Class and Religion
Class is, unlike race, something I’ve thought a lot about personally. I’m not quite sure why, but for whatever reason, I came into this week’s readings with much more background knowledge that with that of two weeks ago, meaning that my beliefs were more strengthened than created like they were then.
In possibly his most famous quote, Marx said “Religion … is the opium of the people”, and devoid of all context, he sounds like an atheist you might see on a message board in 2013, but the context is so crucial to that statement. The full quote reads: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Marx wasn’t saying religion was an addictive and harmful drug, he was saying that, to the poor and downtrodden, religion provides hope and escape, as painkillers do to the wounded, not as heroin does to an addict. There are criticisms of religion in his theory, which I’ll get to later, but as he says, religion is an extremely important part of the lives of the poorest people both here and abroad, and to write it off as pure fantasy ignores the real role it plays in keeping people going.
Religion is extremely important in much of one’s early life, Sunday schools are places of socialization and impart a respect for one’s parents and basic morals in an effective way. Despite my personal disagreements with many of the values they instill, they still perform a pretty critical role in educating kids, and often double as childcare for working parents. As one grows up, the church becomes a place to turn to, a place where you are promised a better life, whether this one or the next, a message who’s potency increases the worse one’s current life is. Eventually one may end up taking advantage of the same systems they were brought up in, especially as poorer people are more likely to have more children. All of these roles are vital in places like the US with the scraps we call a social safety net, and dismissing religion and the functions the church provides betrays the privilege that comes with a higher class.
But, like I said, I still have criticisms. Whether that too is indicative of my privilege or not, I don’t quite know, but I have them nonetheless. As Marx goes on to write about, the church can blind one to the perils of their life, or at least convince them that working against them is futile and that one should be focused on the next. As Chavez wrote in the reading, the church can do that directly, by ignoring working class movements and people, and only providing the community with weekly sermons. The Catholic Church’s decisions that Chavez wrote about were deliberate ones — the radical socialist ideas of the early Christians had been largely washed away by centuries of bourgeois church leaders, and giving food and aid to striking workers would erode the idea of the church that had been built. Or, as shown by people such as Houston’s own Joel Osteen, religion can be manipulated into a propaganda tool to directly combat the ideas those early Christians proposed. Rather than directly refuse to help people (though he does do that in spades, as evidenced by his actions during Harvey), by requesting constant donations, and book-purchasing, and video-series-buying, he spreads the message that extreme wealth is something to want, rather than the message the titular figure of his religion espoused.
Class consciousness is incredibly low in this country, just look to the fact that so many poor Americans see more of themselves in someone who, just a few years ago, was a punchline in jokes about absurd wealth than they do in someone who grew up middle-class and worked as a bartender immediately before running for office. The politics of Trump and AOC aside, people in America generally have no idea how much removed their lives are from those above them, and that’s in no small part due to the bastardization of Protestantism that has proliferated here. Martin Luther’s original reasoning for his famous Theses was that money had invaded the church, had taken the process of asking forgiveness for one’s sins and twisted it into a money-making scheme. He would be disgusted by the modern church he created, by how it’s been used to deceive and steal from people. Allison discussed this, more broadly, in talking about how her family would have been ashamed to learn she worked as a maid, as that was a “black” job to them. People’s inability to recognize their own place in the world leads them to places like that, where they see others in the same place as below them solely because of race.
As I said at the beginning, religion has an important role in our society, and helps to reflect society itself. It’s a useful way to explain the world and getting rid of it isn’t an answer, but one must also take into account they way it obscures the problems people face, and encourages a disregard of the quality of one’s material conditions.
