Religion, Spirituality and Socialism
By Joel Kovel
[This essay is a revised version of a lecture at St. Mary’s Church in Harlem, 2008]
The United States was born in a storm of religious innovation. Each of the 13 original colonies had a distinct religious profile, generally a mix of Christian denominations and a wild degree of often-utopian experimentation. The Founding Fathers, fearful that one faction could take over and install a repressive established religion, built in the strong protection of the First Amendment against that possibility. Thus the United States became a democracy closed to centralized state religion, and also a greenhouse for the cultivation of religiosity of all stripes.
The twofold principle embedded in this—that religion should neither be suppressed nor promoted by state authority—remains valid. It holds with special force when the possibility of socialism is raised. A socialist society under the dictate of any religion is a mockery of authentic religion, as well as of the freedom that must be the foundation of socialism; by the same token, a socialist society that suppresses religion is unworthy of the name of socialism. But there is another side to consider: That there is something about religion that may be essential to incorporate in the struggle to transform society from its capitalist present to a socialist future.
We call it “spirit.” As I put it in my 1991 book, History and Spirit, this is the universal human capacity for going beyond the boundaries of our selfhood—the inner representation of who we are in relation to the world we make and inhabit. The forms taken by spirit are as limitless as the human imagination itself. Spirit is organized by practices of “spirituality,” which are socially as well as individually determined, and play a great role in the ways we define our social reality and change it. Religions are the structured societal versions of spirituality, when “spirit-beings”—gods, demons, etc., step forth and intervene in the affairs of humans. In more complex societies, religion becomes institutionalized and often plays a powerful role in politics — at which point, however, it becomes part of that world which spirit seeks to go beyond. Such is the restlessness inherent to human nature. No effort to regiment spiritual life can permanently succeed—though that has never stopped authorities from trying to do so, for the simple reason that an unbridled spirit, reaching out beyond the boundaries of the given, is the perennial accompaniment to the radical social change that authority seeks to stifle.
To my way of thinking, a life without spiritual aspiration is not worth living. However, we should not fall into the trap of thinking that spirituality is some kind of panacea for an ailing humanity in this age of capitalist materialism. Though it’s accurate to say that a spiritless life is poorly lived, to expect a better life simply by adding spirituality is nonsensical, since going beyond the boundaries of the self can range all over the map of human possibility, from the sublime to the disastrous.
Spiritual outcomes can be enormously powerful, but power can bring about evil as well as good. The human sacrifices of the Aztecs were palpably evil as well as spiritual, as was the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century and the witch burnings that blighted Christianity for centuries afterward. More recently, the scourge of Nazism was consciously promoted as an answer to the “spiritual crisis of modern society,” and as such bamboozled many intellectuals, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the psychologist Carl Jung.
Today, the world is afflicted by right-wing religious fundamentalism in all three “Abrahamic” religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—and Hinduism as well. Their impact is pernicious, but can’t be shouted down with blanket diatribes against religion. Many so-called progressives somehow think that proclaiming their “atheism” or “humanism” as a superior alternative to the religious right will somehow turn the world in a better direction. This is a remarkably foolish idea, and not simply because it ignores the concrete good carried out by many religions or the indisputable role that the great religious narratives have played in movements of liberation down through the ages. More fundamentally, it overlooks the fact that atheists and humanists, if they want to make a difference in pointing a way toward a better world, will have to define a worthy spirituality in order to do so. A spiritless political movement is like a becalmed, rudderless sailboat. Spirit imbues the movement with vital force, which has to be directed intelligently even if there can be no precise calculus for doing so. As the saying goes, we do not live by bread alone.
The path to a better world requires a beneficial spirit, or as it is sometimes referred to, being of “good will.” Its appeal must grip the heart as well as the mind, or, to use a core spiritual term, the “soul” — by which is meant a self open to the spirit dimension—and lift it to give people good cheer, fortitude, endurance, courage, and that which integrates all these, solidarity. All of this is necessary if we are to bring about a socialist revolution. Socialism is much more, then, than an economic or political arrangement. Though it requires bringing down the capitalist state and restoring power to working people, this has to be done by seizing the spirit (that is, the inner truth) of a historical moment and transforming it into solidarity. This will take more than singing inspiring (that is, spirit-inducing) songs. Though music is a powerful feature of spiritual practice, revolution requires an integral spiritual transformation across all levels of existence if it is to foster life’s flourishing. Such is the outcome of spiritual goodness; while that which is spiritually evil denies life its expressive power.
In these harsh and crisis-ridden times, growing resistance to capitalist rule has largely failed to do more than irritate the system and increase its viciousness. The lines have been drawn: a massive spiritual transformation, forged in diverse campaigns, will have to accompany the emergence of socialism.
Lessons from the annals of spiritual warfare
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” —Antonio Gramsci
The evil infesting religion today often manifests itself as a war against women and alternative sexualities. Looking more closely, we see the interaction between the ancient framework of male domination and the capitalist system in its present crisis. Four major developments stand forth:
• capital’s relentless commodification of sexuality through the international sex trades, pornography, and the entertainment and advertising industries. *he result is a profound alienation affecting all dimensions of social relations, with special emphasis on that of gender;
• now entering its fifth decade, the campaign against the working and middle classes wreaked by neoliberalism has severely damaged the fragile structures of masculine pride. “Father knows best,” a sitcom from the “good old days,” would not go very far in these bad new ones;
• endless empire spawns endless militarism, *reinforcing traditional hierarchies while incorporating women as accomplices and victims, witness the statistic that one in three women in the US military experiences some degree of sexual assault;
• most basic, the continuing breakup of community and fragmentation of human relationships, an iron condition of the capitalist system, continues apace, its general alienation fostering violence of all kinds.
