Socialism and Religion

Vincent Geoghegan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136709593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the past decade philosophers and political theorists have increasingly pondered the role of religion in a modern secular society, and of the possible value of religion as a resource for contemporary thinking. The global resurgence of a new religious politics – graphically symbolised by 9/11 - has added a new urgency to this project; how is religion to be integrated, and if necessary contested, in such a time? As this study shows, the desire to integrate religion into a 'progressive' politics is not new. Providing a comprehensive analysis of the Common Wealth movement, this work seeks to bring together for the first time the religious and political commitments of four of the leading thinkers in the movement, bringing to light the significance of the relationships between them.

This study examines at four interwar British radicals – the philosopher John Macmurray, the novelist and sexual theorist Kenneth Ingram, the Science Fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, and the Liberal M.P. Richard Acland – and examines their attempts to develop a socialism that whilst defending the achievements of the secular age was also sensitive to the virtues of religious traditions. Thus it considers Macmurray's attempt to draw on the seemingly antagonistic traditions of Marxism and Christianity, Ingram's long struggle to develop a Christian response to 'deviant' sexual behaviour, Stapledon's exploration of a non-Christian religious spirit, and Acland's journey from liberal atheist to Christian socialist. It then follows the activities of all four in the radical political movement founded by Acland in the midst of the Second World War, Common Wealth, particularly focusing on the positions they took in the serious battles over the function of religion that convulsed the leadership of this body.

This work will be of great interest to scholars of political theory, religious studies, social and political thought.

1 John Macmurray

Christ and Marx

In 1994 Tony Blair, the newly elected leader of the Labour Party, publicly identified himself with the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray: ‘if you really want to understand what I’m all about,’ he had said, ‘you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray. It’s all there.’¹ Since then much ingenuity has been deployed trying to identify the nature of this ‘it’,² for Blair has never been particularly precise on the matter.³ His highly visible endorsement has been distinctly double-edged – on the one hand he significantly helped to rescue Macmurray’s name from the obscurity that had descended upon him even before his death in 1976, but on the other hand the philosopher was to an extent wrenched out of context, his name linked to an issue of which he knew nothing, New Labour. The impression created was that Macmurray was some kind of pious social democrat, when the reality was so different. Since Blair’s intervention there has been a growing literature seeking to redress this imbalance, attempting to place Macmurray’s work in the turbulent intellectual and political conditions of his time. This chapter endeavours to do this through a consideration of his interwar exploration of the relationship between Christianity and the work of Karl Marx, where, a lifetime away from Blair, in a world context of Soviet Communism and international Fascism, Macmurray attempted his ambitious synthesis of radical socialism and highly heterodox religion.

‘Here I Stand’

Some time around 1934 John Macmurray (born 16 February 1891),⁴ Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at London University, decided to commit to paper his deepest convictions.⁵ It is a token of the seriousness of the resulting document – especially from one raised in a staunchly protestant household in Scotland – that it begins with the words of defiance traditionally attributed to Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms: ‘Here I Stand’. The typescript, which Macmurray never published, can be found in the Macmurray Papers at the University of Edinburgh, where he was to become Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1944. It is a little spiritual autobiography dealing with the erosion of the faith of his childhood and youth, and its replacement by a new Christian certainty:

I STAND as a Christian, outside every Church. I stand outside the Churches because I am a Christian. If I am to explain the position I take up as an individual, or as a citizen, in philosophy, or politics, in any department of human life, theoretical or practical, it is this I have to explain. Everything else follows from it. It is, to me, the fixed centre of an experience in flux. Of this I am certain. I am sure of other things, only to the point where I can see their necessary relation to this.⁶

He looks back to his days as an undergraduate at Glasgow University (1909–13) and to the evangelical Protestantism he then vigorously espoused:

That faith today is in rags and tatters. I should rather go naked than be seen in it. Even though I find a good deal of its language still useful, the meaning behind the words has been transubstantiated. In its traditional meaning, it has become frankly incredible.⁷

This is attributed not to a gradual and largely unconscious process of loss but to ‘a conscious and continuous re-examination of its substance, in the light of history and science and philosophy, as well as of concrete personal experience’.⁸ He indicates the current direction of his thinking in enigmatic, even paradoxical, language: ‘The experience that has led me to this declaration, that I am a Christian, is the same kind of experience that has led a considerable number of my own generation to declare themselves atheists.’⁹

