Religious Believers in London
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Almost two-thirds of people in capital identify as religious compared with 53% in the rest of UK, likely to be driven by immigration and diaspora communities
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/24/london-more-religious-than-rest-britain-report-finds
People in London pray more and attend more religious services than those in the rest of the country, according to the survey. It also found Christian Londoners help their neighbours more than their non-religious counterparts, are more likely to volunteer for a charitable initiative, and are more likely to make charitable donations.
The Christian thinktank Theos says: “It sometimes seems as if there are two cities in London: one sacred, one secular. Certainly, there is considerable value divergence.”
<p class=”css-ca4fse”>One in four Londoners attends a religious service at least once a month, compared to one in 10 outside the capital; and 56% of Christians in London pray regularly, as against 32% of Christians in the rest of Britain.</p>
<p class=”css-ca4fse”>Londoners are nearly twice as likely to say sex before marriage is at least sometimes wrong (24% compared to 13%), and are more likely to say the same about same-sex relationships (29% compared to 23%). On assisted suicide in the case of an incurable illness, 38% of Londoners says it is at least sometimes wrong, compared with 27% outside the capital.</p>
The biggest Christian denomination in London is Catholicism (35% of the Christian population), followed by Anglicanism (33%). Pentecostals (7%) and Orthodox Christians (6%) have a more significant presence than outside the capital. A fifth of London’s population identifying with a non-Christian religion, in contrast to 7% in the rest of Britain.
<p class=”css-ca4fse”>Roughly one in 10 Londoners identify as Muslim, compared with less than 2% outside the capital, and “all non-Christian religious groups have population concentrations in London, confirming its status as a gateway city”.</p>Interesting. One tends to think of London as being more ‘progressive’ than the rest of the country. This suggests that it’s more conservative.
Does it say whether the numbers of religious people are increasing or decreasing?
“Does it say whether the numbers of religious people are increasing or decreasing?”
According to Wiki the number of Christians, at least in the UK, appear to be declining slowly, whilst adherence to Islam and some other religions show an opposite trend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_Kingdom#Censuses
With many socialists not being really materialists, but believers in the human will as a first cause (free will), does it really matter if other first causers call their first cause God or not? After all, in the words of one foremost party member, “We can make socialism without ever having read a single book.” Why can’t honest believers in a first cause – the avowedly religious – agree about the need for socialism?
So, it doesn’t matter whether there are more or less religious, does it?
The Great Britain figure for no religion also went up significantly in that time. Same for the UK, if you lump no religion and not stated together.
But the figures beg the question – is the abandonment of religion by the majority a prerequisite for establishing socialism?
No. I don’t see it as necessary. Are we expecting the workers to read tomes of philosophy or to know the definitions of materialism and idealism? Even party members are less read than they were (see above). Yet the party still refuses membership to the avowedly religious.
Of course, fanatics like evangelicals, with their millenarianism and apocalypse fixation, can never become socialists.
Socialists share in the Enlightenment inheritance of respect for reason and evidence against its traditional foe, religion. But at the same time we recognise that the main source of irrationality and exploitation in the modern world is to be found in the capitalist system of society. For socialists, therefore, the struggle against religion cannot be separated from the struggle for socialism. We fight religious superstition wherever it is an obstacle to socialism, but we are opposed to religion only insofar as it is an obstacle to socialism.
The following resolution was passed at our 2003 Conference: ‘The Socialist Party takes a non-theistic, materialist approach to things, in particular to society and social change. Religious people believe in the existence of at least one supernatural entity that intervenes in nature and human affairs. Socialists hold that we live only once. Religious people believe in some afterlife. Clearly the two are incompatible.’
Here are some links to other pages on our website that deal with religion:
Socialism, Atheism or Religion?
Religion: Dying but not yet Dead
Religion and the Limits of the State
Socialism and Religion (1910 pamphlet)
More on the Marxian socialist analysis of religion can be found at http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1947/religion.htm
Most people in Europe, China and Japan who would claim a religion, and thus fail the membership application, are passive religious. Their “religion” would be no barrier to wanting a classless and moneyless society. On the other hand, they would reject our insistence on them giving up the Christian or Buddhist or Hindu name and consider it arrogant of us. They would want to get on with abolishing capitalism, not be lectured on materialism.
It would be in the socialist society that supernatural crutches would fade away because no longer required.
“The following resolution was passed at our 2003 Conference: ‘The Socialist Party takes a non-theistic, materialist approach to things, in particular to society and social change. Religious people believe in the existence of at least one supernatural entity that intervenes in nature and human affairs.”
Buddhism is the world’s fourth largest religion, and along with other non-theistic religions, does not entail a belief in the existence of a supernatural entity that intervenes in nature and human affairs.
“Socialists hold that we live only once. Religious people believe in some afterlife. Clearly the two are incompatible.”
