Debate: Religion

Mike Cowley

The belief systems and communal ritual of religious practice continue to cast a seductive spell over millions of individuals the world over.

Its status as a redoubt of certainty in our fast-forward culture means that clerics of all faiths retain a moral authority which the fallen ‘masters of the financial universe’ must cast envious eyes on. Most human beings – despite living secular lifestyles disconnected from any formal religious practice – persist with a belief in supernatural beings. Scripture, its institutional interpretation and the rituals attached to them, offer people clear navigation through turbulent waters. The humanist and secular Left throw up despairing hands at this perceived irrationalism. What hope of a sea change in consciousness when many still offer their fates into the hands of angels, gods and prophets?

But does any of this matter? Are such values incompatible with secular Socialism? And should the atheist Left continue to view religious belief as a capitulation to superstitious fatalism? I want to argue that in spite of the often reactionary history of its clerical representatives, religion presents us with both an insight into the latent aspirations of humanity as a whole and the Left with an agent of solidarity for struggles past and still to come.

In his biography of Marx (2000), Francis Wheen considers again the much-referenced ‘opiate of the masses’ quote. Wheen argues that, in contrast to the prevailing orthodoxy (that Marx’s comment was a reflection of unalloyed materialist hostility to religious belief), in acknowledging religion’s grip over the ‘masses,’ Marx was in fact documenting a carbon component of all human life; the need to believe in something which transcends the banal and the routine. Marxist theories of alienation are nothing if not a repudiation of the soul-crushing disempowerment at the core of capitalist social relations. Complex industrial societies, far from unleashing human creativity and potential, have in fact reduced us to social appendages, passive consumers, spectators of life rather than autonomous agents. In fact, Wheen argues that Marx was identifying an appetite for transcendence. The secular Left has ceded ground here, allowing churches of all faiths to codify desires which reflect genuine human aspirations.

Social progressives should also seek out common ground around specific issues. Religious institutions and individuals are often active in causes the Left might consider their own. Where common fronts can be identified, we should not reject the moral credibility, influence and numbers churches can offer. From liberation theory and its activist ‘worker priests’ to its role in the anti Apartheid and nuclear disarmament campaigns, individual worshippers have been instrumental in exposing and remediating numerous injustices across the globe.

This is not to overlook the darker side of belief; its misogyny and homophobia, collaboration with the very worst dictatorships, irrationalism and recourse to violent sectarianism. Ultimately, its prescriptions derive from the most egregious superstitions. It stakes a jealous claim to the moral high ground, whilst secularists guarantee the right to worship with reference to Enlightenment values of individual rights. Where the Left hope to galvanise an active and questioning citizenship, the logic of religious belief is deployed as a mechanism of social control.

However, if as the Sociologist Lefebvre says, ‘we are surrounded by emptiness, but it is an emptiness that is filled with signs,’ then we should not be so quick to dismiss those who, reaching out in the dark, are attracted by the light of ideas that contradict our own. At least they are searching. Our task is to offer an alternative map out of the contemporary morass, a moral compass that points not to some imagined afterlife but to the liberation of humanity in the real, lived world.

Continue this debate on the Campaign for Socialism blog at
www.thecitizen.org.uk