An original study of religion in history

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Fully automated production has been a fantasy of factory owners since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The advantages make the capitalists fairly drool at the mouth.

Just picture a factory full of machines and no workers! The machines never go on vacation, don't require coffee breaks, can operate around the clock, never talk back or strike, and are perfectly content to operate without pay-checks.

Rationalizing production has been an ongoing effort, especially since the introduction of the assembly line and Taylorism (time and motion studies) at the turn of the century. Even to this day, with the introduction of industrial robots and computer technology, the modern corporation still requires a sizeable manufacturing force and a large support staff of office workers.

An expansion of services and corporate functions has so far blunted the reduction in the manufacturing sector. But the capitalist class, faced with a structural crisis, is indeed planning a qualitative re-industri -Boston Socialist Action P.O. Box 1046 GMF Boston, MA 02205 (617) 391-7087 Chicago Socialist Action P.O. Box 267848 Chicago, IL 60626 Cincinnati Socialist P.O. Box 37029 Cincinnati, OH 45222 (513) 272-2596 Clovoland Socialist P.O. Box 6151 Cleveland, OH 44101 (216) 429-2167 The Meek and the Militant: Religion and Power Across the World, by Paul N. Siegel. Zed Books, London, 1986. Available from Humanities Press, 171 First Ave., Atlantic Highlands, N.J. 07716. 229 pages. $35 hard-cover, $12.50 paperback.

Religion is basically a ruling-class conspiracy to keep the superstitious masses under control-right? That's what Marxists say—right? No, wrong on both counts!

It seems, however, that most people believe the Marxist view of religion to be purely condemnatory. Even leaving aside the right-wing hysteria about "godless communism," the general perception is that since BOOK REVIEW Marxists are atheists, they must more or less share the outlook of eccentric anti-religious crusaders like Madelyn Murray O'Hare.

Paul Siegel, a Marxist scholar, has produced a masterful refutation of this erroneous notion. He surveys the role of religion in human affairs over the past few thousand years and demonstrates that the Marxist view is anything but simplistic.

From the Jewish wars against the Roman Empire to the peasant wars of the radical reformation to liberation theology and Islamic radicalism today, religion has frequently served as an ideology of the oppressed in struggle against their oppressors. Religion, then, has not always and everywhere been a purely reactionary phenomenon; it has at times revealed a progressive and even revolutionary aspect.

An 18th-century view The one-sided view of religion as a conspiracy of the ruling class, Siegel shows, is a product of the 18thcentury Enlightenment. Voltaire, Holbach, and the other philosophes, by subjecting revealed religion to the test of reason, gave the greatest impulse to the liberation of the human mind from superstition since the birth of philosophy among the Ionian Greeks.

They were right on target for 18th-century Europe, where religion was hardly more than a tool of social policy wielded by cynical rulers. But the philosphes' critique of religion in general was ahistorical; their focus understanding of religion's social role. It is the historical dimension that distinguishes Marxist atheism from the Enlightenment outlook.

If ever there were a movement of the wretched of the earth, early Christianity was one. Even through the distorted historical lens of the Gospels it is possible to detect traces of a fierce class hatred against the rich.

But Christianity's success as a mass movement led to a fundamental change in its character. It began to recruit rich people and wound up as the official ideology of the oppressor state itself-imperial Rome.

Siegel shows that this transformation from rebellious sect to pillar of the establishment has been a typical pattern of development from ancient to modern times and in every part of the world.

As this would indicate, the scope of "The Meek and the Militant" is enormous. It examines the social roots of Judaism in nomadic desert tribes and of Christianity in the ancient Roman slums. From there, it follows the development of the Catholic Church through medieval times, into the Renaissance, and through the split that produced Protestantism.

And since religion was by no means a uniquely "Western" phenomenon, Siegel also traces the entwined development of Hinduism and Buddhism and the rise of Islam.

Religion and class struggle The historical background is prologue to coming to grips with many puzzling questions about contemporary religion. Why is religion so strong in the United States when it has declined in other advanced capitalist countries, and what accounts for the political influence of the Religious Right?

Why, on the other hand, has a part of the U.S. Catholic Church become liberalized both theologically and politically so that it finds itself in conflict with the Pope? How is it that there are four priests in the Nicaraguan government while rightists have murdered priests and nuns in El Salvador and other Latin American countries?

Siegel shows how religion is acting as an ideological force in the class struggle today-not only in the advanced and underdeveloped capitalist countries, but in the post-capitalist countries as well. The role of the Catholic Church in Poland is only the most obvious example.

As for the Soviet Union and China, both have consistently violated the Leninist principles of freedom of religion. Lenin stood for a separation of church and state more thorough than that which exists today in the United States and Western Europe. At the same time, he advocated an ideological struggle against religion carried on by the revolutionary party.

The Castroists and the Sandinistas have come closer to putting these principles into practice than have the avowedly Leninist Soviet and Chinese Communist parties.

All of this would seem to be far too much for a 200page book to tackle, but Siegel has managed, with his use of the historical-materialist method and with humor, to make sense of it all.

Be warned, however, that this introduction to a subject of almost limitless proportions may whet your intellectual appetite. In that event, the book's extensive bibliography will be of use in selecting further reading.