>>Revolutoinaries and progressives have
> > *no* reason whatever to dabble with Xtian thought.
> hmm
> not sure who wrote this
> but a truckload of foundations for what we think of as critical,
> progressive, etc, are entwined with the christian. including some of
what
Isn't this a bit euro-centric? Are you saying that only Europeans with a xtian background can become true progressives? No marxists in Japan, China, India, Indonesia except those whose parents converted to xtianity?
justin goes on to say here. messy, uneven relationship, what isn't? -- but it seems bizarre to me that anyone would make this blanket statement. at the very least it depends on context. on what you're revolting against, with, in relation to... etc.
I'm not "revolting against anything" -- that is what late 20th century teenagers do. Incidentally, I'm a skilled Christian theologian, not because I ever had any interest in Christianity (I'm an atheist by birthright more than merit) but because I spent years of my life studying Milton and his critics, and a student of PL & PR has to be a theologian even if she/she is an atheist who thinks religion boring.
>Marxist anti-religiosity is a hangover from the Enlightenment's
aggressive
>atheism, when "free thought" was radical in itself. Going backa bit, in
>Milton's time, "atheist" had a lot of the force of "communist" in our
time
>up to the end of the cold war. Hobbes was anathamized as an atheist,
probably
>rightly (and wrote a great chunck of Leviathan which no one now reads
to
> talk around that stuff); Spinoza the same, probably wrongly, as least
as Spinoza
>understood God. In the rural South "free thought" may still be ipso
facto
>radical, but in industrialized areas of North America and Europe it's
not
>any more.
>Actually there is another reason for a Marxist who is not a convinced
>atheist to do theology, which is that in Latin America there is still a
powerful
>current of liberation theology that is both Marxist and Christian.
Michael
>Lowy, a Brazilain Marxist who lives in France, has written a lot on
this.
As remarked above, I have "done" an awful lot of theology, and as remarked in my preceding post, I have worked with Christians politically for 35 years -- but I *never* had to call on my deep knowledge of xtian theology in order to do that political work. Some of my closest comrades in Bloomington are "liberation theologists," but in practice they are merely for liberation and one does not need the theology to work with them.
Working politically with xtians simply has no connection with knowing or
being interested in xtian thought, any more than working politically with chess players has any connection with being a chess player.
My non-christianity has the same basis as my non-olympianism or my non-shintoism. Christianity, Olympianism, and Shintoism are all false theories.
Liberation theology, incidentally, has its source not in theology but in
the actual liberation movements of latin america -- when christians turn radical they simply twist their theology around to fit their politics. I doubt that anyone ever abstractly deduced progressive politics from xtian thought -- because christian thought has been reactionary from the very beginning. Read G.E.M. de Ste. Croix. That in the last few centuries so many xtians have been progressive or revolutionary is simply evidence of the artificiality of religious belief. As soon as the believer encounters an interesting reality, she/he grasps it and adapts the theology to fit the reality.
Carrol