The Reformation of Religion
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In the USA, a Poor Peoples Campaign has begun mostly by the churches. In this country, many churches are involved in food banks and refugee aid. (practicing a big difference from the moralism of the Salvation Army legacy)
In America, we are so accustomed to the predominance of the right-wing evangelicalists and forget how the black Churches led the way in the Civil Rights Movement. They are again becoming active.
I thought religion was fading and i got a sharp jolt of reality in 2005 during the charities Make Poverty History…the British churches mobilised their congregation to take to the streets and the Edinburgh churches were transforme into the centres of the logistics and accommodation. It was a reminder of the potential still existing within religion that rivalled the Stop the War achievement in organisation when they sought to protest.
Are we too dismissive of the religious liberal left?
I show in another topic thread the Catholic Church too is jettisoning its conservativism with a quasi-marxist Pope condemning many aspects of capitalism, if not the system itself.
The Church changes as James Connolly observed
Quote:"…the man who imagines that in the supreme hour of the proletarian struggle for victory the Church will definitely line up with the forces of capitalism, and pledge her very existence as a Church upon the hazardous chance of the capitalists winning, simply does not understand the first thing about the policy of the Church in the social or political revolutions of the past. Just as in Ireland the Church denounced every Irish revolutionary movement in its day of activity, as in 1798, 1848 and 1867, and yet allowed its priests to deliver speeches in eulogy of the active spirits of those movements a generation afterwards, so in the future the Church, which has its hand close upon the pulse of human society, when it realises that the cause of capitalism is a lost cause it will find excuse enough to allow freedom of speech and expression to those lowly priests whose socialist declarations it will then use to cover and hide the absolute anti-socialism of the Roman Propaganda. When that day comes the Papal Encyclical against socialism will be conveniently forgotten by the Papal historians, and and the socialist utterances, of the von Kettelers, the McGlynns, and McGradys will be heralded forth and the communistic utterances of the early fathers as proofs of Catholic sympathy with progressive ideas. Thus it has been in the past. Thus it will be…"Marcos will tell us of the South and Central American theological liberationists but no longer is this trend a regional one. The Church of Scotland and the Church of England are no longer the reflection of the middle-class.
But let us be balanced, in Eastern Europe, the various Orthodox Churches are reflecting the right-wing populism, as well.
Is our battle with religion still one over materialism and belief, or is it now shifted ground to being against religious reformism…their politics of alleviating poverty.
Should we now be much more pro-active in engaging the Churches…
ajj wrote:Are we too dismissive of the religious liberal left?No!
ajj wrote:Should we now be much more pro-active in engaging the Churches?No!
twc wrote:ajj wrote:Are we too dismissive of the religious liberal left?No!
ajj wrote:Should we now be much more pro-active in engaging the Churches?No!
As we said on the preface to How The Gods Were Made: Between religión and socialism there can be no reconciliation They are two fundamentally opposed view of the world
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