I always believed religion was incompatible with a society rooted in addressing material reality, although I know we have have religious users and wanted to hear people's takes.

  • junebug2 [comrade/them, she/her]
    ·
    8 months ago

    I have not read Samir Amin. My understanding of the passage you’re quoting is as follows:

    1. Religious interpretation, like many other social relations, is shaped by the structures of the society it is in.
    2. Religious interpretation has adapted to the rise of modernization, secularism, and democracy.
    3. Religious interpretation could adapt to the social forces that arise from a socialist society, potentially molding into something more compatible. That seems fine, and we can see shades of that in, for instance, how liberation theology emerged from the milieu of the Catholic Church and the material conditions of Latin America.

    Speaking of the Catholic Church, I think it’s worth pointing out that the material reality of most religions is not their interpretations, but their institutional power. I am not Catholic, but I have completed the relevant sacraments and education because of my family and where I live. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, I think we can see the religious interpretation of Catholicism liberalize, while the institutions don’t unless forced to. Just as the Catholics conceded that maybe lay people can have bread and wine at the same time without heresy, they maintained and reinforced social relics like the total exclusion of women from religious and political authority; strict hierarchies of seniority, both priest over laypeople, within the priesthood, and within the family; and the use of capital on gilded vanity projects.

    I am by no means saying the Catholic Church is the reason any of those social forces exist, or even the sole reason they are maintained. They exist as an institution to uphold them. Even if doctrinal interpretation might shift to match socialism, the institutional power will act conservatively (working only to maintain itself in stasis). The vast majority of religious institutions are reactionary organizations, and I am skeptical that they would change of their own accord. I agree with your point about the eventual compatibility between religious beliefs and communism. I don’t think any religions proper can be.