Groucho Marxism

Religion has always played a significant role in politics, and the institutions of religion have been instrumental in oppressing ordinary people for all of human history – perhaps none more so than the Catholic church, and more recently the Evangelical Protestant movement. However the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus are generally quite progressive, even by modern standards. Where the Roman Empire valued strength, Jesus said “blessed are the meek” and taught his followers to turn the other cheek. In a society that was deeply sexist towards women, he washed the feet of prostitutes. The parable of the good Samaritan is a lesson against racism. And a fundamental tenet of Christianity, forgiveness of sin, says that justice should be about rehabilitation rather than punishment.

There is also a significant amount of what we would now call anti-capitalist messaging in the New Testament. After all, Jesus was the one who chased the merchants out of the temple and who brought us such phrases as “the love of money is the root of all evil” and “it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” As I pointed out in a previous blog post, if Jesus was alive today we would call him a revolutionary socialist. Fast forward 2000 years and a gigantic schism has opened up between the original teachings of Jesus and the actions of many of his supposed followers. How did this schism occur? And how do right-wing Christians resolve the cognitive dissonance between what they claim to believe and the way they behave?

At the time Christianity arose, the Roman Republic – the classical Roman civilisation – had collapsed under the weight of its internal political instability, coming to an end in 27BC with the establishment of the Roman Empire. The religious movement that arose in the name of Jesus rejected everything that the Empire stood for and spread like wildfire throughout Roman occupied lands. By 300AD Christianity had spread to all of the Empire’s occupied states and even to Rome itself. It became clear that the Empire would not survive the rise of this movement, so something had to be done. Since every culture had integrated the ideas into their own belief systems differently there was no unified and cohesive doctrine among them. The rulers of the Empire realised they could use this fact to their advantage.

In 324AD the Council of Nicaea was formed, ostensibly to resolve theological disputes within Christianity and come to a consensus on doctrine. What arose from this was the formation of the Catholic church, a centralised narrative on Christianity that had been set by the Roman aristocracy. In 381AD, Catholicism was adopted as the official state religion of the Roman Empire and in 391AD, Emperor Theodosius formally forbade any non-Christian or non-Jewish religions. By instituting a hierarchal clergy, the Catholic church alienated the clergy from their communities and removed any sense of spiritual agency from ordinary people. Rather than having a ‘personal relationship with God’, worshippers were instead required to go through a priest as a middle man.

Instead of ideas spreading organically through a community they were now handed down from on high by an authority figure claiming to represent God. The forgiveness of sins now required confessing to a priest, giving them leverage and the power to control people. This was incredibly convenient for a state that was looking to crack down on political dissidents, since these dissidents would just tell them everything they had done. Meanwhile wealthy people could just buy forgiveness with indulgences. As most ordinary people were illiterate, only the clergy were able to read the Bible, and thus had to be taken at their word.  This was particularly advantageous for the Empire in regions outside Italy that needed bringing into line as the Bible could legally only be written in Latin.

Thus the progressive core of Christianity was subsumed into the broader apparatus of state control through a combination of centralization of power under the clergy, construction and distribution of a twisted narrative by the ruling class, alienation of ordinary people from a sense of spiritual agency. Even though the Roman Empire collapsed in 476AD, the institution of Catholicism survived and is still going strong today. For almost 1000 years it was the uncontested doctrine within Christianity, until the birth of the Protestant movement. This arose in the early 1400s in Prague, when Jan Hus and the Hussite movement attempted to break away from the Catholic Church in what is known as the Bohemian Reformation.

Much like the original rise of Christianity, the rise of Protestantism saw ordinary people challenging existing power structures. But through the institutionalisation of Protestantism that original ideal was lost and replaced by doctrine, in the same way that had occurred with Catholicism 1000 years prior. The next major challenge to Christianity came in the late 1800s when Charles Darwin set out his theory of evolution. Prior this people had believed in the divine right of kings, and that the upper, middle and lower classes were different breeds of humans ordained for their specific societal roles by God. The theory of evolution seemed to suggest that this was not the case, and that the aristocracy were not in fact ordained by God at all.

The establishment responded by arguing that the aristocracy had risen to the top of society in the first place because they were genetically superior, and because these superior people had been breeding amongst themselves, they had evolved to a higher form of human. Karl Marx was outraged by this and made the case that material conditions, essentially dumb luck, played a far more significant role than genetics. But that didn’t stop people from taking these eugenicist ideas and institutionalising them. Thus again we see the same pattern emerging. Whenever an idea arises that could challenge the interests of the ruling class, the idea is subsumed and twisted, and made a part of the state machine. This will continue as long as we continue to live in a hierarchical society driven by class interests.