people. Not an inward-focused quietude under the delusion of security.
Adopting a general “security culture” against lumpen activity, keeping your personal business in order, dumping sexual shame (or truly shameful activities), and refusing to get caught up in tactical militancy divorced from truly mass participation are very good ways to game the repression system.
Be principled. Be firm. Be what you’re really about. Beyond that, there are no guarantees.
blackstone said
Offtopic, but what does the picture have to do with Christian Fascists?
ShineThePath said
The picture is of immigrant workers at catholic mass, in NC
hegemonik said
I’ve been taking some time attempting to come up with something that is adequate to the discussion. Hope this works:
On the question of religion, one of the real failings of the RCP has been a sort of contradictory approach on it. Mike’s analysis of the sort of too-close-to-the-text nature of RCP polemics on religion is admirable in giving a name to the problem. But I don’t think that it entirely hits the mark. The RCP does read too closely to the text, but to this we have to ask a deeper question — why does it do so?
What is more to the point is that the problem of RCP line in general — idealism — tends to manifest in the particular fields of work they take up. This becomes very glaring in the field of religion, in which they attempt (valiantly, I believe) to raise a red flag on the question of religion, because of course the idealism that underpins the RCP’s general line and practice is quite at odds with their advocacy of atheism (and its presumed content of being the materialist approach toward religion).
It is less religion than atheism which needs to be dissected here and understood in all its variety, because I think the RCP tends to have this presumption that atheism 1) is inherently materialist and thus 2) is always tending toward a revolutionary consciousness. In my own experience (and I believe in a lot of people’s experience) that’s simply untrue.
On the nature of atheism: like all ideas, atheism splits several times over, and tends to take on a class character. It has a materialist end and an idealist end. Mostly on the question of — if we say “God is dead”, what are we negating? From the RCP, we tend to have an idealist conception of religion, and from that an idealist sort of atheism.
So, taking for example here: “God: The Original Fascist” was a troublesome article, because (as the title itself suggests) it actually enforces that which it attempts to undermine. It took the Bible literally, in a way that no fundamentalist would even dare, and moreover as the title suggests, its sole purpose seemed to be to argue that God (rather than religion) is evil. It’s one thing to say, as Bakunin did, that if God existed we should abolish him. It’s quite another to put that forward as a thought exercise/propaganda; and in fact it’s misleading.
Going further, what we have had out of the RCP is an idealist conception of what the problem is. Is it God? God doesn’t exist except as a concept. God’s as big or as small as you want it to be. Really, all we need here is to say, “We do not recognize the *authority* of God,” and you’re good to go. The RCP’s continued insistence upon using the Bible to establish God’s bona fides as an evil, fascist entity inflates God’s existence far more than it deflates it.
The problem that we are in fact facing is in fact organized religion as it exists materially; i.e., the sorts of false consciousness that it raises, the collective identity it imposes, and the necessity it has of burning heretics every once in a while. Where is the analysis of *that?*
So what we get here is an atheism of the worst sort — one which is set up to fail on its own premises. I’d argue that the atheism espoused by the RCP puts it closer to Libertarianism-Objectivism-Ayn Rand Thought than Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought — in that if you spend any amount of time around Ayn Rand fans, it’s clear that for all the militant-blasphemer posturing, they have as many superstitions and thought prohibitions as any religious sect (i.e., never speak ill of Ayn; always uphold the commodity fetish around gold; etc.) In the RCP, this translates roughly into militant-blasphemer posturing, while upholding a millennarian conception of revolution (i.e., we are in the time of the Second Coming of a Theorist of Great Caliber; the day of judgement is coming; the proletariat takes its place on the stage of history . . .)
I think we should take to heart the manner in which Mao handled atheism/religion. Because, on the one hand, he didn’t just leave the topic undiscussed. Nor did he attempt to create a socialist God-concept. Nor did he get stuck in a slog of proving God’s non-existence. He was very much about the actual *act* of making God irrelevant. Mao reversed the logic of The Foolish Old Man and the Mountain — rather than idealism (God’s angels) moving the material (the mountains), we had material forces (the masses) taking on the superstructure (feudalism and imperialism). And as a result, you have the things that made China a revolutionary society: the masses taking up the effort to wipe out disease, the direct confrontations with Confucian scholarship, etc.
