On Religion (Again), by Andrew W Taylor

Many Marxists continue to hold the older classical Marxist idea of all Religion invariably being a fantastic refraction of Class Society. But some of us learned from Liberation Theology that while Religion is lived by some as a principle of bourgeois Order,other kinds of relgious believing inspires people to rebel from unjust conditions and " seek the Kingdom of God" not just after the grave, but as the future promise of this Earth. After all, Jesus said in the gospel of Luke: "Blessed are the Poor, They will inherit the Earth". (NOT 'they will inherit "pie in the sky when they die")

During the 1980s I met CP militants from Central America who said their national parties had had to come to terms with unnuanced anti-religious elements in older cadre teaching because the "Base Ecclesial Communities" were obviously producing mature, disciplined, militant layers of workers and farmers.

I think this Religion(s) questions looms large for Marxist/Socialist approach to the Aboriginal peoples. Are we really going to arrive at the door of Traditional or Christian Native people, and lecture them based on Eurocentric Enlightenment Thought on their 'superstitious belief in spirits, gods'? Will we bring our Eurocentric intellectual hatchets to chop down 'totems of belief' in a new ideologically imperial Marxist project?

So there is much work to be done by Marxists in developing a nuanced appreciation of Religion as a multi-layered dimension of man irreducible to a simple formula. Unfortunately many Marxists rejected an altar-boy level Religion in their adolescence and have an uninformed dogmatism on the Question.

But of course, one finds people who are angry at Religion in any demographic. I think a lot of ant-religious feeling comes out of western european bourgeois secularism of the post-Enlightenment. My own Scottish grandparents had pure contempt for religion. It was as if they thought "that nonsense has alll been cleared up by science. Only idiots bother with it." What more was there to talk about?

But my grandparents were also educated in the UK under a triumphalistic scientific paragigm, in which they had been taught to view African, North American and Asian Traditional religions as a pack of superstitious garbage which progressive white Europeans would de-mystify for the ignorant brown, black, tellow and red races! The triumphalism of The British Empire, the triumphalism of "scientific socialism", and the triumphalism of "The March of Science" made a heady mixture. All these ideological forces also mightily contributed to the parcelling up and poisoning of the Earth by an imperious scientism impervious to traditional religious reverence for "our Mother, the Earth".

The danger, in my view, for modern (or post-modern) Socialism is to keep alive this unexamined Eurocentric bourgeois bias. The socialist and communist movements will attract only the flotsam and jetsam of European radical relativism unless it re-evaluates its stance on the spiritual dimension of "homo religious".