Makes way more sense than Christian liberalism
Oh for sure. If you actually follow the CHRIST part in Christian. Dude was pretty clear on where he stood on shit. Then you have the apostles who muddy the water and have been taken out of context.
I got where I am today because I actually read the Bible and thought through things and wasn’t in the church that much when I was older. Having a wife who studied the things in college in original languages didn’t hurt either.
I often use phrases from Jesus when discussing things with people IRL. Helps in a lot of ways in America.
About as well as you can be a ‘compatible leftist’. You’re gonna hear a lot of crap about liberation theology, early anabaptism, and other insignificant fringe sects that were crushed by the larger institutional powers for not being evil enough. This is cope. The people going on about it can tell you right away why a political party cant be ‘fixed from inside’ but theyll put their fingers in their ears if you apply that to a religious institution. The same process of cooption and marginalization would neutralize any ‘Christian socialist’ movement easily. Communism begins where atheism begins.
“Liberation theology” is such a hollow buzzword the way it gets used most of the time on sites like this. People just use the phrase but few of them have anything to say about the, you know, theology, because it’s just something they think is cool for other people in some weird condescending way and not something they have any belief in to begin with.
See this thread.
Then there is zero chance of a revolution in the US. You’re not going to convince 250+ million people that their religious beliefs are wrong, actually.
We weren’t about to convince them that their supremacist beliefs were wrong either. The US is the beating heart of evil. The revolutionary potential is about as low as it can possibly be anywhere on earth.
Gestures wildly at liberation theology and the historical record
christian socialist makes more sense than a christian communist, given its transitional nature. i’ve seen material on here which unequivocally excludes all religion from dialectical materialism but we live in a material universe whether it was created or not
You can be a Christian socialist/communist, many of those have existed since well before Marxism and many exist today, but the idea of Christian Marxism is nonsense. You can’t have diamat and also have this being that exists above material reality who performs miracles as He pleases, has encoded the world with objective moral law and with goals that precede humanity, and demands faith-based devotion to the former.
absolutely! Hugo Chavez was
It is required. The Bible says so. You could have asked the anabaptists of Munster about it.
Would the same people saying “you can be Christian and socialist” also say “you can be Muslim and socialist?”
I’m genuinely curious what the point you are making is. Are you saying it needs to be “the right type” of Christianity, like a Unitarian Universalist pseudo-Christianity?
My point is that most people saying “liberation theology is compatible with socialism” won’t say the same about other religions. And the reason why is because they are just Christians trying to reconcile their faith with their politics rather than making a broader point on the compatibility between religion and politics.
To me at least, “to what extend is Twelver Shi’ism compatible with socialism” or “to what extend is political Islam compatible with socialism” are more meaningful questions than “to what extend is liberation theology compatible with socialism” because liberation theology isn’t a very relevant social movement while political Islam is extraordinary relevant in contemporary times. Political Islam could be broadly split between various Salafist/Wahhabist groups and various Shia groups. It’s a question that demands a better answer than “Religion sucks, so Islam sucks too by virtue of being a religion” or “Liberation theology is compatible with socialism, so political Shi’ism is compatible too because political Shi’ism is just liberation theology with Imam Hussain characteristics.”
I guess it depends on where, but a place like here generally has the “liberation theology” types take a Unitarian Universalist approach like you describe at the very end of your comment.
I agree with your point about political salience, even if ultimately I do fall into the “religion sucks” camp.
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As someone that used to be a Christian socialist (to be specific I’m ex-eastern orthodox), I would say kind of. Its theoretically possible, and indeed there are many Christian socialists, but there is an intense contradiction between believing in a materialist ideology and an idealist religion; and furthermore, believing in both will require you to pick and choose between beliefs and principles of the two as many Christian beliefs are incompatible with any kind of principled socialism and vice-versa. With few exceptions Christianity today serves to pacify and distract the working class; churches the world over are deeply entrenched in solidarity with the capitalist class and imperialist hegemony. By and large the clergy are just as much our enemy as the capitalists themselves; you should burn the church within yourself and then some physical ones for good measure.
We need to push Christian Socialism a la “Jesus was a Socialist” to reach the working class in the US South. It is simply too big a part of a super majority of people down here to attack Christianity head-on. I believe the lack of progress in the Dixie states by all orgs stems from a bunch of us bring rightfully distant from the church.
