The Religion Trap People say: “Our problem is that we have to ‘get right with God.’ ‘The Lord’ will provide—he won’t let us down.” If praying to Jesus, or Allah, did any good, then the past 20 years would have been decades of great advance for African-American people—because Black people have been praying like never before! But instead, these have been two decades of horror and despair: the pumping of crack into the ghettos and the promotion of the fratricidal drug trade as the way out for the youth and, with that, the nightmare imprisonment of huge numbers of African-American youth, along with the pervasive, never-ending harassment and brutality, and the constant threat of murder, at the hands of the police; the further rotting out of the inner cities, drained of jobs and resources; the heightening oppression and degradation of women, in thousands of ways; the demonization of Black people in the dominant culture; and so on. All this praying has done nothing to prevent these horrors. But it cuts way deeper than that. Religion is just wrong. It tells people to seek make-believe causes (“straying from the path of God”) for the real problems people face and to fight make-believe enemies (“the devil”) instead of the real-live ones who must be defeated. It tells people to put their faith in make-believe non-existent saviors—instead of understanding the world as it is, struggling to change it, and building unity on that basis. Religion, even the most “progressive” type of religion which includes a call to people to stand up against oppression, nevertheless in the end preaches to people that they cannot really understand reality and overcome oppression and win liberation on their own, but must ultimately rely on some non-existent god (or gods) to lead them to salvation, if not in this world, then in the next. In short, religion is a chain on people’s thinking. Ask yourself this: Why have the oppressors, since slavery days, not only allowed but overall encouraged and supported the Black Church, helping to build it up as a key institution in Black communities, working with it and promoting it as a “refuge” for Black people? And why, today, are the churches being given all kinds of money to set up “prison ministries”—while the educational opportunities in prison are being cut? On top of all that, today the ruling class of imperialists is building up a core of reactionary fundamentalist preachers, including among African-American clergy, as part of a Christian-fascist movement designed to get people to support all kinds of reactionary and oppressive actions and relations, to fight in, or to actively and aggressively support, wars against oppressed people in other countries, in the service of the U.S. empire, to clamp down further on resistance to all this within the U.S. and make this already heavily repressive society qualitatively more repressive. Of course, many religious people do stand up against oppression, and the revolutionary movement should unite with such people. But religious thinking cannot set the terms for the struggle, and those who do understand the importance of taking a scientific approach to the causes and cures for this oppression need to step up and help people get emancipated from these mental chains. It’s time to get rid of this poisonous nonsense about “God will provide” and “Thank you Jesus” or “God willing”—time to quit saying “I’m blessed,” look reality in the eye, and recognize instead: “We’re oppressed!” And then set about joining together in the here and now to do something about it. As pointed to in the passage cited from Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, the Civil War itself came about because of the clash between two different economic and social systems: slavery, based on plantation farming in the South; and capitalism, based on factory and other wage-labor centered in the North. The slave owners needed more land because their plantation system of farming used up the land so fast, while the northern capitalists wanted to control the country as a whole, both for resources and to further develop their control of the national market. By the time of the Civil War, these two forces—these two social systems—were clashing on virtually every major question of economics. For example, factory production was just getting going in the North, and these northern capitalists wanted to erect high tariffs (in effect, taxes on imported goods) to secure the U.S. national market and “protect” their industries against the English capitalists, who could produce things much more cheaply; but the slave-holders insisted on low tariffs to enable them to easily trade with those same English manufacturers. And these basic economic conflicts found expression in politics, culture, and even religion—the Baptist and Methodist churches, among others, split into northern and southern branches over the “godliness” (or “ungodliness”) of slavery! Why? Simply because people in the North had become enlightened? No. While there was a surge of more radical thinking in the North in the decades prior to the Civil War, and militant opponents of slavery such as Frederick Douglass and John Brown began to get a hearing and gain a following, this was ultimately an expression of more fundamental changes going on in the economic base of society—that is, the relations that people enter into to carry out production—and the intensifying contradictions within that economic base, and between that economic base and the political structure which had arisen on top of it. In short, slavery had changed from being the stimulus that it was in the early days of capitalism into a fetter on the development of capitalism. The constitution that served the economic base of 1789—a constitution which legalized and institutionalized slavery—could no longer contain the intensified contradictions of 1860. Abraham Lincoln himself, the president of the United States during the time of the Civil War, was the political representative of the bourgeoisie—the factory-owners, railroad-owners, and other capitalists centered in the North—and he fought the war in their interests. In the view of Lincoln, the power of the slave states had to be at minimum sharply curtailed; and it was only when he was convinced that there was no other way forward that he went to war. Similarly, Lincoln delayed emancipating the slaves and then delayed allowing the slaves to enlist in the Union army until he was convinced that there was no other way to carry out his basic aim of “saving the Union.” Lincoln himself said: My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.18
Posted on: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 16:23:35 +0000
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