The Flexibility of Religious Interpretations
Modernity is based on the demand for the emancipation of human beings, starting from their liberation from the shackles of social determination in its earlier traditional forms.[27] This liberation called for the abandoning of the dominant forms of legitimating power-in the family, in the communities within which ways of life and production are organized, in the State-based up to then on a metaphysics, generally of religious expression.
It therefore implies the separation of the State and religion, a radical secularization, which is the condition for the deployment of modern forms of politics.Will secularization abolish religious belief? Some Enlightenment philosophers who placed religion in the realm of absurd superstitions thought and hoped so. This perception of the religious phenomenon found a favourable ground for expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries among the working classes acceding to political consciousness. If only because the working class left (and the organic intellectuals who expressed its ideologies) in practice came up against the conservative options of all organized Christian religious hierarchies, Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox. Anti-clericalism became frankly synonymous with anti-religion and, because of this, gained ground all over Europe, naturally in different degrees depending on the circumstances of the evolution of the ideological, political and social struggles. French society in particular counted among the most receptive to the new anti-clericalism—atheism -, for reasons which stem from the legacy of its Revolution’s radical character. Soviet ideology took over this fundamental atheism and integrated it into its conception of dialectical materialism.
Nevertheless another reading can be made of Marx. The often cited phrase (‘‘religion is the opium of the people’’) is truncated, what follows lets it be understood that the human being needs opium, because he is a metaphysical animal, who cannot avoid asking himself questions about the meaning of life.
He gives what answers he can, either he adopts those religion offers him, or he invents them himself, or else he avoids worrying about them.In any case religions are there, are part of the picture of reality, even constitute an important dimension of it. It is therefore important to analyse their social function, that is to say in our modern world their articulation with what constitutes the modernity in place—capitalism, democracy, secularity. In what follows I will try to do this for the domain of the three so called religions of the Book. It will be seen that the religions in question have been subject to successive interpretations which have enabled them to survive, to adapt to gigantic social transformations and to accompany them.
The success of Christianity in this domain, which accompanied the modernity which arose in Europe (need it be recalled?), gave rise to a flourishing of ‘theories’ which do not convince me. The most common—which has become a sort of common ground generally admitted, without arousing the slightest critical questioning—is that Christianity bore within itself this exceptional evolution. The ‘‘genius of Christianity” is thus reconstructed as one of the myths—alongside others (the Greek ancestor among others, ‘Indo-European’ racism etc.)—from which the ‘‘European miracle’’ is explained (the fact that modernity was invented there and not elsewhere). The most extremist ideologies of this Eurocentrism adopt an idealist theory of history according to which capitalism is the product of this evolution of religious interpretation. I propose a systematic criticism of this theory in Eurocentrism (published in this work).
And the most extremist of the extremists reserve this genius creator of capitalist modernity for the Protestant Reformation. The famous thesis of Max Weber can be recognized here. It is, even less convincing in my opinion than what I call the ‘Christianophilia’ of Eurocentrism.
The arguments which Weber advances in this respect are confused, despite their apparent precision.
They are moreover perfectly returnable; analogous to those previously advanced to explain the backwardness of China by Confucianism, then 50 years later to explain the take-off of that country by the same Confucianism! Superficial historians had explained the success of the Arab civilisation of the Middle Ages by Islam, while contemporary journalists, even more superficial, explain the stagnation of the Arab world by the same Islam. ‘Culturalism’ has no possible univocal response to any of these great historical challenges. In fact it has too many, because it can prove any formulation and its opposite.As a counterpoint to these ideas—forced, false, but on which the dominant world ideology feeds—I propose the following theses:
(i) Modernisation, secularism and democracy are not the products of an evolution (or revolution) of religious interpretations, but on the contrary, these interpretations have adjusted, with more or less felicity, to their demands. This adjustment was not the privilege of Protestantism. It operated in the Catholic world, in another manner certainly, but no less effectively. In any case it created a new religious spirit freed from dogmas.
(ii) In this sense the Reformation was not the « condition » for the flowering of capitalism, even if this thesis (of Weber) is widely accepted in the societies it flatters (Protestant Europe). The Reformation was not even the most radical form of the ideological rupture with the European past and its ‘feudal’ ideologies—among others its earlier interpretation of Christianity. It was on the contrary its primitive and confused form.
(iii) There was a ‘‘Reformation of the dominant classes’’, which resulted in the creation of national Churches (Anglican, Lutheran) controlled by these classes and implementing the compromise between the emerging bourgeoisie, the monarchy and the great rural land owners, brushing aside the threat of the working classes and the peasantry who were systematically repressed.
This reactionary compromise—which Luther expressed and Marx and Engels analysed as such—enabled the bourgeoisie of the countries in question to avoid what happened in France: a radical revolution. So the secularism produced in this model has remained tentative up until now. The retreat of the Catholic idea of universality which the establishment of national Churches manifests fulfilled a sole function: to further establish the monarchy and strengthen its role as an arbiter between the forces of the Ancien Regime and those represented by the rising bourgeoisie, strengthening their nationalism and delaying the advance of the new forms of internationalism that socialist internationalism would later propose.(iv) But there were also reform movements that took hold of the lower classes, the victims of the social transformations caused by the emergence of capitalism. These movements which reproduced old forms of struggle—those of the millenarianism of the Middle Ages—were not ahead of their time, but behind it in relation to its demands. So the French revolution—with its popular secular and radical democratic mobilisation—had to be awaited, then socialism before the dominated classes could learn to express themselves effectively in the new conditions. The protestant sects in question lived on fundamentalist type illusions. They created a favourable ground for the endless reproduction of ‘sects’ with apocalyptic visions that can be seen flourishing in the United States.
(v) There were not only ‘positive’ adjustments, with the renovated religious interpretation opening the prospects for social transformation. There were also involutions, the religious interpretation becoming in its turn an obstacle to social progress. I will give as examples some forms of North American Protestantism.
(vi) Positive and/or negative adjustments are not the monopoly of Christianity. Islam has experienced positive adjustments in the past and at present is experiencing an involution analogous in many respects to that of the American protestant sects in question. Judaism also. And I would add (as the reader will find explained in Eurocentrism) that this concerns the great Asian ideologies and religions as well.
(vii)That these adjustments can be positive or negative pleads in favour of an interpretation of historical materialism based on ‘‘under determination”. I mean by this that each of the various levels of reality (economic, political, ideological) conceals its own internal logic and because of this the complementary nature of their evolution, which is necessary to ensure the overall coherence of a system, does not define in advance a given direction of a guaranteed evolution.
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