Progressives and Religion: Response to a Response

My friend Trond Jacobsen has always been more tough-minded than me, and his eloquence makes his forcefulness go down easier. But in this instance, it is my turn to be tough-minded, in insisting that we not set up such rigid dichotomies between science and faith. Neither history or politics compels us to do so, and the false consciousness he attacks is the result of what particular religious institutions do in particular historical circumstances, due to particular social contradictions.

The reason those revolutionary priests in Nicaragua made such decisive contributions to their communities, the reason their contributions outweighed those of orthodox Marxists or other progressives in the United States (by and large, at least) is that what they did had more social weight; to use a rather worrisome term, they were in the thick of history. Circumstances existed where they could rationally, and passionately, choose a practical convergence of faith and method, acknowledging humanity's objective circumstances as well as subjective, problematic yearnings.

Maybe all spirituality is just bunk. Maybe it's all just a bad bit of cheese we ate the night before, as Scrooge said. Maybe it's false consciousness explained away by a radical anthropology. If that's the case, I can only answer:

1-that it will not go away just because a few people are brave enough to declare themselves atheists;
2-that that same irrational faith will and does make its way into the science of atheists, even some self-identified Marxists (it will go underneath their consciousness and take a different, and if history is any guide, possibly nefarious form);
3-that religion, superstition, spiritualism, what have you will possibly, then, go away when we reach a particular state of emancipatory development, but in the meantime, see #1.

Trond argues that humanist religions are weak-willed religions that, while not being oppressive per se, are distractions whose contributions to progressive politics are "exogenous to their more metaphysical assumptions." Of course, in the very rational language of academic debate, his argument is pure defense. These "softline" religions don't make things even remotely worse, and in quite many instances make things better, sometimes in spite of their adherents' faith, and (whether we socialist eggheads want to admit it or not) sometimes because of it.

But beyond that, I'm not sure what type of spiritual community he's attacking. I can only speak for my own experience among them, but Unitarians and Universalists are far from "crystal sniffers." A UU fellowship might not turn a crystal sniffer away, but you can be sure the sniffer would get a good dose of rational criticism, a lot of questions, and along the way, a social conscience and lots of training in social action. It's far more likely that, in the midst of this religious rationality, the sniffer would discover that crystal sniffing isn't all that useful, that it's a rather shallow kind of fetishization, and that there are more constructive (and probably less expensive) ways to access one's subjective yearnings.

I fully agree that humanity, life in general, cannot survive without a huge dose of science. My disagreement comes in my holding that the wholesale abandonment of faith is itself irrational and, I would think, unscientific. This is not only because for the past hundred years, the parameters and rules of science have expanded to include hitherto excluded elements of subjectivity, uncertainty, and (in praise of Douglas Adams) infinite improbability, although these shifts are important. More than this, it is because I am unconvinced that something as intrinsic to human consciousness as mystical, ineffable connectivity is really the cause of the kind of paralysis and oppressive apologia Trond rightly laments.

If Che Guervara, who certainly proved capable of killing when he held it necessary, can say in all earnestness that the revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love, I can reasonably hold that spirituality, far from being the inevitable handmaiden of oppressive religion, can motivate us to do great things, very rational things. You won't find too many people out there with stronger feelings than mine about the separation of church and state or people's responsibility to check their metaphysics at the door before participating in political life. And I would not exempt any religious hierarchy from the materialist criticism I apply to all social hierarchy. But ultimately, religion should belong to the people. That doesn't preclude criticizing it, scrapping it, changing it, making fun of it, forcing it to be accountable to rational human conduct. It just means I'm not going to talk about abolishing it. That's a decision the children of the revolution can make. Maybe they won't need to. As Engels said in the context of whether a socialist society would choose to limit population growth: Leave it up to them. They will presumably be at least as smart as we are.

The truest statement in his reply is that "faith and religious and metaphysics function in the current social order in a net regressive fashion." I can't help but think this betrays an acknowledgment, however grudging, that this question is much more about the social order than "religion." I think we have a better chance of turning people away from brutal and hateful (or socially regressive) enactment of their religious beliefs by acknowledging the sublime than by sneering at it.