A work in progress. (Patreon)

Here's a work in progress on a topic that always gets people stirred up —

Religion 😱 !

Gonna pour my heart out a little bit here. But first- the work in progress:

I grew up in a religious home in a very conservative Christian part of the world. What I was taught about Christianity from a handful of old white guys informed everything about the way I understood the world. Mostly I just didn’t want to go to hell, and all of my experiences filtered through that foundational fear. As you could imagine, this was a cause of a fair amount of psychological trauma that I’d have to spend years healing.

After 9/11, the church my family attended became loudly pro-Iraq war, contradicting the supposed core pillar of mennonite denomination of the faith — pacifism. Over the years most of the people I knew in that church have transformed into right wing fundamentalists, outspoken MAGA conservatives, QAnon fanatics, and loud homophobes/transphobes/xenophobes/you-name-it-phobes.

It’s so bizarre to see the christian faith gobbled up by a right wing, pro-capitalist, pro-empire message, because Jesus… kind of the main guy in christianity… he didn’t have many good things to say about wealth or empire.

I mean, take the verse in the poster. Jesus is saying, if you’re a rich man, you CAN’T GET IN. Nope. I remember hearing conservative pastors try to cope with this verse, saying things like, “well actually the eye of the needle was a small passageway in the temple, where a camel would have to get down on its knees and crawl through it. So it’s not impossible for a rich man to get to heaven… it’s just a little hard!”

Come on, a camel’s not doing that. Jesus called it 1800 years before Marx - the bourgeois are doomed. Doomed in the proletarian revolution.

But, despite the actual message of Jesus and many other religious texts, religious communities have been consumed by the right wing, and by capital. My childhood church certainly has.

It’s heartbreaking to see, because for better or worse, these people were my childhood community. Churches, mosques, and temples serve as the backbone for a lot of people’s communities, especially under late stage capitalism, where most of our other forms of community are gutted and scattered by the forces of capital and development. Through the grinding of capitalism, faith spaces remain one of the only places where community can flourish.

I’ve heard a handful of people on the left saying things like ‘abolish religion,’ ‘make religion illegal again’, etc. I understand this sentiment, as someone who’s been harmed by religion. It’s a bad strategy, and a sentiment that, if realized, would harm a lot of working class people.

Communists from history wrote about religion as a part of the material conditions of the working class; religion was something for the exploited populations to turn to as a cure for our alienation, a salve for our oppression. “The heart of a heartless word,” as Marx wrote. The theory was that when material conditions improve, there will be less need for religion. When a classless society is achieved, the church will no longer be needed or desired and will wither away, along with the state.

Maybe the early communists were right… but we’re nowhere close to finding out, because material conditions are not improving for the working class in any part of the world. Material conditions are diminishing, and working people are suffering and growing more alienated. Faith communities are one of the only places where that alienation can be healed a little. We’re in no place to be tearing down anyone’s respite from the grinding maw of capital. We ought to accept the inevitability of religion (as long as there is oppression), and organize within it. The right has certainly been doing it.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with religion. Go off in the comments — this is a much safer place to voice an opinion than Instagram or Twitter.

(Also, what do you think- Red or black, which version do you like better?)