I wouldn’t have been this involved in Politics if it wasn’t to beat back all of those anti-LGBT bigots around me. “God’s love” = an excuse to be a piece of shit to anyone that isn’t straight, white, male, and Republican
This is tailism. We have business only in advocating for what is true and not what we think will let us condescendingly pander to people we apparently have total contempt for so they will rally behind a platform that isn’t actually what we believe. Reinforcing political organization on the basis of religious authority is just playing with a live grenade when we already have reactionaries doing enough of that, and will inevitably lead to further marginalization of religious minorities and other groups.
I see this everywhere on the Left where people care more about being “correct” than winning. I personally don’t know who or what is up there, could be Zeus for all we know, but I do know probably 80% or more of the people around me are 100% sure about Christianity. If I have to play into their book to reach them so be it.
I don’t want to sit in a reading group for the rest of my life waiting for all of the normies to be 100% correct and on our side. When has that ever worked? Also WTF would we think walking up to some Christian and saying “your God is fake, read Marx” is going to do anything but get your ass whooped?
You didn’t address about half of what I said where I tried to explain it to you, so it is no surprise that you are also completely misrepresenting my position. You are just making the same crass tailist mistakes in reasoning that people have been making for over a century in what you suppose is the interest of socialism. It’s not about the “normies” (lovely nomenclature) being “100% correct,” it is about getting people on your side without empowering reactionaries or premising your stance on condescending lies. You don’t understand anything at all about political movements if you think someone supporting you means they are “100%” in agreement with you, and it is in fact quite unreasonable to think the majority base of a socialist movement is going to be nearly that aligned as opposed to working on the basic premise of class interests.
I am also not saying we must be deboooonking Christianity to the masses and demanding they be atheists – I have never and will never say that is an effective method of communist organizing – but being a Christian does not mean all of your opinions come from the Bible or your pastor or some Christian lifestyle influencer, you still need to eat and to have a roof over your head. What we should advocate for is a secular government that isn’t predicated itself on any sort of religious fealty, though members of the public may follow religions as they wish that aren’t breaking secular laws regarding abuse, etc. This is already a pretty normal and uncontroversial idea to most Americans, though even if it wasn’t it would still be what we should fight for because persecuting religious people is not a good method of fighting religion.
If you aren’t fighting for what is correct, victory means nothing except that the reactionary rulership has a personnel change.
I’ve seen this “you didn’t respond to everything” point a few time and it comes across as rude. You are not entitled to a full response to everything you say, and I will choose what to respond to and when to respond to it.
I am also against this notion that we can’t do politics unless we are 100% correct on every point. That isn’t how power is won. Advocate all you want, but I would rather take power by showing Christians that they can interpret their religion from a Socialist lense instead of prosperity gospel corporate mega-church BS. Politics is not a game of “who is more correct”, it’s “who has the most power and control” and that will never be us if we aren’t able to bend and organize people from where they are rather than where we want them to be.
I’ve seen this “you didn’t respond to everything” point a few time and it comes across as rude. You are not entitled to a full response to everything you say, and I will choose what to respond to and when to respond to it.
Don’t give me lectures on being rude, you don’t give a shit about rudeness and are just using it as a cudgel. You’ve been actually rude to me many times (which is whatever, this isn’t me prompting for an apology, I’ve been rude too), so clearly this isn’t something you care about but just a tool for this “it’s not my job to educate you”-style radlib nonsense.
Huh, turns out pandering to values that you don’t actually hold makes you look silly! Who could have guessed? Maybe you can apply that to the present topic.
Much “ruder” is misrepresenting my position and talking past me because I already explained a point.
I am also against this notion that we can’t do politics unless we are 100% correct on every point.
I am curious if you can explain what this even means. Obviously no one is “100%” correct, and no platform or party is either and I never said they had to be. What I said is that you should try as Best you can to come to correct conclusions and then not deliberately support incorrect conclusions (i.e. lie to people) for what you view as political experience.
Politics is not a game of “who is more correct”, it’s “who has the most power and control”
I’ve already addressed this, but I’m not actually disagreeing with this characterization of politics, the difference that I’m arguing for is not that being honest is the most expedient way to gain power, it is often not, but that it is the only way to have real democracy (where people have agency to choose their representation based on genuine platforms), and therefore the only way to have actual socialism.