Instead of saying “How evil is God and God-worship, let me count the ways,” (as I believe the RCP is currently engaging atheism), Mao effectively said, “the place that was once assigned to God (i.e., performer great wonders) no longer belongs to him or any other abstract, immaterial entity; that position now belongs to the masses in their real existence.” And then proceeded to take up the efforts to make that a reality. We should do the same.
BobH said
Very insightful critique of idealist atheism, Hegemonik. One minor criticism, though: the last point about doing what Mao did seems a little idealist since we’re not in a position to mobilize masses to do “miracles”, at least not anytime soon. I think one approach that helps is to try to be more “christian” than actual christians, e.g. in our generosity, selfness, fellowship, etc. If the general level of conduct of communists is noticably higher than of most christians, that speaks more effectively than in-your-face type athieism that alienates people.
zerohour said
Hegemonik -
I agree with many of your points but I wanted to poit out that the RCP’s fault is not that it takes the Bible literally. The Bible demands to be taken literally. there is no stated allowance in the scripture for interpretation, contextual analysis or exceptions to its demands.
Writers like Dawkins and Hitchens [btw, Revolution is wrong when it says that Hitchens's book is largely an anti_Islam tirade - it mostly focuses on Christianity and Judaism] have done a good jhob pointing out that many Christians do not derive their moral code from the Bible. Dawkins has gone furthur to state that this indicates a contradiction between the influences of secular liberalism in the West and the consolations of Christianity. I feel that attempting to resolve this contradiction is why people need to “interpret” the Bible, when in fact, the Bible is very straightforward and needs no interpretation.
You’re right that attacking the Bible is not an effective way to erode the influence of a deeply-ingrained worldview that gives meaning and structure to people’s lives. Calling God a “fascist” just makes people defensive and rightfully unwilling to listen to your arguments. What’s needed is an understanding of living religious practice and the contradictions it reflects and embodies. Materialism is liberating but we need to show it, not just shout it.
hegemonik said
In response to BobH:
A characteristic of older religions (I’m not talking about the stuff that’s comes out of modernity) is the pairing of a heavy determinism placed on humanity with this agency given to the divine to do just about anything. Humanity is left to its lot. If you’re poor, God (or your ancestors, or your ancestors) made you that way and you should stay that way. The divine, on the other hand, can supposedly do anything of its own accord — make babies in virgins, send angels to move mountains, etc.
I’ve warned of idealism, but so too should we refrain from a vulgar materialism that doesn’t understand the interplay with the superstructure. The masses can and will do things that make the miracles of religion look quite passe in comparison. Jesus once fed his followers with a few fishes and some bread? Well, with cloning having arrived, isn’t it possible to now feed the masses several times over using one fish, a grain of wheat, and cloning techniques? Isn’t the miracle of Muhammad flying to Jerusalem and elsewhere just lame when you consider that you could use a helicopter to do the same several times over? Doesn’t the movement of two mountains sound like kid stuff, when you consider that miners regularly blast mountains to smithereens?
What was necessary to these “miracles” of modern science and industry was for the masses (and no, not just a few scattered geniuses) to grasp certain ideas and in doing so *make them material forces*. Which in the case of Mao was what he achieved (to a certain degree, of course) — the barefoot doctors, for instance, achieved an end to diseases that seemed entirely invincible; not even the utopians of China could imagine their end.
===
The problem of the RCP’s idealism, then, is not that they deal with matters of ideals, the superstructure, etc. It is that a good lot of their propaganda, especially on science/atheism/religion doesn’t aim toward translating ideas into material forces. It just remystifies things.
To give an example: it would seem that the RCP views the clashes over the teaching of evolution only as a contest of ideals. It has used its coverage of the conflict mostly to score points against the intellectual midgets of Creation Science, and not toward getting the masses an actual grasp of evolution, nor even of a really persuasive case for why Creation science is nuts. Getting back to part of Mike’s criticisms of the “Christian fascist” stuff — the problem seems to be that they ascribe to such persons some inveterate and sincere theocratic fascism, when it’s much more possible that it’s all just a cynical game being played.
