Christians could face one year prison sentence for encouraging conversion to their faith, according to a new controversial legislation being introduced in Israel. The legislation which is being proposed by ultra-Orthodox members of Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition would also proscribe Christians from engaging in religious discussion with Jews.
Titled Proposed Penal Law: Amendment – Prohibition of Solicitation for Religious Conversion – 2023, the legislation is introduced by United Torah Judaism's Moshe Gafni and Yaakov Asher. The law would apply to anyone who would attempt to persuade someone to change their religious beliefs, however the legislation specifically mentions the Christian faith, saying that "recently, the attempts of missionary groups, mainly Christians, to solicit conversion of religion have increased."
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I'd say that that's not an indication of a lack of a problem but more just a more mature way of approaching the issue, which is natural in specific social and cultural contexts where leftists are under more pressure to recognize the facts of religious majorities in politics, the deep, culturally and socially conservative religiosity of their working classes.
Obviously this doesn't only apply outside the West, given the importance of religion in many USAmericans' lives and the fact that if you simply trash their spirituality in the process of trying to radicalize them well then well done you blew it. As you note, in practice you are just insulting and alienating them and driving them towards right-wing (in particular religious) forces. White atheists in the West are also empowered by (at least implicit) white (including culturally) supremacy.
I'm not speaking just about this crude, insulting, arrogant and ineffective way that is characteristic of white, western interest atheists, but of how to relate to religion in general. I mean more broadly how communists should relate to religion, including when we are in positions of political hegemony. The discussions around secularism are thoroughly poisoned because in the West what this means has had little to do with any real concrete obstruction of the role of reactionary religious influence in politics (see USA), or because it has been used hypocritically as a cudgel as one state-mechanism among many for the oppression and dehumanization of minorities, above all Muslims (see, above all, France). But in a situation of communist political hegemony, how should you try to combat a variety of reactionary facets of the religions in your society? There will be inevitable backlash. Obviously the situation now is not hegemonic for us, so broad fronts and support are absolutely necessary and progressive, but honestly alot of this can at best be justified as critical support and even then I think only with certain groups. Also I'd add, to avoid the situation where certain westerners (especially the yankies), incl. on here doing their classic of larping as islamists or defending a non-western Communist Party of X just because they're called communist, that alot of communist parties, not only in the West, are deeply compromised wrt issues like reformism, corruption, opportunism, and sticking to undisputably reactionary social and cultural positions (above all wrt gender, sexuality, and race). The Russian and Greek communist parties are good examples of groups that have been deeply reactionary in these respects. This social conservatism can also afflict communist parties in countries under imperialist boots, and I think it worth bearing in mind when considering how they relate to religious groups.
It reminds me of an argument on here a few months ago about a US professor who was fired for showing a medieval Persian painting showing Mohammad in a class on the history of religious art and having alerted the students innumerable times that it would be shown, and the influence of modern liberal identity politics was (imo, unfortunately) very present (even on here) in justifications on the broad 'left' media sphere of the firing of this professor. This is obviously a more benign, less materially important example but it's symptomatic of the fact that, in general, the left has not been able to properly conceptualize its correct relation to the political claims, rights and obligations of religious groups.
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I would agree with everything you've said. I personally don't have an issue with anyone trying to engage in experiences which could be called spiritual or even mystic, meaning a particular type of uniquely intense and meaningly type of experience, so long as it is not confused with or presentend as supplanting other, in particular materialist-scientific forms of knowledge, and so long as it doesn't lead to reactionary points of view. Ofc, it's not an easy question to what extent spiritual or mystical experiences can be separated from materialism. I'd call Nietzsche and Bataille (ontological) materialists, but also somewhat mystic (Bataille explicitly so).
As you note, organized religion insofar as it has historically existed has been deeply reactionary. This fact is a consequence of the historical, socio-economics contexts, i.e. the forms of society in which they existed, which they shaped and which shaped them, of which they were an intrinsic, organic component. The question then becomes: are there contexts in which the form that religion/spirituality/mysticism tape could be non-reactionary, taken as a complex whole? I've met Christians were deeply impressive people even if I didn't really agree with their politics, and it was clear to me that their spirituality played an important role in that. Unfortunately I've met more Christians who gave me the opposite impression of the function of their religion.
I'm not sure what form spirituality will take in the future, or in potential future socialist societies. On the one hand, if we consider the West, most people are not really deeply religious in any genuine sense as someone in one of the societies of Christendom would have understood it. Tbh most evagelicals and anglicans I've met have such gray, lifeless conceptions of their own spirtuality that I'd even hesitate to apply the word to them. On the other hand, the modern left is far less militantly atheist that it has been in the past, for better of worse. I think this has had both positive and negative consequences, e.g. it's promoted a far greater degree of understanding and sympathy for the religious and helped comabt prejudice and discrimination, but on the other had I think it's somewhat emblematic of a movement away from scientific socialism, which I definitely think has had a broad, negative impact on how the modern left thinks and acts (see the rebirth in popularity for anti-rationalist, anti-empiricist, neovitalist thought among many on the self-described 'left').
It's perhaps worth noting that even at the time, there were Bolsheviks who didn't share Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin's militant atheism (even anti-theism). The examples that first come to mind are Lunacharsky and Bogdanov.
GOOD post