That this intense credo was written at this time is indicative of Macmurray’s sense that his thought was going through a significant shift, and is a testimony to the impact that a couple of years’ intensive study of the young Marx had had on his ideas. As he suggests in ‘Here I Stand’, his thinking had been evolving since his undergraduate days, in his time studying philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford, and as a university teacher at Manchester and Witwatersrand, before his return to a fellowship at Balliol (1923–8). Significant among his ‘concrete personal experience’ had been his active service in the First World War where he was wounded (indeed permanently scarred), and his company wiped out, at the battle of Arras (he was subsequently awarded the Military Cross for his actions in the battle). There was also his painful experience of the hostile reception he received when, on sick-leave after the battle of the Somme, he preached a sermon on international reconciliation in a London church, an event which determined him to renounce membership of any institutional Church.¹⁰ Thus, as we shall see in more detail later, a good deal of his thought in the 1930s had roots that predated his encounter with Marx, but his deep engagement with that thinker’s work was an undoubted watershed. Reminiscing in the 1960s Macmurray pinpointed his decision to begin an in-depth reading of Marx’s early work to a conference held in October 1932 which brought together a number of leading religious and lay thinkers to ponder the question of the rejuvenation of Christianity in the modern world. In Macmurray’s account the conference concluded

that before we could discover what Christianity is we should have to study seriously two other questions. The first of these was the nature of modern Communism, the other was the problem of sex. We then decided that we would tackle Communism first … It was this conference which led me to undertake a thorough study of the early writings of Karl Marx, with an eye to discovering, in particular, the historical relation between Marxism and the Christian tradition.¹¹

The fact that the conference decided to discuss Communism, and not Marx specifically, is indicative of the impact of broader social and political factors on public perceptions at the time. Soviet Communism, for better or for worse, was increasingly on the public agenda. Macmurray’s study of Marx was initiated, and was to be coloured, by the beginnings of the geo-political tensions between Communism, Fascism and the Western democracies that was to dominate the decade and precipitate a world war.

Macmurray and the Early Marx

What is especially noteworthy about Macmurray’s study of the early Marx in the 1930s is that he had access to texts only recently published for the very first time, particularly the groundbreaking Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, with its classic discussion of alienation, which had appeared in the German original in 1932 (in a collection entitled Der Historische Materialismus: Die Frühschriften). Given that the first freely available English translation of the text did not appear until 1956 Macmurray had access to material virtually unknown to the English-speaking world.¹² Encouraged by his new friend the Hungarian thinker Karl Polanyi, Macmurray’s reading bore fruit in a remarkable essay (published in 1935) entitled ‘The Early Development of Marx’s Thought’ which must constitute one of the earliest discussions of the Manuscripts in the English language.¹³ It also included a very insightful reading of another early text of Marx, On the Jewish Question, where Marx presents a bravado analysis of the dualism inherent in liberal democracy. These texts laid bare the link between Marx’s analysis of religion and his critique of capitalism, and provided a context for understanding the ambiguities of the compressed critique of religion in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction.

Marx’s early work was decisively shaped by his encounter with Feuerbach’s critique of religion.¹⁴ The structure and methodology of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity positively invites contrasting readings. It is divided into two parts, in which the first part deals with ‘the true or anthropological essence of religion’, while the second seeks to reveal ‘the false or theological essence of religion’. In a later preface, Feuerbach expresses this distinction as a contrast between the ‘human’ and the ‘unhuman’ aspects of religion.¹⁵ Put baldly, Feuerbach’s overarching argument is that humans use religion to think and speak about themselves. Building on the atheist axiom that the transcendental realm is an illusion, he argues that religious language must be a form of human language, and must therefore be a form of conversation humanity holds with itself. In this sense ‘God’ can never be higher than the underlying humanity.¹⁶ However, the differing strands in The Essence of Christianity emerge in Feuerbach’s attempt to analyse in depth the nature of the religious conversation. On the one hand religion involves an expression of the most sublime perceptions and hopes of humanity, but on the other it articulates self-loss and spiritual impoverishment.

Between early 1843 and mid-1844 we find Marx at his most Feuerbachian; it is also in this period that he produced his most detailed critique of religion. Never again was he to devote this degree of energy to the topic, for in these months he came to believe that he had definitively sorted out the question of religion. In the course of his deployment and development of Feuerbach’s critique of religion, Marx began to fashion some of his most important concepts, and these, as a consequence, were grounded in the overcoming of religion. Marx’s whole emerging project therefore rested on his stance towards religion.