Put another way: do we think for a second that a ruling class whose pockets are lined with money from Big Oil, Big Coal, and Big Biotech *really* believe that the earth is 5,000 years old and evolution is all poppycock? Or is it much more the case that the ruling class’s alliance with Creation science and all that other horseshit was (and is!) a wedding of convenience? And further, that stuff like Creation science is much more an attempt to keep the very folks who do the blasting for big coal, the drillwork for Exxon-Mobil, and the sales for Mosanto bamboozled such that they never get their grubby hands thinking of expropriating the company?
Jimmy Higgins said
I agree with hegemonik’s point on the interests of the big bourgeoisie in the whole creationism kerfluffle. In fact, the ideological alliance shaping the current Republican Party (theocons+neocons+taxcutters) is not without numerous downsides for big capital. They were able to escape some of the ugly side-effects of a home population half of which believes that the whole universe was created in more or less its present form within the last 10,000 years by importing a large percentage of their graduate students in the hard sciences from other countries. Now the “national security” clampdown is drying up that source, or rather diverting its flow to the home states of other imperialists. What was it the old gent said about picking up a rock?
hegemonik said
Zerohour writes:
This is the problem of being an idealist — especially around the Bible.
The Bible may not, in its text, allow for interpretation, i.e., it serves as a pure injunction (”thou shalt”/”thou shalt not”). The problem is — Bibles can’t enforce themselves. They are nothing but ink on parchments or wood pulp. The Bible can have a thousand thou shalts or thou shalt nots, but *somebody’s* got to actually stone adultresses.
We have to be materialists on religion. And further, stop having this schizoid position on it, who on the one hand believe that it’s all a bunch of horseshit written by ancient ruling classes and yet treat it as if it really were some word of God.
So being materialists, let’s get into things like the living, material existence of religion on earth. Churches, congregations, and ulemahs; pastors, priests, rabbis, and imams. These are the things that take the ideas of the Bible, and translate them into material reality. They’re the bridge between the superstructure of religion and the folks out there putting butts in pews. Without them, religion is dead letter.
For an example: the Bible says, God created the earth in six days. But you know what? The pope says that evolution is a demonstrable fact. And because of that, parochial and Catholic schools throughout *the world* teach that the earth is millions of years old and that humanity evolved from primates. Because the pope is a real material force. God didn’t put an asterisk in Genesis 1; some guy in Italy did.
The Bible is also contradictory. It’s a work of man and not God. It therefore *demands* interpretation whether it likes to or not. It’s why Jews have a Talmud. It’s why various Christian churches have policy-wonks, who have to make sense of whether to go with Deuteronomy and allow for divorces versus the Gospels that say divorce is forbidden.
Failing to recognize this, the RCP’s stuff on religion — of which “God the Original Fascist” article is only the tip of the iceberg — is just plain wrong to regurgitate a sort of greatest hits of the Bible’s worst atrocities. That stuff was written so long ago, that even the religious have disregarded a good portion of it. So why not go after what is *actually* fucked up in religion, which you get by reading Catechism and papal bulls and the sort (which represent the actual ideals that followers are bound to), rather than a Bible that has been deemed insufficient for the modern reality *centuries* ago?
====
If I may get into a digression, regarding Hitchens.
I must confess that back when he was a leftist, I read a fair amount of Hitchens’s stuff (mostly on Indonesia/East Timor). What is very striking about Hitchens is that his atheism was always a veil for his various chauvinisms and petit bougeois attitudes. You will notice that even in his attacks on Christianity, he almost always concentrates on the Catholic Church in particular; I would attribute this to British Trotskyism’s particular problems on various national questions that began with the question of the Irish republic.
I would also point out, that Hitchens doesn’t fit into the Islamophobe box either; in fact, Hitchens’s fault may be that he has been far too uncritical of Islam as a political force. He defends Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Iraq for example; and further back, he was actually backing a sort of Islamic-Democratic party in Indonesia led by Abdurrahman Wahid (himself a Muslim cleric). In the end, Hitchens is a petit bourgeois asshole who sold out any of his ideals a long, long time ago.
