Dumping Religion

 In 1910 the Socialist Party published  Socialism and Religion, the pamphlet in which our attitudes are fully stated. 

Members of the Socialist Party are frequently told that Christianity and socialism share the same objective, i.e. the brotherhood of man. Our answer ever since the foundation of the Socialist Party has always been that we are unequivocally opposed to religion in every form. No-one holding a religious belief is admitted to membership. The opposition is twofold.

 First, to give credit to the supernatural and supposed absolute truths is to block an intelligent understanding of the world. Second, organised religion has always been fostered by rulers to keep subjects in their place. With fear and ignorance as stock-in-trade, and poverty and submission as blessed states, belief provides a perfect instrument. Plenty of other organisations and individuals may share the feeling that the churches are in the pockets of the ruling class, but are not prepared to damage their prospects of power by publicly declaring it and instead apply the evasive principle “religion is a private affair” which has become the widespread acceptance in the left-wing radical movements. 

A regular churchgoer is now almost an exceptional figure. In non-urban areas where vestigial beliefs linger on and the churches’ direct influence on social life has continued longest, only handfuls now attend. In recent years hundreds of churches in Britain have been closed or demolished and their parishes incorporated into others. Most people acknowledge never attending church except for baptisms, marriage and funerals; but still, assert faith in God and an afterlife. The word “atheist” has curious connotations of shock while “agnostic” is more respectable, conveying vague intellectual qualities.

There is a shrewdly-conceived episode in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists where a preacher is challenged over a biblical passage saying believers may take poison without being harmed, shown a likely-looking bottle, and invited to demonstrate. His answer—” I wouldn’t be such a fool” — is precisely what all Christians would say about the literal pursuit of their beliefs. Why should they not be expected to pursue them if they do believe them? After all, it is usually Christians who say to holders of unrespectable views: “What would the world be like if everyone were like you?” Well, what would it be like if everyone acted on Christian precepts? To see large numbers of people rejecting riches, turning the other cheek, giving precedence to the meek and lowly, etc., would be a nice change.

Of course, many Christians disclaim superstition and mythology; most of our correspondents do. They could hardly say otherwise if an argument is to be had. The main supernatural claims of religion have been demolished by scientific discovery which has become everyday fact, from Darwin and Lyell to space exploration,. Even allowing that many Americans reportedly think no-one has been to the moon and the whole thing is a TV studio production, nobody has commented that one of the oldest props of rule by fear has gone. It was never suggested or expected that the astronauts might run into flights of angels or pass Paradise on the way; yet only a generation ago schoolchildren were taught and adults believed that they were all above the earth, looking down.

The religious fashion today is to talk as if those beliefs were never taken seriously, and the remaining supernatural doctrines can (if it suits, that is) be disowned. Thus, the self-styled “thinking” Christian can play a game of can’t-catch-me: on one hand repeating Creation, virgin birth, Hell, Holy Trinity, and resurrection, on the other explaining that these are allegories whose meanings his opponents don’t understand. It would be more to the point to say that he finds them impossible to support but is anxious for other people to believe them.

The decline of religion is due to more than simply scientific knowledge, however. Just as devout Christians do not live according to the Commandments and the Beatitudes because it would be materially inconvenient to do so, working people generally are less and less ready to swallow doctrines palpably against their interests. A notable instance is the increasing failure of working-class Catholics to comply with their Church’s orders about family life. Irish Catholics practise birth control of a kind by marrying as late as possible, but in Britain and America, the majority of Catholic families are seemingly affected by relative sterility. The reason is obvious. In a different environment, the extreme poverty of outsize families becomes unacceptable: belief goes to the wall.

But what of “the brotherhood of man”? Can the absurdities, the superstitious and absolutist elements be stripped from religion and an entity remain which socialists and Christians are striving for alike? The answer is no. The presumption that brotherliness and co-operation are “what Christianity is all about” is another religious spoof. They are what, humanity is all about. Man is a social being, with co-operation and order as his dominant tendencies — if he had not them, we should not be here today.

Socialists, therefore, do not seek the brotherhood of man: it exists already. What we aim at is the creation of a society in which it can flourish, instead of being continually frustrated and perverted as it is under capitalism. And, to come back to where we began, religion gives no aid in that task. On the contrary, the churches’ support for capitalism and Christians’ hocus-pocus beliefs, it is an enemy of social progress. If improbably, in a sane society there turned out to be individuals who could not live without imaginative consolations, that weakness would be accepted (certainly it would not be treated with the malevolence with which Christians behave towards atheists today). However, we are in the world of capitalism, and in that context socialism and religion are diametrically opposed.