A kind of continuing chaos ensues, a regime of endemic fear in which the masses of folk who are victimized by the crisis reach desperately for some mooring in traditional patterns and values. *The system gives as it takes away, producing and enabling widespread sexual alienation at the same time as its minions in the religious right inject a spurious security through fundamentalist ideology, and identify suitable victims for its violence: liberated women, sexual minorities, and the de jour object of racism: muslims.
Right-wing spirituality purports to protect women from the dangers of this age; but by degrading their humanity it breeds evil and increases the ultimate level of violence. Patriarchy—the ancient framework of male domination—has always had an ambivalent relationship to capitalism—associated in power, yet deeply threatened by the entry of women into the capitalist work force and the roiling of traditional social relations. In capital’s ascending phase it gave rise to the feminist call for full equality of human right. This grew fitfully throughout the 19th century, and peaked after the second third of the 20th. Now, religious reaction erodes this and denies feminism its emancipatory potential, leaving only a narrow opening toward dividing up the economic pie in a world where the mantle of female achievement belongs to the likes of Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice.
Only a socialist revolution can overcome the structural inequalities that support this impasse. Yet how is the socialist alternative to contest the pernicious influence of the religious right when its own spiritual development has been so barren? Mere sloganeering about the evils of fundamentalism emptily reassures liberals of their virtue. To contest the powerful spirituality of the religious right requires an alternative and more powerful spirituality adequate to the necessity for socialism.
There is a path, scarce recognized, toward just such an outcome. It derives from the imperative to transform a fundamental dynamic of the capitalist system.
A path toward a viable future
To confront the present moment in history is to recognize that there will be no worthwhile future unless we reverse the ongoing drift toward ecological collapse caused by global capital. We cannot pick apart and mend the ravages caused by capital’s accumulation one by one. Mere reformism spells doom. Transformation of the system as a whole is demanded: an ecosocialist revolution.
Ecological collapse means a breakdown across the whole realm of nature caused by human productive activity. This is now shaped by capital, but its ancient and enduring root was installed through patriarchy, in this context, a splitting between genders in which the human being is regarded as male and women represent nature, considered as an inferior level of being suitable for domination and, eventually,* its reduction to the least common denominator of cash value. Thus the rape of nature is not simply a metaphor for what capital does. It is a basic dynamic at the heart of capitalist accumulation itself, defining an unending cycle in which active male aggression violates passive female nature.
It follows that to overcome the ecological devastation of the capitalist order, a transformation of gender relations becomes essential. This translates into a new phase of feminism — ecofeminism — and requires an ecofeminist dimension to the project of ecosocialism. It means removing all traces of domination from the sphere of gender, enabling the full humanity of the female portion and an intrinsic value given to nature by the male. Thus the human is no longer estranged from nature and as such, is rendered capable of restoring the integrity of ecosystems. This is very much a spiritual process, as it engages a major transformation of the historically constructed self.
The gender system is embedded in virtually all of the world’s spiritual traditions, as these shape and are shaped by the actual ecological behavior of the societies that form around them. The greatest ecological menaces emerge from those whose spirituality most sharply splits the world between “male” humanity and “female” nature, such as has been deeply associated with the Judaeo-Christian traditions.
The spiritual politics of ecosocialism and ecofeminism involve challenging the defects of established spiritualities and making alliances with their radical elements. This would include substantial contributions from the legacy of the First Peoples around the world, generally marked by a more fluid gender system and far less ecological devastation than the societies of their conquerers.
The situation more than superficially resembles the great surge of “liberation theology” during the 1960s and 70s. This was chiefly spurred by the crumbling of the Western colonial system in the wake of the Second World War. Centered in Latin America, liberation theology set into motion a profound democratization throughout the Christian faiths, including an incorporation of Marxist and socialist elements, before it was turned back by neoliberal counterattack and the Papacy of John Paul II.
Now it could be that we are primed for a second wave of emancipatory spirituality, less exclusively focused on Christianity, and deriving rather from the struggle for ecological integrity. Both waves, however, require undoing the evil wrought by empire under the aegis of capital.
If I have downplayed the role of established religion here, it is owing to the corruption of its establishment and the falling away of great numbers of people in the industrialized Western world. But this reveals a serious problem, because religion, despite all, can mobilize degrees of commitment that the secular world urgently needs. In my view, there will have to be a great revival of faith within the ecosocialist/ecofeminist movements if they are to prevail. The path taken by much non-religious contemporary politics has its virtues, especially as it incorporates a demand for universal justice. But the challenge remains of achieving the capacity of authentic religion to assuage the doubt and fear that lurk about the edges of such existentially radical choices as lie before us in the revolutionary period ahead.
The most frequent admonition in the Bible, I have been told, is to “be not afraid.” Capitalism, like any reigning system, works by instilling a zone of fear that stifles radical options for change. Unless we conquer our fear, we cannot overcome the system.
Since the 1980s, I have found myself drawn to the practices of radical Christians in struggles to support Central American revolutionaries, in working for a nuclear-free world, and in opposing police brutality over youth of color. It was not the superiority of their intellectual analysis, however brilliant, that pulled me in, but their attitude, composed of fearlessness and good cheer. We need to find such a way of being if we are to move beyond the death-dealing world of capital.