Jimmy Higgins said
One thing that this religion discussion has reminded me of is the mechanical materialism of the Chicago School of economics. Applying their “rational choice” model to religion, they endeavor to explain a lot of religious behaviors by investment models: deathbed conversions are common in Christianity for instance because it is a minimal “investment” for a considerable reward–”eternal life.” (For the philosophy buffs here, this is obviously Pascal’s Wager restated.)
Adherence to faiths which make extreme demands in terms of sacrifice and belief structures are also explainable in this framework. Raising the reward (and upping the penalties–torment without limit) and restricting those who will be permitted to partake of it (only 144,000 go to heaven, according to various Christian sects) makes the greater investment seem worthwhile, while that investment is “protected” from devaluation as apostates and less dedicated ‘free riders” are forced out by the heavy strictures of the creed, and face eternal damnation.
Ulises said
hegemonik writes: “The problem of the RCP’s idealism, then, is not that they deal with matters of ideals, the superstructure, etc. It is that a good lot of their propaganda, especially on science/atheism/religion doesn’t aim toward translating ideas into material forces. It just remystifies things.”
You nailed it. This problem runs throughout their works and thinking. Witness the “materialist” understanding of leadership which transubstantiates almost immediately into a re mystification of leadership.
At the same time this has its exceptions. It is uneven.
hegemonik writes:
“To give an example: it would seem that the RCP views the clashes over the teaching of evolution only as a contest of ideals. It has used its coverage of the conflict mostly to score points against the intellectual midgets of Creation Science, and not toward getting the masses an actual grasp of evolution, nor even of a really persuasive case for why Creation science is nuts. Getting back to part of Mike’s criticisms of the “Christian fascist” stuff — the problem seems to be that they ascribe to such persons some inveterate and sincere theocratic fascism, when it’s much more possible that it’s all just a cynical game being played.”
I know in this case that many RCP supporters would raise the Ardea Skybreak book as an example of why your thesis is wrong. What do you make of that book? How does it fit with the rest of your analysis of the RCP’s take on religion vs secularism?
tellnolies said
Zerohour writes:
“The Bible demands to be taken literally. there is no stated allowance in the scripture for interpretation, contextual analysis or exceptions to its demands.”
The Bible makes no such demands. I strongly recommend the book “Misquoting Jesus” which is written by a biblical scholar and former fundamentalist/biblical literalist. Its an interesting book for all sorts of reasons. It mainly deals with the impossibility of even determining what the original texts of the New Testament even said, but along the way excavates in a popular way the history of the Bible which has not stood still at all over the centuries. In the course of this he claims that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is actually a very recent American invention, basically a product of 19th century evangelical protestantism.
There are parts of various books in the Bible that claim to be the “word of God” like the ten commandments and various lesser admonitions. But the vast majority of the Bible does not have this character, but is rather composed of stories, prayers, letters and other items of uncontroversial human authorship.
Pavel said
I have Bart Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus and agree with Tellnolies that it’s a useful book. Zerohour is mistaken in suggesting that the “Bible demands to be taken literally.” The Bible is not a person in a position of demanding anything. It’s a collection of works written by people over many centuries. The currently accepted Christian arrangement of texts (omitting dozens of “gospels” and “acts” of this or that figure) only agreed upon in the 4th century, and even after that there was controversy about the authenticity of different books. It is people in authority within the various Christian churches who promote the notion that these books are the “Word of God” inspired by the Holy Spirit, without error and to be taken literally. But there are also Christians who reject biblical literalism. The Christian tradition of interpreting the Genesis myths symbolically goes back at least to the late second century.
The RCP seems unaware of the fact that many people who self-identify as Christians see the New Testament as a collection of documents written by human beings, riddled with contradictions, containing historical errors, susceptible to critical analysis— and yet containing basic truths about the nature of the cosmos unavailable anywhere else. You’re not telling such people anything new when you (say) point out that the Matthew and Luke nativity narratives don’t agree with one another. You don’t impress them when you point out that both Jesus and Paul failed to challenge the slave system directly. And when you depict your own presentation of these simple facts as impressive scholarship or “hard truths” you just come off as the “village atheist” trying to shock misguided people out of their faith which, since you yourself haven’t done enough homework to understand, you can’t disabuse them from. So you just offend.
