Editor’s Note: This column was adapted from The Socialist Temptation.
You’ll remember that when I sketched out the socialist position on freedom I mentioned freedom of worship. Freedom of worship is not only a fundamental American liberty, but also very much part of our tradition. Not for nothing is it called “America’s first freedom.” Long before there was a Constitution, our ancestors came here to pursue freedom of worship. And while their ideas of religious liberty were both limited and very different from ours, they started an evolving tradition of increasing freedom of conscience, which helped America avoid the religious strife other Western nations suffered.[1]
Socialists’ attitude toward religion has also evolved. Early utopian socialists took religion as the basis for their beliefs. Marx, however, famously denigrated religion, calling it the “opiate of the masses,” and saying, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. . . . The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.”[2] Marx may not have disparaged religion entirely, but Lenin took the ball and ran with it, saying, “Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism,” although he declined to make atheism a requirement of Communist Party membership.[3]
Atheism was part and parcel of the Cultural Revolution in China and Year Zero in Cambodia (in those countries, Buddhism and Islam were the main targets). Yet in other countries socialist revolutionaries tied themselves to the Cross or to Islam. In Latin America a whole new brand of Roman Catholic theology evolved to reconcile socialism with the Church — Liberation Theology (the current Pope, Francis, has strong links to this strain of Catholicism, which centers on a “preferential option for the poor” and tends to portray Christ as a revolutionary figure.[4])
In short, modern socialism has an ambivalent relationship with religion, especially organized religion. According to the statistical analysts at FiveThirtyEight (working from a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute), Americans who are not religious “are 10 percent more socialist, on average, than religious Americans,” with the gap greater among older people than young (young people are more likely not to be religious regardless of politics).[5] Not being religious is also strongly correlated with the distinguishing features of the democratic socialists we have met — young, college educated, childless, living alone.
On the other hand, many of the poor and working-class constituencies that socialists court are much more religious. African American churches, for instance, have been major organizational forces in liberal politics for generations. Hispanic immigrants also tend to take religion seriously. Even white women are more religious than white men, according to most polls.
This puts socialists in a bind. Attacking religion itself is likely to put off people they need to attract. So modern American socialists tend to concentrate on one way to square this circle: the aggressive pursuit of separation of church and state.
Any separationist worth his salt will bend over backwards to say that all he wants to do is to ensure that the First Amendment’s strictures on religion are respected. State establishment of religion, he will contend, includes any attempt to prefer one religion over another, or over none at all. Thus it is fine to pray in school, but not fine for teachers or other school authorities to lead a prayer, or ask a student to do so. The courts have accepted this argument. As David French notes, “In a series of shocking Supreme Court cases, a progressive court elite destroyed the Protestant public school and ruthlessly disentangled Protestant church and state. School prayers? Gone. Daily Bible reading? Gone. Recitations of the Lord’s Prayer? Gone. Prohibitions on teaching evolution? Gone. The Ten Commandments on school walls? Nope, no longer. In a roughly twenty-year span, the edifice of America’s Christian public educational establishment was nuked from orbit.”[6]
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SOURCE: Christian Post, Iain Murray
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