You can win by lying, for example you can get lots of money and public support by denying the genocide in Gaza depending on where you are, but taking power on that platform fundamentally means abandoning socialism and becoming part of the machine.
This is literally the problem also with the “vote blue no matter who” people, that they don’t believe in advancing their own agenda except for having someone painted blue winning. They don’t actually gain power that way, because that power rests on the support of reactionaries (or more often, they just lose to people who are even more reactionary, but even in their ideal scenario they are ultimately still failing). I am describing the attitude of members of the public who sign on to this idea, obviously the pols and consultants themselves generally don’t care about or are actively opposed to advancing progressive policy in the first place and this is just a trick.
So what I am saying is not that honesty is best for getting power but that it is necessary for maintaining the “who” in “who has power”. Does that make sense? Becoming a backwards political novement to get support from reactionaries just makes you another reactionary and makes the conversation about who gets power meaningless.
and that will never be us if we aren’t able to bend and organize people from where they are rather than where we want them to be.
Here radlib language is useful, because you should meet people where they are at, but you cannot be content to leave them where they are at. It is the job of a vanguard to agitate the public to support socialism, not to act like the baby communists on reddit saying “well actually we shouldn’t call it socialism but actually super patriotism!”
I see this talking point from Piker and his followers constantly, he uses it for example to justify using ableist slurs because “that’s how normal people talk”, and this is a backwards view, a capitulation to ableism that doesn’t serve any progressive purpose (but let’s be real, he uses a lot of this shit just to defuse any criticism because he almost never admits to ideological fault, ever, which should be a sign of dogmatic fossilization from a socialist perspective). Also it’s used for his weird entryist nonsense, but we don’t need to get into that.
I think the main point I have that you would find more agreeable is that there are some battles worth fighting at a given time and some things are not. That does not mean you need to agree to reactionary nonsense, you just need to identify in each instance what is most important to counter and leave the rest for later. Someone using ableist slurs and also engaging in, idk, supporting anti-immigrant policy should be argued with on that latter basis, but there is no need to yourself use ableist slurs in the meantime.
I think you’ll find this to be consistent with the thought experiment about the old black woman you made up, that I believe we should be getting people on the same page about more urgent matters (does community defense require participation from the community?) rather than struggle over things that have very little urgency (does God exist?) when there are urgent matters. Of course, I believe that the platform itself should be materialist, but that doesn’t mean your supporters will all be, especially not immediately.
I thought of another point for your hypothetical, so let’s see if I can edit it in the other comment before your see it . . .
The talk with the woman is not purely hypothetical. I’ve had that kind of conversation at the doors and although it wasn’t exactly like that I had at least one person tell me “I vote for who God wants me to vote for”, and variations of “I don’t participate because all of this is God’s plan”.
I see your rebuttals and am going to disengage. I have that “purity” complaint about the people left of me. I accept that I am politically not the best fit with this site and we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
One point I will bring up is this repeated assumption that I want to lie to people? I do not want to lie to anybody. When I talk about pushing Socialism from a Christian perspective, I mean talking to these people that I encounter in the south and telling them to look at their New Testament harder. Notice what Jesus did and how he was against wealth, helped the sick and poor, and was clear about that many times. Capitalism isn’t praised in the Bible, that’s the made up stuff that evangelicals and prosperity gospel people push!
I believe we can go very far in the south by getting the non-evangelical Christian to spend more time in the New Testament, put it up against current events, and move them away from Leviticus and other hateful parts of the religion. It’s the same religion, just focused on different parts of the book. That is going to be 100x easier than trying to get that person who spent every Sunday of her 70+ years in a church to disavow the whole bible.
I don’t believe you mean this but just to be clear you’re not saying people with Christian beliefs is reactionary in itself?
I think the appeals to Christ’s progressivism will ultimately be hollow at scale if it’s being pushed by self-admitted atheists. I also have a softer view on negative rather than positive assertions in this realm if we mean interpersonal dealings, e.g. to me there is a great difference between pointing out that their Bible does not say what they claim it does versus telling them that they should believe something because the Bible says so and they are Christians (also the Bible is extremely inconsistent and self-contradictory anyway, so a lot of that would basically be quote-mining).