***
Look at these pieces on early Christianity by Engels.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/religion/book-revelations.htm
and
http://atheism.about.com/library/marxism/bl_EngelsEarlyChrist.htm?rnk=r5&terms=Early+Christian+Writings
Compare them to the offerings on religious topics we receive from BA and the RCP.
tellnolies said
Zerohour also writes:
“the Bible is very straightforward and needs no interpretation.”
This isn’t true of ANY text (not even the phonebook), least of all a product of thousands of years of cultural sedimentation and upheaval like “the” Bible.
The Bibles (there are many with many important differences between them) is riddled with contradictions, confusing passages, allegories and the like that make it impossible to read without all sorts of interpretation. Saying, for example, that “the Bible demands to be taken literally” is an INTERPRETATION.
Both the “curse of Ham” (which was interpreted as a justification of the enslavement of Africans) AND Exodus which provided the language of Black resistance to slavery are in “the” Bible. Part of what has made the Bible such a powerful force that has survived through several transformations in modes of production is precisely this openness to contradictory, indeed antagonistic, interpretations.
The Cold Lamper said
There’s a great throwaway line in and episode of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” where Worf is criticizing the Prophets of Bajor. He says the Klingons overthrew and killed their gods a million years ago (this was probably around 2372-73, I think this was in the fifth season arc “In Purgatory’s Shadow”/”By Inferno’s Light”). Apparently the Klingon spiritual beliefs are more efficient without deities lording over them like some interstellar Il Duce.
Deists in the Beta Quadrant, anyone?
This struck me as being more the view of Jefferson: that God existed, and established the basic laws underlying the development of the cosmos, but did not actively intervene in their motion and development further; it fell upon humans to uncover these laws through science.
Yet as I remember, this is reflected nowhere in “Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy.
I’m also learning about “Hinduism” (like “curry,” I know) which has very complex views on not just on the existence of deities but of their worship. Apparently there are even “atheist” strains of Hinduism which recognize divine entities yet refuse to confer tribute upon any of them.
Where is any of this reflected by the RCP?
zerohour said
Tellnolies -
My point is that religious texts are presented as containing eternal and universal truths. Of course they are interpreted, every text is, but their interpretations are based the need to reconcile the realities of competing ideologies with the monolithic claims of the text itself. Yes the Bible is contradictory, having been written over several centuries by those with differing agendas, but we can only come to this understanding if we do not accept the Bible as a product of god’s word. The fact of interpretation itself should cause one to question the divine source of the text.
Textual critique itself is not going to win anyone over, but it is important to point out the human-made nature of such texts as part of a broader religious critique.
Jaroslav said
Cold Lamper:
On Hinduism, there’s a great book (if you can find it) called India: From primitive communism to slavery by S.A. Dange. Actually Dange soon after proved to be a revisionist but in any case this is still a great book in my opinion. The book uses Hindu sacred texts from different times to show the development of class society in ancient (northern / Sanskrit-speaking) India. Although it is purely textual analysis, which Mike criticises as being insufficient explanation of religion & totally unable to de-religify (or however one says that) folks, Dange unlike BA doesn’t pretend that his textual analysis does this, rather it is a contribution to study of history.
However as to your reference to ‘”atheist” strains of Hinduism’, if they recognise divine entities, or have any kind of superstition or supernatural stuff involved in their worldview then I’d say it’s not atheism.
BobH said
Zerohour says:
Yes the Bible is contradictory, having been written over several centuries by those with differing agendas, but we can only come to this understanding if we do not accept the Bible as a product of god’s word.
I think this misses the point Tellnolies was making. For christians more sophisticated than the average fundamentalist, it’s not hard to see the contradictions/inconsistencies of the bible(s) as the product of the imperfections of mankind, but also inspired by god. Those contradictions and attempts to understand and interpret them just become one more example of the gulf between the human and divine. Pointing them out, or the unscientific nature of biblical “truth”, will only make you look condescending to a lot of people.
Attacking the social practice of rich, right-wing christians (their basic un-christianess) is probably a lot more politically effective than attacking the bible. The upsurge in immigrant rights’ movement, like the civil rights movement before it, shows that churches play an important role in mass mobilization. Knowing how to win christians over without “converting” them is a pretty important part of mass work in the U.S, imho.
the cold lamper said
Thanks Jaroslav. I have to confess that the “atheist Hinduism” is Wikiknowledge. I would agree with you, which is why I employed scare quotes.
