Church and Revolution

Continuing the Conversation between Christianity and Marxism

Simon Hewitt

• Publisher: Sacristy Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789590937
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Christianity and Marxism are often thought to be irreconcilable. This book argues that this is not the case. It looks at four central focuses of the alleged conflict—atheism, materialism, revolution, and ethics—and shows that in each case tensions can be dissolved. Not only that, butworking through the alleged difficulties sheds new light on both Christianity and Marxism and demonstrates that each has something to say to the contemporary world.

Notes

1 Thus The Times the weekend before we set off.

2 Carlo Giuliani was a twenty-three-year-old Italian anarchist shot dead by police, who then reversed a van over his body, during the Genoa protests. The film Carlo Giuliani, Boy (2002, general release) details his killing.

3 To get a sense of the kind of politics in which Corbyn was formed see Tony Benn’s essays, Arguments for Socialism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980). Political writing dates rapidly at the moment, but Richard Seymour’s book is still a useful guide: Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 2017).

4 I thought about writing “creeds” here, but that is misleading. Both Christianity and Marxism are before anything else practices, ways of existing in the world. Christianity is first and foremost the collective practice of responding to what Christians take to be God’s act of self-communication in Christ. Marxism is first and foremost the practice of criticizing society in concert with the struggle for working-class self-emancipation. Both involve believing certain propositions, and it is with this cognitive side of things that I will mainly be concerned here, but both are so much more.

5 Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror (London: Verso, 2015).

6 I’m leaving the north of Ireland out of consideration here, except by way of the influence of the DUP. The best accessible account of the manipulation of religious divisions in Ireland in the service of British rule remains the early parts of Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town, 3rd edition (Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2018).

7 Grouped around the hard-right-wing fundamentalist Stephen Green, this group gives the impression of not having many members other than Green. Its website <https://www.christianvoice.org.uk/> is often unintentionally hilarious to those not signed up to its brand of stern biblicism. When I checked it on 20 February 2019, I learned that there had been “open-air prayer in West Ham”, no doubt an event of great theologico-political importance, and I was told that the “Sussex Chief Constable had dishonoured his uniform at Gay Pride”. This last story was a good deal less interesting than the strapline might suggest.

8 Andrew Collier, Christianity and Marxism: A Philosophical Contribution to their Reconciliation (London: Taylor & Francis, 2001).

9 Pelagianism being the view, regarded as heretical, that humanity can be redeemed (in the sense in which Christians mean that word) without Christ.

10 The University of Hull, announcing the closure of philosophy programmes in late 2018, cited directly the needs of “business partners”. See <http://dailynous.com/2018/12/19/philosophy-hull-threatened-heads-39-uk-philosophy-departments-object/>. Thankfully the subsequent outcry won a reprieve, a valuable lesson in fighting back.

11 Karl Marx (1843), A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction. Available at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.html>.

12 On this see Denys Turner, “Marxism, Liberation and the Way of Negation”, in Christopher Rowland (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 229–47; and Alistair Kee, Marx and the Failure of Liberation Theology (London: SCM Press, 1990). The debate about the use of Marxist tools by Christian theologians has been most intense around Latin American liberation theology. A handy guide is Rosino Gibellini, The Liberation Theology Debate (London: SCM Press, 1987).

13 The focus on belief might seem surprising. In contemporary philosophy of religion there has been a movement against an excessive focus on belief at the expense of practice, often allied to political concerns. See e.g. Scrutton and Hewitt, “Philosophy of Living Religion: an Introduction”, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 79:4 (2018), pp. 349–54. Marx, however, differs from the mainstream of contemporary philosophy of religion in taking seriously the nature of belief as a socially situated phenomenon. Religious belief arises in definite social circumstances, and it is the relationship between the two which provides the material for his critique.

14 Marx (1843), Contribution.

15 Ludwig Feuerbach (1841), The Essence of Christianity. Available at <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/>.

16 Karl Marx (1844), “On Alienated Labour”, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

17 “[I]t has to be noted that everything which appears in the worker as an activity of alienation, of estrangement, appears in the non-worker as a state of alienation, of estrangement”, Marx (1844).

18 Of course, the fight against class society might, in particular circumstances, require attacks on particular forms of religious consciousness (and no Christian socialist should think otherwise!), but that is a matter of tactics rather than of first principles.

19 The New Atheists are usually thought to include at least Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris.

20 Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, 4th edition (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), p. 255.

21 See the essays in Mikel Burley (ed.), Wittgenstein, Religion, and Ethics: New Perspectives from Philosophy and Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

22 Well, that’s not quite true: there is one (curious, and very bad) argument for atheism in the 1844 Manuscripts. See Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 170 ff. for details.

23 What does ‘have for’ mean here? It depends if you are looking at things from the perspective of the atheist or the theist. Roughly things are as follows (no doubt finessing is needed to catch stray cases.) For the Feuerbachian atheist, I can say something truthfully of God only if I deny that same thing of humanity. For the “Feuerbachian” theist, for all F in a significant class, God is F only if no human being is F. The reason that the two versions of the dilemma are phrased in significantly different ways is, of course, that the theist believes that God exists, whereas the atheist doesn’t.

24 Karl Marx (1844), “Private Property and Communism”, Manuscripts.

25 The key figure is Aquinas. Turner has written an excellent introduction: Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). Aquinas’ most important work, the Summa Theologiae (STh), is available at <http://www.newadvent.org/summa/>.

26 Denys Turner, “Feuerbach, Marx and reductivism”, in Brian Davies (ed....