Clearly they are incompatible, but that assertion does not explain why they cannot be socialists.
Lew
And with what arrogance and limitation do we condemn the cultural diversity that is rooted within religion. For Hindus, for instance, religion carries its original meaning we had in the West prior to Christianity. Social behaviour. A Hindu can be an atheist-materialist. So can a Buddhist, with no concept of God or soul.
We understand by the word religion what Christianity – an immature cult – has left us. A cult alienated from nature, imbued with our western psychology which pits Man against nature, which lumps nature with that figment of alienated Man’s imagination, Satan: the goat, the animal, the enemy. Ring a bell? Man as conqueror of nature, not an animal within nature.
Such is what a westerner means by religion: God, Satan, the supernatural, soul, self, division, permanence, salvation, free will, guilt, blame, reward, punishment, heaven, hell, etc.
And we assume this to be religion in every case. Our western arrogance first attempts to impose it, and then lectures others about its antidote: the European rationalist revolution that dethroned Christianity.
A non-westerner can well find it offensive that a similar arrogant “we have the answer” now wants to lecture him/her on Marxist materialism, another western product!
Why should people drop rituals and customs etc., behaviours which are their legacy, and which enrich their lives, because of our western paltry definition of “religion”, based on European history? Why should they adopt our historical European legacy? They can act to abolish capitalism without us telling them “this is how to think and be.”
Would people in socialism, and do socialists today, not want rites of some kind to assist grief when loved ones have died?
Do socialists not know that to say “death is the end” is unscientific and nonsensical? Life and death are ongoing processes. Matter is indestructible. Its form changes, and is already changing while you are conscious and define yourself as a “self.” But in fact “self” is illusory, because it has no entity separate from the material components of the form, constantly in flux. Reality has neither end nor beginning.
Buddhism is the world’s fourth largest religion, and along with other non-theistic religions, does not entail a belief in the existence of a supernatural entity that intervenes in nature and human affairs.
It still allows them to kill Muslims. It is the age old use of all religion in secular affairs. Where ‘believers’ are manipulated.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22356306
Yes. That is true. By definition though, a believer is not a Buddhist. The popular structure we know of as the Buddhist religion is subject to manipulation, and manipulation is incompatible with socialism.
Manipulation will end with the abolition of capitalism. So will fade away the structure of popular Buddhism, which developed so that Buddhism could appeal to the feudal rulers of the regions and empires it encountered as it spread eastward.
Classical Buddhism, like classical Taoism, has little in common with the popular form we call the religion.
Again, it comes down to how we define religion.
Lew – Buddhism is the world’s fourth largest religion, and along with other non-theistic religions, does not entail a belief in the existence of a supernatural entity that intervenes in nature and human affairs.
Mutual aid – A Hindu can be an atheist-materialist. So can a Buddhist, with no concept of God or soul.
I live in a strongly devout Buddhist country. It may be the original canon of the Buddha to hold no beliefs in supernatural entities or superstitions but these are indeed practiced and followed by the people and the Buddhist monks reinforce such ideas with religious blessings and rituals. Just as the Church was parasitic upon the community, Buddhist monks equally are as well, perhaps even more so.
Both however have their radical wings – Liberation theology and what is called engaged Buddhism, being examples. And such sects as the Quakers whose meeting halls, many branches happily make use of.
I don’t think think it is helpful to equate religion with always being props of our exploiters. They have grown into being very critical of capitalist society Although they still remain the most committed to reformism, whether it is social or individual lifestyle-ism.
From the Manifesto – “Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.” [remains true but i would substitute aristocrat with reformer]
In many ways James Connolly’s interpretation has come about – that to survive the church will pragmatically adhere to many socialist ideas and jettison their anti-socialism, much in the way they accept evolution and drop their fundamentalist creationism these days. I have made a habit of posting various “progressive” statements of the Pope on the forum as an instance of this trend.
But i note people have avoided the two elephants in the room – the growing strength of Islam and its counter-revolutionary role. Or the existing political conservatism of American evangelicals.
There will be religious believers within the socialist movement and many will be good solid revolutionaries. As stated, religion is very malleable and can be moulded into any shape or form.
However, our question is whether we should continue to exclude them from membership of our Party.
If we changed that policy, do not think think there will be a sudden rush of Form As .That will not happen. I doubt we would perceive any change whatsoever in numbers. Nor do i believe we would become entangled in any religious controversies within the Party arising from different religious persuasions.
But what we will occur (and for want of a better expression) – we will lose the moral high ground of remaining true to materialist convictions. It is a price i don’t think is worth paying.
I prefer if the Party followed the one-time custom of the US military regarding being gay – Don’t Ask – Don’t Tell.
That would permit some who hold various individual levels of personal religious belief to join but prohibit professed Church members from joining.
But some members would rightly consider it a backslide to making religion a private matter and not a social question.
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