***
I erred: the first reference to the slaying of the Klingon gods took place during the fourth season story “Homefront”/”Paradise Lost”:
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Klingon_religion
“I never kill anyone at the supper table, Mr. La Forge.” (Kurn, TNG: “Sins of the Father”)
***
There was an astounding note by Comrade Avakian in the RWOR circa 2002-03 to Christians who wanted to end the Iraq war referring to the passage in…Matthew? about missing the log in one’s own eye for the speck in another’s. That was a heartwarming example of how to appeal to progressive believers in non-alienating terms, IMHO. As bad as the New Synthesis may be on this question, I don’t think Bob is sitting in a bunker somewhere making trigonometric calculations as to how much offense he can cause with such-and-such reference to baby slaughter in the Psalms, as if he were Huey Freeman threatening to blow the lid on the governor’s gay affair if he doesn’t liberate brother Shabazz from the pig penitentiary, based on nothing more than bizarre postulation that something like one in twenty politicians are cheating on their wives with gay men.
“I always wondered about Jesse [Helms]’s collection of little shoes…” Bill Hicks
By the way, a comment on Psalm 137’s apparent promotion of baby killing, from a footnote in my mother’s old fifties era Catholic Bible, which I always found provoking and which harkens to the 9Ls point about interpretation of holy texts:
“Ver. 9 According to the ruthless custom of ancient warfare, children were indeed cruelly killed. Cf. 4 Kings 8:12; Osee 9:16. But it seems more probable that here the psalmist is personifying “the daughter of Babylon” as a mother whose little ones are the adult citizens, not the infants, of the city. Cf. Luke 19:44″
Anyone else think this is a bit of a stretch, and awfully convenient?
zerohour said
BobH -
I think we are talking about two different things.
We have to find ways to win people over to secularism, not just radical politics, which is how I think you saw my statement.
The main discussion here is how to understand religion in all its complexity. We have to avoid reductionism and see it as a lived experience as well as an ideology that provides meaning and structure to people’s experience, which in turn provides solace in the face of uncertainty and hardship. I could have been clearer but I wrote my comments based on past commentary on this thread. I was just clarifying my position for tellnolies.
RCP’s way of doing it is wrong. As Mike points out, they rely on textual criticism [which I said was inadequate but necessary], reductionism [god = fascist] and just plain provocation.
I don’t know how other people see it but I think radicals don’t have a major problem working with religious people. Major problems don’t necessarily come from any religion/secular tension. What we do have a problem with is convincing the larger religious populations that religion will not resolve their problems in the long run, and is actually part of many of their problems today.
You’re right that Christians can respond to textual criticism with compensatory arguments, but even these arguments are replete with further blind spots and logical gaps. The underlying questions they cannot convincingly answer would be: why would an omnipotent and omniscient deity rely on such an imperfect medium to spread his word? Especially since he should already know what the outcome will be? Is this condescending? I don’t think so, but anyone who holds fast to religious [or any] belief might look at any serious questioning as “condescending.”
However, these kind of arguments cannot be the primary approach to dealing with religious ideology. I think we will largely have to prove, in our personal behavior, organizing methods and theoretical openness and sensitivity that secularism, especially in revolutionary form, is a crucial component of any fundamental liberation.
The Cold Lamper said
In all fairness, Avakian has attempted to weasel out of dealing with beautiful stories like the one the letter mentions in the Gospel of John about letting he who is without sin cast the first rock against an adulterous woman by pointing out that by all historical accounts this work is a fabrication. But this again lacks a sense of the social and historical roots of people’s faith; after all, by many accounts Jesus himself is a historical fabrication (certainly many of his exploits described in the New Testament are). That doesn’t give us a blank check to refuse to deal with why people find solace in his ideas–which Avakian does seem to be conscious of on one level, since in the audio speeches he doesn’t even deal (IIRC) with the “Historical Jesus” and his possible deviation from the literary Jesus. (I think End/Beginning twenty years ago mentioned this stuff in passing.)
