Question: Can one be a true socialist and also religious?
Yes, absolutely!
Indeed to me Socialism and my religion (Christianity) are pretty much the same thing
I. Religion Versus Socialism?
The Marxist view of religion has been that belief in God and in the supernatural is ultimately incomparable with Socialism where the "means of production, distribution and exchange" are "owned and regulated by the community as a whole."
It is true to say that the earliest forms of the socialist aspirations of ordinary people have been religious in nature and drawn direct inspiration from religious authority and scriptures. For nearly all of human history prior to the 19th and 20th centuries, religion and politics were united, with religious arguments either serving to defend or criticise political authority. Marxism believes that departing from this religious consciousness is essential to a free, socialist society.
There are a huge number of directions this debate could go in, so I'm going to keep it as broad as possible and let the chips fall where they may.
II. Atheism and Freedom
The belief that politics and religion could be separate was never as certain or automatic as it is today, but was born out of philosophical and political debates. The English Civil War represented a conflict over legitimate political authority between King Charles I and Parliament. One group, the Levellers, articulated early arguments for the rule of the people. Among many of the movements that developed was the
Diggers who argued for a form of Christian Socialism and common ownership. During the Restoration, Robert Filmer wrote "Patriarcha" as a defence of the Divine Right of Kings. John Locke responded with his
Two Treatise on Government that developed the idea of a "social contract" where government was based on consent. These debates all contain a basic common theme of whether the government and society are organised by God or by the will, intent and design of human beings.
It's worth keeping this in mind as the question of whether God's existence is compatible with Mankind's ability to govern itself is likely to be a theme in this debate. The struggle for Atheism is the struggle for freedom since if God exists and created the universe, it comes loaded with the implication that God can create society and dictate our economic, political, legal and moral systems. If however, Man created God and God doesn't exist, then man is the architect of his social organisation. Man is thus capable of freedom, of self-government and of designing and building a society that satisfies his needs: socialism.
Atheism wasn't a quirk in Marxism, but based on the belief that man created god in his own image, and that god has consistently served as a symbolic defender of every exploiting class and exploiting society. If you are going to overthrow the ruling class, you are going to have to go to war with
their version of God that defends and justifies oppression and exploitation. The big question is whether
all conceptions of god are incompatible with man's freedom and self-government or if a socialist society could create a religion of it's own. Marxism has thus overwhelmingly taken the view that a socialist society cannot be religious or accept god. That being said, taking a more agnostic view to religious belief and wanting to find ways for socialism to replace religion, or "
god-building", has been a persistent, if heretical, theme in communism's history.
III The Origins of Socialism as a Secular Ideology
The birth of Socialism as a secular political ideology can be traced back to the French Revolution where Francois-Noel Babeuf led the "
Conspiracy of Equals" as a failed coup attempt against the Directory of the French Republic by the most radical egalitarian branch of the Jacobins. This was after the development of deistic and secular ideas around the "
Cult of Reason" and the "
Cult of the Supreme Being" in the French Revolution as ruptures with traditional Christian belief.
There is some debate amongst historians over whether the Marquis De Sade, known for his sexual perversions and giving his name to "sadism", was a proto-socialist with atheistic and anti-religious beliefs. De Sade's observations about the meaning of freedom, the hostility towards organised religion, the nature of aristocratic power and it's propensity for cruelty as a basis for justifying it's radical redistribution, have an uneasy place in socialism's history especially given the violence of the twentieth century. Certain Atheistic ideas were also expressed by the "
French Materialists" of the 18th century and were of interest to Karl Marx. Socialist ideas were then later developed by a number of thinkers including Charles Fourier, Saint-Simon and Robert Owen.
Out of a series of disputes over the philosophy of Fredrich Hegel in Germany, came a series of anti-religious authors such as David Straus (who denied the divinity of Jesus in
The Life of Jesus in 1835), Bruno Bauer (who wrote early forms of biblical criticism) and Ludwig Feuerbach who wrote
The Essence of Christianity in 1841, where he advocated an atheist and materialist understanding of Christian belief and, by implication, of religious belief more generally.
IV Marxism's "Scientific Socialism"
Amidst this climate of anti-religious criticism were Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, whose intellectual partnership was responsible for founding Marxism. They developed a materialist philosophy of history which denied the existence of god and the supernatural and insisted that the development of history would eventually lead to Socialism through class struggle.
With the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species" in 1859, Religion came under a sustained assault. In treating man as part of nature and human history as an extension of natural history, Marxism was part of the wider acceptance of Social Darwinism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Marxism's decline in recent decades, reflects an increasingly pessimistic assessment of science's ability to understand human beings and society as a response to the moral catastrophe of twentieth century history. Both Nazism and Stalinism serve as warnings to what happen when we replace religion's roles in politics, with science (or "pseudo-science" depending on your view).
The dangers of using evolutionary theory to understand social conflict and the struggle for power are much clearer to us now than they were to Marx, yet doing so is critical to Marxism's ability to sustain a consistent atheist and materialist understanding of the world and our place in it. There is pretty much no way of avoiding the conclusion that by equating freedom with power, and that as there was no god that could over-rule our actions or veto our decisions should we abuse power, Marxism contributed to a greater scope of political power and range moral problems in a "totalitarian" state not previously known in human history that haunts us to this day.
V. After the Fall: Was Atheism Communism's Original Sin?
The debate over the relationship between Religion and Socialism is essentially retracing this journey from beginnings of Socialism in French Revolution in the 1790s to the development of Marxism in the 1830s and 1840s. These strands of Socialism, Atheism, Materialism and the criticism of religion came to be combined in Marxism which went on to become the most consequential atheist and anti-religious movement for the 20th century. Religious forms of socialism never completely disappeared (e.g. the
Liberation Theology from Latin America in the 1960s) but it wasn't able to compete and many religious people either openly opposed Communism or were unwilling to associate with it.
The main contention of Marxism is that being atheist is a
better (or "truer") basis for Socialism because religion is ultimately a conservative force even when it takes a more benign guise in "Christian Socialism". Through perpetuating ignorance, falsehood and superstition, religion keeps man a prisoner within exploiting societies like capitalism and has so often served to defend the chains man has tried to escape from in order to be free. In this respect, Christian Socialism might be considered self-defeating.
The problem of course is that the twentieth century gave us such a dark vision of what human beings might do with this power and the freedom it entails, we've become very used to wanting to stick with capitalism. The risk of building a new world without god is the only person who can stop us from committing evil is ourselves. We are just not brave enough to attempt it again, especially because we may not survive what we find out about ourselves and our species.
As Fredrich Nietzsche eloquently put it of Atheism, so it could well be said of Marxism-Leninism and the carnage it unleashed upon the world:
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