As I have said several times, I have no interest in deboonking the Bible to the public (except in the occasional cases we have probably both encountered of someone drifting away from their faith and being receptive to such things). Party platforms do not exist to make the public perfectly adhere to them and criteria for support is not the same as criteria for party membership. Criteria for support is just supporting without stirring shit, and there are many people who would support a materialist platform on the basis of class interest, which is the primary goal.
I don’t believe you mean this but just to be clear you’re not saying people with Christian beliefs is reactionary in itself?
Interesting phrasing. The short answer is that I have no interest in fighting people on it, but fundamentally basically yes, I do believe that. I believe the world would be improved by less religious belief (this is usually called “anti-theism”) and I believe that a vanguard must operate from a materialist standpoint that precludes ideas of divine intervention, divine teleology or morality, etc. These are all concepts that would fundamentally interfere with materialist reasoning. If someone is religious but is willing to engage with the subject from a materialist standpoint, then that is fine.
I don’t believe in engaging in any form of religious persecution or attacking people for not being atheists or anything like that. My belief is that with better material conditions, more agency in your life, and better education (and an absence of billionaire ghouls boosting evangelicalism, etc.), religiosity will become increasingly defunct, something that has already been observed happening in the real world for over a century.
So I am an anti-theist, but I am very peaceable about it, unlike how I address many other matters (such as in this conversation).
Let’s say I go knocking on doors in a black working-class neighborhood and a 70-year-old African American woman answers the door. She’s been going to church her entire life. She doesn’t know anything about Socialism but knows a highway project is about to displace some of her neighbors, cause noise pollution, oh and her fixed income isn’t buying as many groceries as it used to. But she says “God will protect me”
What are you saying to this person?
Is she saying that because God will protect her, she does not believe in taking action? I would simply say that I do believe we need to take action and she should pay close attention to what ends up happening and why. I don’t need to get into a theological debate, nor do I need to validate her beliefs. She is still a thinking human who presumably wants to not live in squalor, so she can see for herself either the community successfully defending itself or it failing to do so and judge from that if “God is protecting her”. I would not say that last part, obviously, the point is that she figures it out herself, and if she doesn’t, then I personally am not equipped to reach her anyway and hopefully the community encourages her or something. You can’t reach everyone.
If she is not saying it to not take action but just as a statement about personal feelings (which I think is much more realistic), then it doesn’t matter and I would leave it be.
Edit: it of course would be worth pointing out that there have all through history been communities of faithful Christians (and people of all faiths) that have been forcibly displaced. It’s worth asking her what she thinks of it, but if she says that in her case it is different just like evangelicals believing the rapture will happen in their lifetimes when generations of their ancestors died believing the same thing, then see my original point because I don’t think I can directly reach someone like that, nor is it all that important unless this is a widespread community belief.
We need to stop acting like it’s not psychotic to believe a magic wizard controls everything.
yes this is how we will reach the masses
Let’s denormalize deadly delusion. It’s claiming nore victims every day.
You are correct, but the way you are talking about it in the earlier comment is performative reddit atheism. I have full belief that you can talk about it in a more measured way and actually succeed in helping people.
People are dying. Instead of pretending “reddit atheist” is some kind of valid criticism, help spread the important information that more people need to understand: “god exists” is an assumption, and it is deadly to treat assumptions as facts. Magical thinking is unacceptably selfish and never should have been normalized.
My point is that if you want people to listen to you, explaining the dangerousness of Christianity with due severity is fine but the performative shit is rhetorically repulsive and will only help you feel better about yourself while no one is convinced. If you actually care about helping people, then you need to be able to successfully talk to them.
“god exists” is an assumption, and it is deadly to treat assumptions as facts.
There is no such thing as operating without premises (“assumptions”), and if you fail to recognize this then you’ll fall into a scientism cult or something.
You structurally cannot make an argument without assuming the truth of your premises, if you argue for their truth, they are conclusions rather than premises and you used some other premises to support them, which themselves are being assumed. You cannot escape the necessity of assumption, you can only strive to have intellectual integrity about what those assumptions are.
Fuck you for calling it performative. You let other people ruin the idea of calling out bullshit for you, which is weak as fuck.
Your cowardice is costing human lives. Do better. Thanks.
I think it depends on what you need.