Jaroslav O. said
I think Mike has it right when he identifies the error of reductionism by BA & RCP. As folks here have talked about already, there are two relatively distinct discussions to be had: {1} textual stuff (what does it really mean, what can one learn about history from it, etc), and (2) political/philosophical issues of what/why people actually believe & what/how they acted based on that.
Not just in matters of religion, but in general my experience has been that close supporters can’t deal well with this idea of having two distinct issues. They will characterise such an idea as trying to artificially wall off one issue from the other, denying the dialectical relation between the two, etc; when in reality what they are doing, just as artificially, is to conflate the two things into one. It’s like the whole apples & oranges thing: they’re both fruit, & sometimes that’s all that matters, but at other times one must recognise that they’re two different kinds of fruit.
BobH said
Zerohour, I think we are basically on the same page. Of course, the believer can always fall back on “god works in mysterious ways” to get out of any problematic scripture. Good thing god put that in the bible :)
nickglais said
Interesting discussion – Marxists are philosophic materialists not just scientific materialists. To often Marxists counfound Philosophy and Science – Lenin made it clear that the Philosophic idea of something like matter did not depend upon latest development in Physics.
Marxism is quite different from the Atheism of a Bruno Bauer or even a Ernst Haeckel down to Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins.The quote 71 above is a clear appreciation of Marx of the profound social depth of religion.
In a Global context the issue for Marxists is the Religion of Islam but in the US Christian Fundamentalism also poses a serious problem.
The approach to both of them should be similar to work with them on the concrete problems of Palestine or Iraq or Poverty in the Bible Belt rather than opposing practical action with believers to an abstract opposition to Religion.
Support the “social gospel” against dogmatic Theology whether in Christianity or Islam has the class struggle has an objective basis within Religion as well as Atheism today.
Just look at the Free Market Social Darwinists in the Dawkins Camp and the apologetics on Iraq coming from Christopher Hitchens.
By polemicising against Dawkins and Hitchens we will also rediscover the Philosophic depths of Marxism and rescue it from radical bourgeois thought in which Post Modernists has sought to bury it.
Matigari said
My 3rd point of apprehension with 9-Letters:
Fascism: I felt a bit uneasy reading Mike’s critique of the RCP’s campaign against Christian Fascism, even though I actually agree with the need for analysis: “You want to put forward an analysis of trends toward fascism in the U.S.? You need to analyze their actual movements (inside & outside the ruling class), their history, sharp internal contradictions, & what they would actually have to knock down (not just ideologically, but institutionally, legally, structurally & politically). We would also have to hear & debate, in its own right, the underlying theory of fascism.”
Call it what you will, has there not been a serious ramping up of the legal apparatus that legitimizes naked, heavy repression being rained down on everyone in the U.S. & not just on people of color? Has there not been a leap in the formation of a mercenary army, a Praetorian Guard (Blackwater, for example)? Has there not been a leap in restructuring law enforcement in the U.S., major moves to integrate the functioning of local, state & federal bureaucracies? Has there not been strong indications of the rigging of the national elections? Has the bourgeoisie not gone to great lengths to institute a climate of generalized fear—War on Terror—so as to keep us tense & accept the increasing government intrusion into our lives? Also, have there not been serious leaps in the development of technology for spying on the citizenry & for crowd control?
I’m not trying to do an RCP “scare” but I think we have some real problems to confront, the first being an assessment of how serious the situation actually is. Now whether or not this is a trend towards fascism in the U.S. or not is, in a sense, academic, though I would love to see analysis & discussion of the question of fascism—I know that I would have a great deal of trouble with giving a precise definition of fascism. The term has had a history of looseness to it—Has there ever been a Marxist, Leninist, Maoist (or any combination of these labels) analysis of the similarities/differences between German, Italian, Spanish & Japanese Fascism leading up to World War II? Was is right to call Pinochet a fascist, as many have done? What about post-Stalin Russia & post-Mao China, etc.?—which is a fact, though not necessarily a good thing. While reading 9-Letters, I sometimes got the hit of what could be a serious underestimation of how drastic the economic/political condition is becoming. The point is not to bludgeon people into political action because of what is coming down but to understand how objective conditions are calling on us to prepare for those times when there are “develop¬ments of such magnitude twenty years are not more than a day” (Marx). When such times come up, let’s not be blindsided & drop the ball.