The concept of ideology was to emerge out of his analysis of religious consciousness. He runs with Feuerbach’s notion that religion reverses real relationships, arguing that ‘man makes religion, religion does not make man’ and that therefore religion inverts the world; religion is ‘an inverted world-consciousness’.¹⁷ This image of inversion became central to Marx’s fledgling concept of ideology. Likewise Feuerbach’s notion of self-loss in religion is fundamental in the genesis of Marx’s concept of alienation. The ideological inversion of relationships in religious consciousness is the first form of alienation Marx considers. In a direct echo of Feuerbach, he argues that ‘the more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself’.¹⁸ All his subsequent expansion of the concept of alienation comes in the wake of the initial discussion of religious alienation, and he acknowledges that it was the examination of this form of alienation which was achieved first: ‘The immediate task of philosophy … once the holy form of self-estrangement has been unmasked, is to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms.’¹⁹ Feuerbach’s characterisation of the egoistic individualism of Christian religiosity also informs Marx’s first major attempt, in On the Jewish Question, to develop a theory of the state. Marx argues that, historically, the secular project of liberal democracy has resulted only in emancipation from state religion, not religion as such. In the USA, which he considered the most developed form, to date, of liberal democracy, religion positively flourishes. Paradoxically it is not the religious state which represents the triumph of Christianity, but the modern secular state. This is because the division between civil society and the state in liberal democracy is an expression of the egoistic individualism dominant in civil society, and this egoistic individualism is at the heart of modern Christianity. Liberal democracy is thus profoundly Christian. For Marx the fact that in liberal democracy individuals acknowledge themselves via the intermediary of the state means not that they are merely doing something analogous to religious behaviour, but that this activity is itself religious.²⁰ Put another way, religion represents how far political emancipation falls below human emancipation.

When Macmurray began his intensive study of Marx the best known and most easily available text by the young Marx on religion was his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction (late 1843, early 1844). The actual remarks on religion only occupy a brief few sections at the very beginning of the work, but found here is Marx’s most quoted statement on religion – that ‘It is the opium of the people’. In fact this statement is embedded in a discussion in which both aspects of the Feuerbachian analysis of religion are present – the negative and the positive. Thus religious distress is deemed to be ‘the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress’; it is ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature’, ‘the heart of a heartless world’ and ‘the spirit of spiritless conditions’. But then comes the killer: ‘It is the opium of the people’, and despite ingenious attempts to put a positive gloss on the narcotic metaphor, the negative connotation is surely deliberate. All the surrounding passages are resolutely negative: ‘the struggle against religion is … indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma’, or ‘the criticism of religion disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who … has come to reason’.²¹ And yet it was possible to assemble out of these early works elements towards a much more positive appreciation of religion, and one, furthermore, that could also use Marx’s critique of dualism to distinguish an authentic from an inauthentic religion. As Macmurray threw himself into a detailed reading of the early Marx, this possibility became clear to him.

At the same time as Macmurray was engaged in his close reading of Marx, Isaiah Berlin was working on his biography of Marx, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, which was to see the light of day in 1939 – but what contrasting readings of the early Marx they provide. Berlin claimed that he had read everything Marx had written – in the multi-volumed collection of Marx’s original-language texts (the so-called MEGA edition)²² – but it is clear that he was either unfamiliar with the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which is not mentioned, or failed to see the significance of the text, a fact attested to by the complete absence of any discussion of the concept of alienation. His account of Marx’s views on religion lacks nuance in its characterisation of Marx as simply hostile to religion, which is explained in terms of a psychological reaction to his father’s opportunistic conversion from Judaism to Lutheranism, and the influence of Feuerbach’s materialist critique of idealism.²³ Berlin has no understanding of the complexities of Feuerbach’s project (describing the thinker as one of the ‘mediocrities’ in the history of thought whose ‘contribution to philosophy is jejune and uninspired’²⁴) and no sense of the linkage between religion and alienation; hence his total lack of appreciation of On the Jewish Question, where he merely notes Marx’s rejection of Bauer’s liberal solution to the Jewish question, before making the astonishing judgement that ‘it is an essay of little value’.²⁵ In introductory notes to later editions of his book in the 1960s and 70s, Berlin acknowledged the lacuna on alienation, and also admitted that he was ‘perhaps too deeply influenced’ by two sources.²⁶ The first of these was what he termed the ‘classical interpretations’ of Marx produced by Engels, Plekhanov and Mehring. This, however, deepens the mystery of his treatme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. John Macmurray: Christ and Marx
• 2. Kenneth Ingram: The Christian and the sexual – homosexuality, bisexuality, pederasty
• 3. Olaf Stapledon: Religious but not Christian
• 4. Sir Richard Acland: The conversion of a Liberal MP
• 5. The moment of Common Wealth
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index