21.12.1995

Born of despair

Official religion is on the defensive but there is no room for complacency

Few now take the Church of England seriously. Apart from marriage and burial ceremonies most people have little or nothing to do with the traditional C of E establishment (or for that matter its once bitter Catholic, Baptist and Methodist rivals). Even the high points in the ecclesiastical calendar see year-by-year congregations getting older and smaller. Not surprisingly then Christmas, as celebrated by the vast majority in this country, is closer in spirit to its wild pagan origins than its prim 4th century reinvention by the Christians.

The creaking Judeo-Greek-Labourite theology preached by the men in black is unconvincing intellectually. Nor does their mix of tatty state ritual, sanctimonious Jesus allegory and Victorian heating systems work to trick the emotions. Hallelujah, the flock has escaped the fold!

In spite of this welcome development there is no room for complacency. Religion has not been exorcised. Secularism has not banished the ghosts. Those materialists who optimistically imagined a mechanical correlation between scientific advance and rational thinking were profoundly wrong.

Humanity has discovered the outer limits of the universe and its smallest sub-atomic particles. We manipulate DNA, explore the Jovian atmosphere, talk continent-to-continent at the speed of light and harness the awesome power of the sun. Nevertheless fundamentalist religion is on the march - above all, in its most irrational and cabalistic forms, Christianity.

The United States is the richest and technically most advanced country on the planet - and has been throughout the 20th century. Yet it is also the most religious. As is well known, born-again Christians now make up half the population. The religious right exerts a growing and cancerous influence on the body politic via the Republican Party.

In Latin America US-based cults have made deep inroads into what was once an undisputed bastion of Catholicism. Suppressed by the hierarchy, liberation theology has lost out to Protestant evangelicals. Their following has risen from 5 to 40 million. Racially integrated charismatic churches in South Africa are now supported by 35% of the population. In Russia too the Orthodox Church is under threat from dollar-financed Protestant missionaries.

Christians today make up at least half the population in two-thirds of the world’s 223 states. It is no longer a religion of the northern hemisphere. Moreover by the year 2,000 it is “estimated that one in three Christians will be a supernaturally-orientated ‘charismatic’” (Ian Cotton The Guardian Weekend November 25 1995 - much of the information I have used comes from his article).

The Church of England has been influenced by this worldwide phenomenon. Some 40% of its recent synod describe themselves as ‘evangelicals’. Certainly the only growth it has experienced has come courtesy of vicars such as the notorious, and now defrocked, Chris Brain and his ‘Nine o’clock service’.

Most ‘new’ Christians however are not linked with the Church of England. They operate regionally and bottom-up through the so-called house churches - services are held in front rooms, school halls, community centres, etc. Each congregation has its own self-selecting leader. Loosely joined by fax, telephone and the internet, they have as yet no overarching structure. Numbers are therefore difficult to estimate. By the late 1980s it was said that there were over 100,000. But the house church movement is actually far wider, embracing as it does like-minded revivalists still within the conventional Anglican, Catholic and Baptist denominations.

These people shun rationalism like the plague. They believe in original sin and that the Bible is the unalloyed word of god. With prayer anything is possible. Debts can be cleared, jobs found, illnesses cured, and yes, the dead raised. These miracles come with pounding music, upraised hands, speaking in tongues, dancing, whooping and swooning. A pop concert, if you like, with very special effects.

It would be foolish for communists to ignore this movement or dismiss those involved as irredeemably rightwing. Religion is the “opium of the oppressed”. It is also the expression of real distress and a protest against existing conditions. As Marx said: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation” (On religion, Moscow 1972, p38).

Studies show a close relationship between stress and religious conversion. The psychologist, William James, famously described it in 1902 as the “sick soul” crying out for help. “Here is the real core of the religious problem,” he wrote in his book, The varieties of religious experience. Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Canada has recently researched the neurological side of religious experience. Imitating brain stress using low voltage, high density doses of electricity, he produced visions among his subjects. They saw hallucinations, coloured and shaped by cultural norms. Those living within the orbit of Christianity beheld its idols - Jesus, angels, the devil.

Stress brought on by divorce, childhood trauma, illness, depression, redundancy can all be a prelude to conversion. What applies to the individual also applies on a macro-scale. When society undergoes dislocation or rapid change, the masses are prone to seek reassurance in a faith that offers comfort and salvation.

The US has always been a nation of endless migration, insecurity and credulity. Where there is no community, alienation takes extreme forms. If human beings generally relate to each other only as things, they will try and find their humanity outside humanity - in heaven.

Britain was swept by a religious mania following the industrial revolution. In the absence of a viable political alternative Wesley and the Bible gave solace to the dispossessed.

Today capitalism is attempting to stave off another general crisis by revolutionising the mode of production. As a result four million people in Britain are unemployed and millions more live in relative poverty. Part time work, temporary contracts and so-called self-employment means that 60% of the active workforce no longer has secure employment. Even amongst skilled workers and the middle class professions the drive to intensify labour takes a terrible physical and mental toll. Evidence of this was recently supplied by Sir John Bourne, the auditor general. He reported last month that 150,000 teachers took early retirement or resigned because of ill health over the last 10 years - three times the number leaving at normal retirement age.

In all this we have the raw material for religion ... or revolution.

Jack Conrad