Also, in Mike’s polemics against Avakian’s intellectual sloppiness in regard to the assessment of fascism & the role of Christianity, I feel a pull towards empiricism: the sun has risen day-after-day for the last how-many-eons, so it will rise tomorrow. We do need to study history but we must also be ever ready to expect new things to emerge in the world. The issue is the question of causality. We need to be able to identify what processes—with their underlying contradictions—are driving things in society so that some old features can be expected to recur in some form or other, modified by the emergence of new but secondary processes & their underlying contradictions. Of course, this is related to the criticism of inevitabilism & to the question of causality or of necessity.
Proletariat: On another political economic note, I was uneasy about the deemphasis of class in 9-Letters, though as noted in my previous post (a comment under Letter 9), Mike does not completely omit this issue. The conditions within the lower strata of the US is going downhill–quite rapidly, I think–not only because of the lack of jobs that pay enough to scrape by but also because of the housing debacle & the outrageous escalating cost of health care. Closely related to this is the process of many people being declassed—dropping through the ranks of the lower middle and working classes—forced downward. And the composition of the working class has shifted dramatically: as of last October, US manufacturing accounted for only 10% of the job market. Add to this the role of the immigrants who populate the lower socio-economic rungs & have been important cogs in the economy & a tinderbox situation is clearly in the making. We are in the midst of a drastic sea change in the objective conditions. I believe we can make very significant political gains in the period ahead, despite the present drought. It behooves us to grasp the dynamic features scientifically, if we are to be able to acquit ourselves well. This crucial & very massive work needs to be done as rapidly as possible, for events—domestical & global—are galloping. The time for “hastening & awaiting” might be rapidly drawing to a dramatic close—these are “the times we have been waiting for.” I suspect this very strongly & feel it needs to be studied deeply. I wish we were better prepared…
Again, I’m not advocating RCP-styled panic, which is how I see the new synthesis & Avakian’s alleged “epistemological breakthrough”. Their latest orientation substitutes some pretty bad strategy/tactics for what is really needed, sober assessment of the objective condition & strategy/tactics based on that.
The most useful attitude is captured very graphically in the final battle scene of the great Kurosawa movie, Seven Samurai. The leader of the samurai band who had organized & trained the villagers to defend themselves from bandits, stands in the middle of the village square, amid the chaotic swirl of the battle, calmly notching his arrows & with great deliberation, mowing down the enemies with deadly fire. To be the ones “we are waiting for,” as we enter “the times we have been waiting for,” we need to be scientific like never before, & aim our political blows with calm, deadly accuracy.
Understanding the Material Basis of Incorrect ideas « Kasama said
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Linda D. said
Sorry friends of Kasama. Am not going to lend anything near de profundis to all the more profound “wrangling” –(like Jimmy Higgins, I bristle when I hear that phrase–I would include “grappling” in the mix) around religion, Christian fascism, etc.
But I do want to relate something, that while seemingly simplistic, for me was a profound moment in understanding how we, as revolutionary communist atheists, etc. deal with this huge contradiction–i.e., religion.
Think it was around 1971 when a delegation from the RU went to revolutionary China. One of the delegates and former leaders of the RU was telling tale about how he had encountered a woman in the countryside who had been a devout Catholic. So the RU member asked, “Well why are you no longer religious or a Catholic?” and she answered, “Because I don’t NEED to be anymore.”
“Didn’t You see that Spirit Descend?” — Shackles in the Bible Belt « Kasama said
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Militant Materialism or Textual Literalism? More Communist Debate on Atheism « Kasama said
[...] 5 [...]
fromspahnranch said
When Jesus said “Render unto Ceasear what is Cesar’s and to God waht is God’s,” after looking at a Roman coin he was in fact rejecting the money system. He was being trapped by the Jewish authorities who wanted him to either accpet Roman taxation (which would make him not appear revolutionary to the people who believed he was a Messiah) or oppose taxes (which would make him an ememy of the EMpire). Only by rejecting both by giving the money system back to Ceasar did he escapte the trap set for him.