5
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)