Socialism and Religion ~~ The Socialist Party of Great Britain ~~ Introduction by Adam Buick

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlet/socialism-and-religion/

~~ Thanks to Red Robbo for this contribution:  "October 12 is Freethought Day so the theme of Socialism and Religion seems appropriate.  Banish gods from the skies and capitalists from the earth!"

INTRODUCTION by Adam Buick

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This pamphlet was first published by the Socialist Party of Great Britain in London in 1910. It proved so popular that a new edition was brought out the following year. This was not surprising in that the pamphlet is well-written and well-argued but also because, at that time and for half-a-century afterwards, the main outlet for putting across the case for socialism was the outdoor platform.

It was here that new contacts were made and socialist pamphlets and journals sold. But who else was to be found speaking on the same street corners and in the same parks but open-air preachers urging workers to “Come to Jesus”? In other words, explaining and refuting religion wasn’t just a philosophical exercise; it was a practical necessity.

In America those other soap-box orators the Wobblies, as the members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were popularly known, adopted a more down-to-earth solution to the same problem. They took the tunes of the Christian hymns that groups like the Salvation Army made destitute workers sing as a price for being given a meal and a bed and changed the words. The first verse of the best of these adaptations “The Preacher and the Slave”, to be sung to the tune of “In the Sweet Bye and Bye” with words by IWW songster Joe Hill (later executed on a trumped-up murder charge), goes as follows:

Long-haired preachers come out ev’ry night,

Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right:

But when asked about something to eat,

They will answer with voices so sweet;

You will eat (you will eat) bye and bye (bye and bye)

In that glorious land above the sky (way up high)

Work and pray (work and pray), live on hay (live on hay),

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die (that’s a lie).

Two radically different messages were being put across to workers. One was that this life “down here” was only important as a preparation for the next life after death which, depending on whether or not you adhered to the precepts of Christianity, would either be eternal bliss or eternal hell-fire. The other – the materialist, socialist view – was that this was the only life we are going to have and that workers should therefore concentrate on making it the best possible; which could only, be done on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the means of living. This – socialism – was what they, should be striving for rather than preparing themselves for some non-existent future life.

The pamphlet, which the September 1954 Socialist Standard disclosed had been drafted by Socialist Party of Great Britain founder member F.C. Watts, defined religion in the following way:

“The fundamental idea of religion is a belief in the persistence of life after death. Originally, and in essence throughout, religion is a belief in the existence of supernatural beings, and the observance of rites and ceremonies in order to avert their anger or gain their goodwill”.

There are two ways of opposing religion. One is to refute it as untrue, to show that there are no rational grounds, because there is no convincing evidence, for believing either in “the persistence of life after death” or in “the existence of supernatural beings”. This is the approach of the Secularists and Freethinkers and of course what they say, is true, but this leaves the impression that religion is merely an erroneous belief It leads to concentrating on refuting religious beliefs as such in a purely ideological battle while leaving everything else, including class society and capitalist relations of production, unchanged.

The second way to oppose religion – which is the way of this pamphlet – is to explain its origins, development and role in materialist terms as an ideological product of the changing material economic and social conditions under which people have lived. This approach reveals religion to be a reflection of people’s lack of control over the conditions governing the production of their material means of survival and that it survives precisely because people lack this control.

On this analysis, opposition to religion cannot be separated from opposition to the economic and social conditions that give rise to it. Religion won’t disappear simply because Secularists and Freethinkers, or for that matter Socialists, refute it as untrue. It will only disappear when people are in a position to control the production of their means of life. This requires the end of the class ownership of the means of production and the end of production for the market with a view to profit and their replacement by common ownership and production directly and exclusively for use.

In other words, religion cannot disappear until the conditions of which it is an ideological reflection disappear. Criticism of religion leads, or ought logically to lead, to criticism of society. As Marx put it in the famous passage in the Introduction to his 1844 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (which is quoted in this pamphlet but from the French version since the work was not then available in English):

“Religion is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion”.

In its time Socialism and Religion was a best-seller not only in Britain but in North America too. Here it received a boost from an eccentric Episcopalian bishop, William Montgomery Brown, who reproduced extensive passages from it at the beginning of his book ‘Communism and Christianism’, which went through twelve editions between 1920 and 1928, and whose front cover proclaimed “Banish Gods From Skies and Capitalists from Earth”.

Socialism and Religion can be described as a socialist classic and its republication has been long overdue.

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Please follow link above to:

A CLEAR AND EXHAUSTIVE EXPOSITION OF THE SOCIALIST POSITION IN RELATION TO RELIGION

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