Personal, non-institutional practice is kind of beyond reproach in isolation (unless you’re talking to somebody who reads Marx and co. dogmatically or something, but those folks can safely be ignored as having missed the point before they even got started)
But you can’t… you cannot make the catholic church socialist by trying to be a socialist AND a catholic, and both your catholicism and your socialism will be impaired by the dissonance you will feel. Protestant and catholic churches are all, as an institution, deeply embedded in the history of anti-socialist and reactionary politics.
I have private religious practices. I will even congregate with other people to read and study (we’re talking one, maybe two people) - and I basically mark it like this - my spiritual and religious tendencies are for organizing my interior - my priorities, my actions, my symbolic understanding of reality, all comes from a religious place, and that place is deeply rooted in christian (well it’s increasingly more islamic these days) belief.
Marxism is the core of how I navigate the external world. It’s the main toolset i use to understand politics at any scale. It’s what I use to theorize/imagine how to build a better life for myself and others.
But it’s really not useful for spiritual matters. Lots of key figures explicitly only analyze religion of any sort (though a lot of marxist-speaks-on-religion material i’ve read has a really huge problem with reducing belief to being something that is essentially a european flavor of christianity and it sucks) through the lens of its material political expression.
This isn’t useless, but it absolutely isn’t useful for understanding the value of belief systems in terms of what it’s actually useful for, which is the transformation of self and identity.
You can be Christian and socialist. You can’t be catholic, or protestant, and socialist, if that makes sense?
like a socialist brand of christianity would need to emerge in dialogue, joining other socialists who are christian to define how their belief structures integrate with the larger marxist project, and in that context you will basically always have certain types of people who are mad you’re even around them, having that conversation.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
No. “Christian” relies on “christ” which is a human sacrifice sent by an abusive god to die to appease that same abusive god, and if you don’t submit to him completely you get punished. It’s pure authoritarianism, violent fascism. In christianity, god owns everything, including human beings.
Fascism is much more historically specific than that. It’s not “when one guy tells everyone what to do” or “when you hold that lots of people deserve death/torture” or whatever the meaning being used here is.
Merriam-Webster definitions:
a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition
God is the dictator, his chosen people are the race, the promised land is the nation, he gives commands for how to own slaves and what to do with money, and he forcibly suppresses opposition.
a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
He fits this definition as well.
What do you think is missing that prevents us from describing the biblical god (and therefore christianity itself) as fascist? The abrahamic faiths are all fascist death cults.
Merriam-Webster, as rightly (now) a mainly descriptivist account of language, can tell you about how terms are popularly used but is not a great source for actual political philosophy. This definition makes “fascism” basically a synonym for “nationalist tyranny” and has very little in it that can separate Mussolini from countless figures that predate him and most of the social and economic conditions that were the basis for his movement.
Fascism is a form of society produced by capitalists using their control over the state as a way of maintaining the power of private property controlled and eradicating socialists. It exists as a reaction against internationalism and the socialization of ownership and has as a critical element the popular support of the petite bourgeoisie seeking to preserve their standing under the perceived threat of the system coming apart.
Some other notes: your idea of a “nation” is anachronistic; God cannot really be compared with an earthly ruler unless it’s like a Pharoah situation and the God is basically a myth for legitimizing an actual real head of state; and God’s actions even more so cannot really be understood as actions of an earthly state and should not be politically analyzed that way because it’s all supernatural fancy disconnected from real human political structures. This last point is compounded by the fact that both the Bible and most interpretations of it make a clear distinction between human political organizing and “the Kingdom of Heaven”. Vibes and free-associations don’t make for good political analysis or even theology.
Christofascism is a real thing, you can have fascist movements that are Christian and indeed there are many in the world right now, but that does not make Christian theology itself fascist.
An authoritarian death cult, then?
I still think “fascist” applies, personally, I disagree with your arbitrary gatekeeping.
Gatekeeping?
I agree that Christianity is a death cult, so we can be glad to have found agreement there. I think the extent to which it is “authoritarian” depends heavily on the sect, since again obedience to God that has no actual state enforcement is just a religion having values, and we shouldn’t treat the idea of God punishing infidels and heretics as being the same as human governance. As a great counterexample, check out Imperial Shintoism, where actual fascist governance was part of the religion. You can also look at the religious views of Christian nationalists, who again make enforcing their religious morality the business of the state, or Hindutvas or any number of other examples.
