Can socialists be religious?
RELIGIOUS NEWS AGENCY (REDNA) – Is there room for religion, or spirituality, in socialist politics? Graham Jones believes there is, both on a personal and a political level: “Spirituality can provide a set of bodily tools for care of the self and the other, to combat the demobilising effects of burnout and to help us navigate interpersonal conflict. It can teach us how to appeal to the hearts and minds of otherwise unmobilised and unorganised people through our narratives and the construction of collective identity. And it can enhance our dialogue with the huge number of people both within and far beyond our immediate social circles who come from and exist within a religious background.”
The secular left, he suggests, tends to approach religion antagonistically. Obviously, there are reasons for this: the problem with appealing to people on the basis of this particular ‘collective identity’ is that it is based on irrational foundations and is inherently exclusionary, a leftist atheist might respond with some justification. It may ‘enhance our dialogue’ with some, but alienate others.
But equally, ignorance or insensitivity towards people of faith is not going to win them over and such an attitude may correspond to a deeper insularity towards other identities. A majority of the world’s population is religious, Jones reminds us. Perhaps his own sense of empathy was developed by his father, who took the trouble to teach himself Swahili, Urdu and Arabic among other languages, “and so came into contact with perspectives he had never been exposed to as a child in rural 1940s England.”
Socialists’ attitudes towards religion are often shaped by their understanding of the Enlightenment, which is sometimes simplified to mean the struggle of reason against superstition. But Jones argues: “Often when the European Enlightenment is summarised, the critique of religion is made its central feature, it even being presented as thoroughly secular. But Enlightenment thinkers were actually more often arrayed against particular aspects of religion, such as against religious authority or orthodoxy, and typically wrote in favour of religious toleration. There were very few actual atheists.”
Even in the French Revolution, “often thought of as dogmatically atheist”, there were revolutionary priests who preached proto-communist sermons to mass followings. This phenomenon was not dissimilar to contemporary “liberation theology”, which became widespread in Latin America in the second half of the 20th century.
Using a “network of grassroots assemblies as an organisational vehicle, liberation theology was able to feed into social movements across Latin America. In Brazil it became central to the landless workers movement and formed the base for the Brazilian Workers Party. It impacted the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and the civil war in El Salvador.”
Secular socialists often quote Marx’s famous dictum: “religion is the opium of the people”. But the full quotation expresses more sympathy: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”
In this sense, Marx saw religion as a ‘painkiller’, rather than something that inherently muted the masses’ revolutionary potential. Of course, there are plenty of examples of organised religion aiming to do just that, but equally there are instances of religion being used as motivator to rebellion, from the European Middle Ages to anti-colonial struggles in the 20th century.
This is an absorbing work with lots of digressive excursions into different belief systems, science, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and much more. The problem is that some of it is both proselytising and long-winded and comes across as the author’s general theory of everything, losing sight of the open-minded and pluralist approach at the start of the book. Jones’ imagined future is frankly not that imaginative and his exposition of it tries to cover too much, with the result that some of it is superficial.
The author’s initial contention that an openness to religious belief can be advantageous for socialists and need not imply support for religious institutions, hierarchies or their involvement in politics is a good one that I wanted to read more about. Unfortunately, of the two narratives struggling to be heard here, Jones’ own all-encompassing world-view wins out over the more interesting strategic issue of how socialists should relate to and even incorporate faith – a pity, given the book’s promising opening.
Source: Labour Hub